ABSTRACT
The last chapter focused on the role of linguistic structure in child language. The relevance of linguistic structure for grammatical operations was used to distinguish between alternative models of language acquisition. In particular, we considered children’s interpretation of disjunction in downward entailing environments as an additional phenomenon that highlights the role of structure for grammatical operations. In this chapter we put aside these broader issues, and focus on a phenomenon that has created much disagreement even among researchers that draw upon linguistic theory in their investigations of child language. In particular, we take downward entailment as a case study for theories of children’s quantificational competence.
