ABSTRACT
The last two chapters dealt with two apparently unrelated phenomena, namely children’s interpretation of the universal quantifier every and their interpretation of the indefinite some with respect to negation. Unrelated as those phenomena might appear to be, their investigation has undergone a surprisingly similar development. Taking the case of every, children’s non-adult behavior was initially interpreted by some researchers as a grammatical phenomenon, but recent research attributes children’s non-adult behavior to factors outside the grammar (see Chapter 4 and discussion in Meroni, 2002). As for the interpretation of some in negative sentences, Musolino (1998) and Musolino, Crain and Thornton (2000) attributed children’s non-adult responses to differences in the grammar of children and adults; this, too, is now more accurately viewed as a non-grammatical phenomenon, observable both in children and adults, and eliminable in children (see Chapter 5). Observations of the course of scientific investigations aside, an interesting relationship between these two phenomena is suggested by recent work on positive polarity items. As we observed in Chapter 1, the standard view of positive polarity items is that these items manifest the opposite pattern of behavior than negative polarity items. Roughly, positive polarity items cannot appear in the scope of downward entailing operators, while negative polarity items must be in the scope of a downward entailing operator. This view has been challenged, however, by Szabolcsi (2002a). Details aside, Szabolcsi argues that one should not focus on so-called positive polarity items (PPIs) in isolation. Rather, one should investigate what properties, if any, are manifested by complex expressions consisting of positive polarity items and the downward entailing operators they ‘resist.’
