Patrícia Amaral

Children Build on Pragmatic Information in Language Acquisition

Pragmatic information is integral to language use for both adults and children. Children rely on contextually shared knowledge to communicate before they can talk: they make use of gesture to convey their first meanings and then add words to gestures. Like adults, they build on joint attention, physical copresence, and conversational copresence both as they acquire and as they use language. This can be seen in children’s early communication, in their first inferences about word and utterance meanings, and in their ability to make use of appropriate contextual information as they learn how to interpret and produce terms like big or long compared to full, almost and only, and all and some.

A Cross-Linguistic Study on Information Backgrounding and Presupposition Projection

This chapter builds on previous work on the diversity of English presupposition triggers with respect to their projection behavior in an experimental setting (Amaral et al., Proceedings of ESSLLI 2011 Workshop on Projective Content, pp. 1–7, 2011; Cummins et al., Humana Mente 23:1–15, 2012, Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 17, pp. 201–218, 2013). Using the same methodology and similar materials, but in Spanish, we investigate the empirical validity of the distinction between two classes of presupposition triggers posited in the theoretical literature, namely that between lexical and resolution triggers (Zeevat, Journal of Semantics 9:379–412, 1992). The results of this study replicate our previous findings with English data. First, native speakers exhibit the same tendencies with respect to the addressability of foregrounded vs backgrounded content in coherent question-answer pairs. Second, the results point to native speakers’ sensitivity to the distinction between lexical and resolution triggers, while further suggesting that distinctions within classes of triggers should be understood as gradient rather than categorical.