The Distributive and Cumulative Readings Acquisition: Experimental Evidence from Czech
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| Year of publication | 2024 |
| Type | Chapter of a book |
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| Description | The child’s mother tongue acquisition is a gradual process of linguistic and communi- cative competencies. It is related to the child’s overall development, thinking, and cognition. This paper discusses the issue of the acquisition of distributivity, quantifiers, and nominal phrases in the Czech language. The study aims to discover at what age the obligatory distributive interpretation of the universal quantifier (UQ) každý ‘each’ appears in the language of Czech children. We focused on Czech UQs and bare NPs concerning their distributive and cumulative interpretation (since definiteness in Czech as a grammatical category is questionable at least, see Šimík and Demian 2020), which left us with two issues that we would like to address in the current paper: (i) What is the learning development of UQs/bare NPs? (ii) Is there a correlation between the acquisition of the correct obligatory distributive meaning for Czech UQs and the tendency to reject the distributive interpretation of bare NPs? |