Scalar Implication as a linguistic universal: experimental data from Brazilian Portuguese

In this work we investigate the acquisition of scalar implicature in Brazilian Portuguese searching for the components that underlie mastery of such kind of inference. The subjects of our experiment were 5 and 7 year olds acquiring Brazilian Portuguese. Analogue sentences containing weak scalar term...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Revista Linguística
Main Author: Renato Caruso Vieira
Format: Article
Language:Portuguese
Published: Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro 2018-09-01
Subjects:
Online Access:https://revistas.ufrj.br/index.php/rl/article/view/17044
Description
Summary:In this work we investigate the acquisition of scalar implicature in Brazilian Portuguese searching for the components that underlie mastery of such kind of inference. The subjects of our experiment were 5 and 7 year olds acquiring Brazilian Portuguese. Analogue sentences containing weak scalar terms were uttered in lower-bound and upper-bound contexts, allowing us to test children's capacity of giving literal or scalar implicature interpretation to scalar terms depending on the contextual influence. The tested children showed contextual sensitivity by giving the expected interpretations. Our results reinforce the ones obtained in studies on other languages.
ISSN:1808-835X
2238-975X