Speakers: Dr. Raj Singh (Carleton ICS) and Dr. Ida Toivonen (Carleton ICS and SLaLS) (joint work with former student Dejan Milacic, now at McGill University, Department of Linguistics)
Title: The meaning of “each”: Distance Distributivity and Skolemization
Abstract:
There are many quantificational expressions in natural language. Somehow, a child must learn these expressions, and somehow, speakers and hearers must be able to understand one another. For example, a sentence like (1) is ambiguous between two quantificational meanings:
(1) The boys lifted a piano
On one reading, the “collective reading,” the boys as a group together lifted the piano, while no individual boy did. On another reading, the “distributive reading,” each boy lifted a piano on his own. This means that this surface string actually generates multiple form-meaning pairs; speakers and hearers know this, must have acquired this knowledge at some stage of development, and must be able to find the right one in context. English speakers also know that adding a single word to (1), “each,” can disambiguate in favour of the distributive reading:
(2a) The boys each lifted a piano
(2b) The boys lifted a piano each
Not only do they know this, they also know that there are constraints on the possibility of adding “each” to the end of a sentence — where it distributes over “the boys” from a distance — that are not present when adding “each” somewhere closer to “the boys”:
(3a) The boys each swam
(3b) *The boys swam each (we use a “*” to represent ungrammaticality)
(4a) The boys each lifted the piano
(4b) *The boys lifted the piano each
In this talk, we give an account of the form this knowledge takes (we suggest it involves the formal mechanism of “Skolemization”), how this knowledge might have been acquired, as well as its expression in other languages (e.g., Swedish, Serbo-Croatian).