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Wh-Words: Existential or Universal Quantifiers in Child Mandarin?

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Wh-words have been analysed as existential quantifiers (Chierchia in Logic in grammar: polarity, free choice, and intervention. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2013; Fox, in Sauerland U, Stateva P (eds) Presupposition and implicature in compositional semantics (Palgrave studies in pragmatics, language and cognition). Palgrave MacMillan, Houndmills, pp 71–120, 2007; Liao in Alternative and exhaustification: non-interrogative uses of Chinese wh-words. Harvard University, 2010) or universal quantifiers (Nishigauchi, in: Theoretical and applied linguistics at Kobe Shoin 2, Kobe Shoin Institute for Linguistic Sciences, 1999). These two accounts have distinct predictions on how children initially interpret wh-words. The universal account predicts that children should initially interpret wh-words as universal quantifiers, whereas the existential account anticipates that children should start out with the existential interpretation. To adjudicate between the two accounts, the present study was designed to explore pre-schoolers’ semantic knowledge of wh-quantification. Specifically, it investigated the interpretation of the wh-word shenme ‘what’ with 4-and 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children and a control group of adults. Using a Truth Value Judgment Task (Crain and Thornton in Investigations in universal grammar: a guide to experiments on the acquisition of syntax and semantics. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998), Experiment 1 evaluated whether children interpret the wh-word shenme ‘what’ as closer in meaning to the polarity sensitive item renhe ‘any’ or the universal quantifier suoyou ‘all’ in the antecedent of ruguo ‘if’ conditionals. Using a Question–Answer Task, Experiments 2 & 3 respectively investigated whether children interpret shenme ‘what’ as closer in meaning to renhe ‘any’ or suoyou ‘all’ in two types of questions: yes–no questions with the particle ma and A-not-A questions. It was found that both children and adults interpret shenme ‘what’ as closer in meaning to renhe ‘any’ than suoyou ‘all’. The findings suggest that Mandarin-speaking pre-schoolers already have adult-like semantic knowledge of wh-quantification: wh-words are existential quantifiers rather than universal quantifiers. Due to the paucity of primary linguistic input, children’s early mastery of the non-interrogative wh-words appear to support the biolinguistic approach to language acquisition (Chomsky in Aspects of the theory of syntax. MIT Press, Cambridge, 1965; Pinker in Language learnability and language development. Harvard University Press, Cambridge, 1984; Crain et al. in Language acquisition from a biolinguistic perspective. Neurosci Biobehav Rev, 2016. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neubiorev.2016.09.004).

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Notes

  1. Note that wh-words in Mandarin Chinese stay in situ, which is probably the most salient typological feature compared with other languages. For example, English wh-questions are typically formed via overt wh-movement: moving a wh-constituent to the sentence initial position. By contrast, wh-questions in Mandarin Chinese are formed by leaving a wh-constituent in situ. Nevertheless, it has been claimed that wh-questions in Mandarin Chinese are subject to covert wh-movement (Huang, 1982a). Therefore, Mandarin Chinese has been generally assumed as a wh-in-situ language (see Huang, 1982a, 1982b; Huang, et al., 2009).

  2. We are grateful to an anonymous reviewer’s request for the acquisition literature that supports the existential account as the universal account is based on acquisition evidence in this paper. However, no direct acquisition evidence has been documented for the existential account even though it has been theoretically claimed by a group of semanticists (Kratzer and Shimoyama, 2002; Chierchia, 2013; Fox, 2007; Huang et al., 2017, among others). Actually, the thesis of the present study is to probe the acquisition evidence for the existential account of wh-words.

  3. Note that the distinction between veridicality and nonveridicality is established in the light of truth, as schematized in (i) by Giannakidou (2002: 5).

    1. (i)

      “A propositional operator F is veridical iff Fp entails p: Fp → p; otherwise, F is nonveridical”.

    To illustrate, consider sentences (ii) and (ii). If the truth of the proposition (ii) is not entailed in the context of (iii), then the context of (iii) is typically considered as nonveridical.

    1. (ii)

      John speaks English.

    2. (iii)

      I hope that John speaks English.

    Note also that there has been a continuing controversy on the distribution of the non-interrogative wh-words (see Huang, 1982b, Cheng, 1991, Li, 1992, Lin, 1996, 1998, and among others). The precise distribution is beyond the scope of this paper, and interested readers can refer to Li (1992) and Lin (1998) for a detailed discussion.

  4. Polarity sensitive items such as renhe ‘any’ in Mandarin Chinese can also be licensed in other downward entailing contexts, i.e., negative sentences (Tieu & Lidz, 2016). In particular, renhe ‘any’ is not licensed in affirmative sentences (Huang & Crain, 2014), so it is also referred to as a Negative Polarity Item (NPI). To illustrate, consider (i) and (ii).

    (i)

    Zhangsan

    mei

    chi

    renhe

    shiwu

    Zhangsan

    Neg

    eat

    any

    food

    ‘Zhangsan didn’t eat any food.”

    (ii)

    *Zhangsan

    chile

    renhe

    shiwu

    		 

    Zhangsan

    eat-ASP

    any

    food

    		 

    ‘Zhangsan ate any food.’

    As illustrated in (i), renhe is licensed in the scope of the negation marker mei ‘not’, and it generates a domain widening effect. That is, the sentence entails that Zhangsan didn’t any food, including food that is atypical in common sense (Chierchia, 2006; Tieu & Lidz, 2016).

  5. Note that polarity sensitive items such as renhe ‘any’ can generate a universal interpretation in certain linguistic contexts. For example, the polarity sensitive item renhe ‘any’ licenses a universal Free Choice Inference when it appears in the scope of a deontic modal verb (Chierchia, 2013; Kamp, 1973, 1978). For example, consider sentence (i).

    (i)

    Zhangsan

    keyi

    kan

    woshufangli

    de

    renhe

    yiben

    shu

    Zhangsan

    may

    read

    my study inside

    DE

    any

    one-CL

    book

    ‘Zhangsan is allowed to read any book in my study.’

    As illustrated in (i), renhe ‘any’ is licensed in the scope of the deontic modal verb keyi ‘is allowed to’, and the sentence gives rise to a universal Free Choice Inference that Zhangsan is allowed to eat any book in my study.

  6. Note that both suoyou ‘all’ and mei ‘every’ are universal quantifiers in Mandarin Chinese. However, they differ from each other in terms of distribution. That is, suoyou ‘all’ can appear in either subject or object position. By contrast, mei ‘every’ can only appear in subject position. It sounds odd if mei ‘every’ occurs in object position. In the present study, we adopted suoyou ‘all’ as the universal quantifier because the test sentences in Experiments 2 & 3 require a universal quantifier in the object position. In so doing, we can keep consistency in terms of the use of the universal quantifier across the three experiments in the present study.

  7. An anonymous reviewer raises concern of the naturalness of the test sentences like (25). We are thankful to this valuable comment. To ensure the naturalness of the test sentences like (25), we did a follow-up survey with 20 Mandarin-speaking adults (10 males and 10 females; age range 31–48; mean 36). In the survey, the participants were invited to judge the naturalness of the test sentences, using a 5-point Likert scale, with 5 representing the perfectly grammatical and 1 representing completely ungrammatical. The mean naturalness score for the test sentences including DE was 4.12 (SD = 0.95), suggesting that the test sentences sound grammatical and acceptable.

  8. Besides the test sentences like (25), an anonymous reviewer finds the test sentences like (30) and (33) unnatural without the perfective aspectual marker le, and he believes that this might explain some adults’ non-target-like responses. We agree with this view due to the fact that a subset of adults had a few non-target-like responses to the afore-mentioned test sentences. We also appreciate this friendly reminder as it will help us improve our future experimental design.

  9. Note that all of the test items were pre-recorded in a sound-attenuated lab at School of Foreign Languages, Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan, China. In addition, we did a post-recording survey on 10 Mandarin-speaking adults and they all confirmed that the test items were produced in a global level intonation without stress on any word.

  10. Compared with Experiment 2, children had better performance in Experiment 3. We attribute the reason to the fact that A-not-A questions have stronger yes–no question force than yes–no questions with the sentence-final particle ma.

  11. Note that the result from the corpus study is consistent with what Huang & Crain (2014) has found in a similar survey.

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Acknowledgements

This research was funded by National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 21BYY108), and we are grateful to the funder. For valuable feedback and discussion, we would like to thank Stephen Crain, Rosalind Thornton, Lyn Tieu, Corry Bill, and the audiences at the 44th Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. In addition, we are also thankful to the kindergarten affiliated with Hubei University of Technology, Wuhan, China.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Foreign Languages, Jianghan University, Wuhan, China

    Haiquan Huang & Lina Qian

  2. School of Foreign Languages, Hubei University of Technology, Hubei, China

    Hui Cheng & Yixiong Chen

  3. Department of Linguistics, School of International Studies, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, China

    Peng Zhou

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  1. Haiquan Huang
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Correspondence to Lina Qian.

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Conflict of interest

Haiquan Huang has received research grant from National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 21BYY108), and has completed the present experimental study with the help of Peng Zhou. Hui Cheng, Lina Qian and Yixiong Chen participated in the data collection and data analysis. All authors declare that they have no conflict of interest with one another.

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This study was funded by National Social Science Foundation of China (Grant Number: 21BYY108). All procedures performed in the present study involving human participants were in accordance with the ethical standards of the institutional and /or national research committee and with the 1964 Helsinki declaration and its later amendments or comparable ethical standards.

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Huang, H., Cheng, H., Qian, L. et al. Wh-Words: Existential or Universal Quantifiers in Child Mandarin?. J Psycholinguist Res 53, 46 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10936-024-10079-4

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