Conservativity and Learnability of Determiners. Hunter, T. & Lidz, J. Journal of Semantics, 30(3):315–334, August, 2013.
doi  abstract   bibtex   
A striking cross-linguistic generalisation about the semantics of determiners is that they never express non-conservative relations. To account for this one might hypothesise that the mechanisms underlying human language acquisition are unsuited to non-conservative determiner meanings. We present experimental evidence that 4- and 5-year-olds fail to learn a novel non-conservative determiner but succeed in learning a comparable conservative determiner, consistent with the learnability hypothesis.
@article{HunterLidz2013,
  title = {Conservativity and {{Learnability}} of {{Determiners}}},
  author = {Hunter, T. and Lidz, J.},
  year = {2013},
  month = aug,
  volume = {30},
  pages = {315--334},
  issn = {0167-5133, 1477-4593},
  doi = {10.1093/jos/ffs014},
  abstract = {A striking cross-linguistic generalisation about the semantics of determiners is that they never express non-conservative relations. To account for this one might hypothesise that the mechanisms underlying human language acquisition are unsuited to non-conservative determiner meanings. We present experimental evidence that 4- and 5-year-olds fail to learn a novel non-conservative determiner but succeed in learning a comparable conservative determiner, consistent with the learnability hypothesis.},
  file = {/Users/mmaldona/Zotero/storage/HWYZA6DQ/Hunter and Lidz - 2013 - Conservativity and Learnability of Determiners.pdf},
  journal = {Journal of Semantics},
  language = {en},
  number = {3}
}

Downloads: 0