The Givenness Hierarchy and Language Acquisition

Read: Gundel, Ntelitheos & Kowalsky 2007

481 - GH and Acquisition 1 Some clarifications about the GH

• The non-familiarity implicature associated with the indefinite article, and the not-in-focus implicature associated with demonstrative determiners do not arise when the information that would be conveyed by the stronger form is irrelevant: – I’m not going along. I’ve been sitting in a car all day. – Look. A man is hitting a dog. – I love John’s kitchen. It/That’s my favorite room.

481 - GH and Acquisition 2 • In some cases, the second part of Grice’s Quantity Maxim blocks the implicature that the cognitive status encoded by a stronger form is not met. – Since signaling that the addressee can uniquely identify the referent is usually sufficient to allow her to interpret it, given the encoded descriptive content and Relevance-driven pragmatic inferences, the definite article typically provides sufficient information about cognitive status, and an explicit signal of familiarity is usually unnecessary.

481 - GH and Acquisition 3 • The GH is not a hierarchy of degrees of accessibility in the sense of Ariel 1988,1990. – The statuses are not mutually exclusive. – Referents of forms that code statuses lower on the hierarchy are not necessarily more difficult to access than referents of forms that code higher statuses. • E.g. an ‘inferrable’ UID referent that requires the addressee to construct a new representation might be easier to access than a ‘reminder’ FAM entity that must be retrieved from long-term memory.

481 - GH and Acquisition 4 What children need to ‘know’

• Knowing which linguistic form encodes which cognitive status must be learned. – Linguistic • Ability to assess whether something has a particular status must be learned, although there might be some innate components to this. – Non-linguistic – Assumes some ‘theory of mind’ • Ability to assess when information about cognitive status is relevant must be learned. – Non-linguistic – Assumes some ‘theory of mind’.

481 - GH and Acquisition 5 Givenness Hierarchy studies on acquisition • When do children ‘master’ definite and indefinite articles, demonstratives, and personal pronouns? – By age 3 or earlier; English and Spanish. • Is the appropriate use of these forms acquired idiosyncratically or is there a pattern that holds for all children, both within and across languages? – The order of acquisition of forms that code cognitive statuses seems to parallel the order of forms on the Givenness Hierarchy, with pronouns acquired first and indefinite article acquired last. • If there is a developmental order, does this differ according to the language being acquired or is it the same for all languages? 481 - GH and Acquisition 6 Pronouns – Eve 1;11.8 EVE: that Papa shoes %alt: Papa’s EVE: there %act: untied father’s shoe FAT: what did you do? FAT: well#you tie that right up EVE: ok FAT: right now FAT: tie that shoe EVE: Papa tie it

– Eve 1;11.8 MOT: there# that one’s just right EVE: that are hot MOT: well#it’s not very hot EVE: I better blow it

481 - GH and Acquisition 7 Demonstrative Determiners

• Used correctly, but more frequently than in adult speech, including the input. – Adam 2;5.12 ADAM: what dat? URS: that’s a paper clip ADAM: what dat paper clip doing • It seems that children acquire the linguistic knowledge about appropriate use of different forms before they make referential choices driven by the Quantity Maxim. – Consistent with other work on scalar implicatures

481 - GH and Acquisition 8 Definite Article

• Middle of third year, earlier for Eve. – Adam 2;6 ADAM: what dat fire engine doing MOT: there isn’t a fire engine there MOT: there’s just a fireman on a ladder ADAM: what the fireman doing? MOT: he may be going to help fight fire

481 - GH and Acquisition 9 Indefinite Article • Acquired later than other determiners and pronouns – Eve 1;11 MOT: What do you want? EVE: I want sandwich MOT: You want what? EVE: a sandwich MOT: sandwich EVE: yeah MOT: well# what do you want to drink? EVE: I want sandwich MOT: you want a sandwich? EVE: cheese sandwich – Adam 2;6.3 MOT: is that your garage? ADAM: that’s a little garage 481 - GH and Acquisition 10 Implications for Theory of Mind

• Since children use referring forms correctly before the age of 3, children this young must have a ‘theory of mind’. • But ‘theory of mind’ studies have shown that 3 year old children are not able to verbally attribute beliefs to others that are different from their own beliefs. • This must be a different kind of theory of mind, or a different aspect of it. – Perhaps there is a difference between implicit behavior taking into consideration theory of mind, and explicitly attributing mental states to others. • Clements & Perner 1994 show that while 3-year-olds lack the ability to verbally attribute false beliefs to others, they do show an implicit ability to recognize false beliefs by looking to the place where they think people with such beliefs will look.

481 - GH and Acquisition 11 – The ability to assess epistemic states such as beliefs involves attributing propositional states to others, whereas the ability to attribute cognitive status does not. – Closed class items typically encode non-representational, procedural information; they only manipulate representations and as such are less accessible to consciousness and more implicit and automatic. Open class items are declarative, representational and explicit, and therefore more accessible to conscious awareness and less automatic. • Matsui et al. 2006 found that children were better able to make use of information about evidentiality (a speaker’s certainty with respect to some expressed proposition) when it was encoded by sentence final particles than when it was encoded by epistemic verbs such as know and believe.

481 - GH and Acquisition 12 Conclusion • The appropriate use of referring forms involves the ability to take into account the mental states of others in at least two ways: 1. the ability to appropriately assess what cognitive status the intended interpretation has for the address at a given point in the discourse • Implicit, non-propositional, automatic • Develops at a young age, before 3. 2. the ability to assess how much information is sufficient and relevant for the addressee, both information about cognitive status and information about conceptual content. • Requires more conscious reasoning • Develops later, after the age of 4. 481 - GH and Acquisition 13