Wenda Bergsma: Children’s interpretation of Dutch sentences with the focus particle alleen (only)

Focus particles in Dutch like alleen (only), ook (also/too) and zelfs (even) operate on the sentence they occur in and contribute to the meaning of this sentence in a particular way. The way focus particles contribute to the meaning of a particular sentence can be determined with the help of the following notions (i) association of a particle with the focus of the sentence it occurs in (Rooth 1985); (ii) the type of particle involved (König 1991) and (iii) the syntactic domain of the particle, its so-called scope (Barbiers 1995; Bayer 1996).

In this paper, I will discuss how children use these notions in interpreting the Dutch focus particle alleen. Previous experiments in Dutch have shown that children interpret sentences with the focus particle alleen in a non adult-like fashion (Drozd and van Loosbroek 1998; Van Beek 1997). The aim of the three comprehension experiments presented in this paper is twofold. One aim is to show that children’s performance become more adult-like if possible alternatives to the associated constituent of alleen are clearly presented in the discourse context by using a different experimental design. The other aim is to show that children are more sensitive to the syntactic position of alleen than to the use of focus in order to identify the associated constituent of the particle.

In the first experiment, children were asked to judge whether Dutch sentences like in (1) match situations which either relate to a subject-focus reading or to an object-focus reading:

(1) a. Alleen BERT heeft een peer gewogen.

‘Only Bert weighed a pear’

b. Bert heeft alleen een PEER gewogen.

‘Bert only weighed a pear’

The results on this first experiment show that children above the age of four-and-a-half perform nearly as well as adults in interpreting sentences like in (1). Like adults, almost all of these children correctly assigned a subject-focus interpretation to sentences of the type (1a) and an object-focus interpretation to sentences of the type (1b). These findings sharply contrast with the finding of previous experiments that children’s interpretation of sentences with alleen is not adult-like. What the results of this first experiment do not show is whether children utilize the syntactic position of alleen or the use of focus in order to identify the associated constituent of the particle. In both types of sentences in (1), there exists a correspondence between the syntactic position of alleen and the use of focus, i.e., in both sentences alleen immediately precedes its associated constituent marked by focus. In order to investigate whether children use syntax or focus as a possible clue for the identification of the associated constituent of alleen, two other experiments were conducted. Taken together, the results on these two experiments reveal that children are more sensitive to the syntactic position of alleen than to the use of focus. In sentences in which there was a mismatch between the syntactic position of alleen and the use of focus, children prefer to associate alleen with the constituent the particle precedes, regardless of whether this constituent was marked by focus or not.

References

Barbiers, S. (1995). The Syntax of Interpretation. Leiden, University of Leiden.

Bayer, J. (1996) Directionality and Logical Form. On the Scope of Focusing Particles and Wh-in-Situ. Dordrecht: Kluwer.

Drozd, K.F. and E. Van Loosbroek (1998). Dutch Children’s Interpretation of Focus Particle Constructions. Poster presented at the 23^rd Annual Boston University Conference on Language Development. Boston.

König, E. (1991). The Meaning of Focus Particles - A Comparative Perspective. London, New York: Routledge.

Rooth, M. (1985). Association with Focus. Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Massachusett, Amherst.

Van Beek, M. (1997). Alleen Staat Nooit Alleen. De Verwerving van een Fokus Partikel. MA Thesis, Utrecht University.