What Does ‘every’ Mean to Young ESL Learners?

Lina Mukhopadhyay, Prodipta Bhattacharjee

Abstract


Investigation of sentences that have multiple quantifications like the ones with a combination of a universal quantifier every preceding an existential quantifier a/an (e.g., Every boy is on a tractor) have led to qualitatively different conclusions about children’s linguistic knowledge. This study with young Indian ESL learners was undertaken to understand their knowledge on one universal quantifier every in combination with the existential quantifier ‘a/an’ in sentential context. A picture-based truth-value judgment task was used to ascertain knowledge of abstract generalizations quantifying expressions hold over objects and the properties they refer to (Chierchia & Ginet, 2000). Picture cues were constructed to make the task felicitous and fulfill ‘Condition of Plausible Dissent’ (Crain et al. 1996)1. The findings suggest that children’s knowledge of every runs deep and shows the positive impact of task conditions on generating almost adult-like interpretations. In other words, the findings reveal that even at early stages of second language acquisition, as long as the sentences are presented in felicitous contexts with picture support, children’s interpretation of multiple quantifications appears to be UG governed. A pedagogical implication of this study would be that if young ESL/EFL learners show knowledge of interpretation of quantifiers in English, then their ability to mathematize or compute numerical figures would be easy to achieve in word problems. Therefore, if teachers use contextually rich tasks to help learners notice and arrive at multiple interpretations of quantifiers as presented through different syntactic combinations, then the learnability issue of multiple interpretations of quantifiers would be well addressed.


Keywords


second language acquisition, universal quantification, task felicity, condition of plausible dissent, scope, ambiguity, Universal Grammar

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