TY - JOUR TI - Resolving wh-/quantifier ambiguities DO - https://doi.org/doi:10.7282/T3M043PD PY - 2014 AB - Universal quantifiers, such as every and each, and wh-words interact in complex ways, creating ambiguity. Questions, such as Which toy did every boy pick? may be understood as asking about a single toy, that everybody picked - a single answer, or for pairings of boys and toys of their choice - a pair-list answer. The factors affecting the availability of pair-list answers have played a prominent role in motivating various linguistic theories of questions in syntax and semantics. However, most of the data on the availability of pair-list answers comes from intuitive acceptability judgments, and several kinds of examples are a subject of disagreement in the literature. This dissertation presents experimental results revealing that that the interaction of wh-words and quantifiers is more complex, than originally thought. The analysis developed in the thesis confirms that the acceptability of pair-list answers is affected by the syntactic positions (subject vs. object) and the lexical type of the quantifier phrases. However, contrary to theoretical predictions, the plurality of a wh-phrase does not have a strong effect on the judgments. Furthermore, although pair-list answers to questions with certain object quantifiers are predicted to be unavailable, adults, both naïve speakers and professional linguists, find them acceptable in some cases. Children also access pair-list readings of questions with object-quantifiers. They sometimes understand questions, such as Who picked every toy? as asking about pairing of toys and children such as John picked the car, and Jane picked the truck. Given that in other domains, at the age of four and five, children’s grammatical representations are abstract and elaborate, I maintain that non-adult like patterns of responses in the area of wh-/quantifier interactions are the result of a developing lexicon and discourse parsing, rather than immature grammar, as previously suggested in the developmental literature. I propose that the information structure status of the quantifier phrase (topic vs. focus), rather than its structural position (subject vs. object), affects the availability of pair-list answers. Such answers are available if a quantifier phrase can be understood as a topic. I recast the subject-object asymmetry in wh-/quantifier interactions in terms of information structure. The proposed analysis also accounts for the observed variability among speakers and incorporates the semantic factors affecting the possible readings of questions with quantifiers. KW - Psychology KW - English language--Quantifiers KW - English language--Psychological aspects LA - eng ER -