Topichood and quantification in L1 Dutch
Bart Hollebrandse · IRAL - International Review of Applied Linguistics in Language Teaching · 2004
The goal of this special issue on Interfaces is to explore the division of labor between pragmatics and grammar. In the introductory paper a system of different modules and interface mappings has been presented. Some suggestions were made where the job of the acquisition process is. It was posed that most, if not all, acquisition is in the mapping rules itself rather than in the modules. This paper explores the possible interaction between topicality and the interpretation of universal quantifiers. The experimental finding is that children, interpreting quantifiers, take topicality into account only when the topic is realized in subject position. Topicality has no influence on the interpretation of quantifiers in object position. This means that these children do relate pragmatic information to specific syntactic positions.