Young Children’s Developing Expectations about the Language of Events

Speakers routinely provide cues in their utterances about their intended meaning that a listener must retrieve using inferential processes that go beyond pure lexical semantics and semantic composition. A classic example of this speaker-hearer meaning negotiation comes from conversational implicatures (Grice 1975). To take two well-known cases, if a speaker delivers the utterance in (1a) with the existential quantifier some, the hearer might infer that the toddler did not eat all of the broccoli. Similarly, if a speaker delivers the utterance in (1b) with disjunction (or), a hearer might infer that the toddler ate either the broccoli or the peas, but not both.