On Realizing External Arguments: A Syntactic and Implicature Theory of the Disjointness Effect for Passives in Adult and Child Grammar

Abstract

Abstract This contribution presents an account of why disjoint reference effects obtain in verbal but not in adjectival passives. Our focus will be on passives in child language, which are independently argued to be always adjectival. This allows us to use a natural experiment in child grammar that is not available in the adult grammar—predicting the lack of a disjoint reference effect in even those passives that might prima facie be conceived of as verbal. We will conduct our discussion against the background of the difference between adjectival and verbal passives in general. Our account is based on (grammatical) Implicature theory. We show that the initiator in the semantic representation of adjectival passives stays at a kind level, hence cannot introduce a discourse referent. It therefore cannot trigger a disjointness implicature, in contrast to the initiator in verbal passives (see Gehrke 2013, 2015). We show in two experiments, one in Dutch, one in English, that children’s passives do not exhibit disjoint reference, in contrast to adults’ verbal passives, even though children have no trouble computing disjointness implicatures elsewhere. Thus, our contribution confirms with a novel kind of evidence the syntactic nature of young children's difficulty with verbal passives. It offers a new perspective on the nature of the difference between verbal and adjectival passives based on Reinhart's theta-theory, while also offering additional evidence for a grammatical, rather than general pragmatic, theory of implicatures.