On the conjunctive interpretation of the disjunction 'fie. . . fie' in child Romanian

Abstract

Previous studies show that adults tend to interpret sentences involving unembedded complex disjunctions ('The mouse carried either the apple or the orange') exclusively (‘The mouse carried one or the other but not both’), while children tend to interpret them either inclusively (‘The mouse carried one and possibly both’) or conjunctively (‘The mouse carried both’) (Paris 1973; Braine and Rumain 1981; Chierchia et al. 2001; Guasti et al. 2005; Singh et al. 2016; Nicolae and Sauerland 2016; Tieu et al. 2017; among others). We conducted a set of experiments investigating children’s and adults’ interpretations of different kinds of simple and complex disjunctions in Romanian, with the goal of probing whether children’s conjunctive interpretation of  disjunction is an experimental artifact, as argued by Huang and Crain (2020) and Skordos et al. (2020). Specifically, we investigated whether contexts where the disjunctive statement exhaustively mentions all objects in the display are more likely to elicit the conjunctive interpretation. While the majority of the disjunction types were interpreted inclusively by children, there was one disjunction that appeared to differ from the rest: the complex disjunction 'fie. . . fie', which children tended to interpret conjunctively, whether there were two or four objects in the context. In this paper, we focus on this particular finding, and discuss possible sources of children’s conjunctive interpretations: (i) a derived meaning via an implicature within an alternatives-based account, (ii) a primary meaning alongside inclusivity, (iii) syncretism with the present subjunctive of the verb 'a fi' (‘to be’).