German Determiner Presuppositions in First Language Acquisition ∗

Three components of determiner meaning have been identified in semantics: truth conditions, implicatures, and presuppositions. Among the three components, the acquisition of truth-conditions (of the universal quantifier every) has received attention most intensively. There has been more investigation on the acquisition of scalar implicature since Noveck (2001). Noveck (2001) observes that children are more likely to give semantic/logical responses to scalar implicature items than adults. Subsequent works on the acquisition of scalar implicature corroborated Noveck’s (2001) result (Chierchia 2001, Gualmini et al. 2001, Papafragou & Musolino 2003, among others). In this paper, I will focus on the third component of the determiner meaning: presuppositions. The acquisition of presuppositions have not received much attention so far. Karmiloff-Smith (1979), Schaeffer & Matthewson (2005) have observed that children’s use of definite determiner is not adult-like, but not much else has been discussed so far about the acquisition of presuppositions. Our goal, therefore, is to investigate the missing part, which, we hope, would shed new light on our understanding of children’s acquisition of determiner meaning.