A Developmental Analysis of Generic Nouns in Southern Peruvian Quechua

Abstract

Generic noun phrases (e.g., “Cats like to drink milk”) are a primary means by which adults express generalizations to children, yet they pose a challenging induction puzzle for learners. Although prior research has established that English speakers understand and produce generic noun phrases by preschool age, little is known regarding the cross-cultural generality of generic acquisition. Southern Peruvian Quechua provides a valuable comparison because, unlike English, it is a highly inflected language in which generics are marked by the absence rather than the presence of any linguistic markers. Moreover, Quechua is spoken in a cultural context that differs markedly from the highly educated, middle-class contexts within which earlier research on generics was conducted. We presented participants from five age groups (3–6, 7–9, 10–12, 14–35, and 36–90 years of age) with two tasks that examined the ability to distinguish generic from nongeneric utterances. In Study 1, even the youngest children understood generics as applying broadly to a category (like “all”) and distinct from indefinite reference (“some”). However, there was a developmental lag before children understood that generics, unlike “all,” can include exceptions. Study 2 revealed that generic interpretations are more frequent for utterances that (a) lack specifying markers and (b) are animate. Altogether, generic interpretations are found among the youngest participants, and may be a default mode of quantification. These data demonstrate the cross-cultural importance of generic information in linguistic expression.

Notes

¹“Quechua” is a family of related languages, analogous to Romance. By “Southern Peruvian Quechua” we mean the linguistic continuum that includes the Bolivian and Argentine varieties of Quechua and those varieties spoken in the six Southeastern departments of Peru (i.e., Quechua sureño; Cerrón-Palomino, 1987; Mannheim, 1991). These varieties can be characterized by an overlapping lexicon and pragmatics, and a morphosyntax whose variability is as yet undetermined.

²Evidentials can also be used to mark a speaker's personal claim to authority (Faller, 2002), when producing utterances that draw on encyclopedic knowledge as opposed to personal knowledge.

³In many languages, such as English, “some” means “at least one” so that it is literally correct to assert “Some babies have noses.” Nonetheless, “some” is often interpreted as contrasting with other, more informative quantification terms (and therefore implying, for example, “not all”). This pragmatic inference is known as a scalar implicature (Noveck, 2001). The ability to derive scalar implicatures undergoes developmental change, such that younger children tend to apply a logical interpretation whereas older children tend to apply a pragmatic one (Musolino & Lidz, 2006; Noveck, 2001; Papafragou & Musolino, 2003).