Differing Interpretations of Empty Categories in English and Japanese VP Ellipsis Contexts

Abstract

Abstract This article describes how English and Japanese children interpret empty categories in Verb Phrase Ellipsis contexts as in (1): The penguin [sat on his chair] and the robot did Δ, too. To obtain an adultlike interpretation of (1), English children have to do two things. First, they need to find a suitable antecedent for the empty verb phrase labeled with Δ; second, they need to find the antecedent of a pronoun (his, in this case). Finding the correct antecedent of the pronoun depends on the knowledge that English pronouns are ambiguous between referential and bound variable interpretations. It is theoretically debated whether Japanese children have to do the same thing as English children in interpreting the Japanese equivalent of (1) or whether they need to engage in a different operation, such as recovering a noun that consists of a bundle of semantic features (Hoji (1998) Hoji, H. 1998. “Null Object and Sloppy Identity in Japanese,”. Linguistic Inquiry, 29: 127–152. [Crossref], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]). This article reports and interprets results from three groups: 14 English-speaking children, 17 Japanese-speaking children, and 10 Japanese-speaking adults; they participated in an experiment using the Truth Value Judgment Task methodology. The experiment compared 4 different conditions: a strict reading, a sloppy reading, a color mismatch reading, and an object mismatch reading. We discuss the fact that English and Japanese children behave differently in interpreting these empty categories and that Japanese adults and children also behave differently. We consider and discuss what is causing Japanese children to perform differently from adults in the experiment. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS This study was supported by Max Planck Gesellschaft and a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada (SSHRCC #410-2003-0420). In the course of writing this article, I was helped by various people; especially, I would like to thank Nigel Duffield, Wolfgang Klein, Leah Roberts, Tom Roeper, and William Snyder for their valuable help and comments. The editors and reviewers of Language Acquisition have given me thorough and very constructive comments; I am especially indebted to the review given by Reviewer 3. I also appreciate the feedback given by members of the Acquisition Group at the Max Planck Institute and at the CLGC Colloquium at the University of Groningen. My special thanks go to Bart Hollebrandse, Angeliek van Hout, and Laurie Stowe.