Investigating the effect of prosodic markedness on the interpretation of simple disjunction in Romanian

Abstract

According to Horn’s (1984) Principle of Division of Pragmatic Labor, marked forms should have marked meanings. We investigate differences in the interpretation of two prosodically distinct forms of the disjunction sau in Romanian (‘A sau B’): (i) neutral rise-fall prosody, and (ii) marked rise-fall-rise prosody, where both disjuncts are stressed. Adults typically interpret disjunction inclusively (A or B, possibly both) or exclusively (A or B, but not both), while children interpret it inclusively or conjunctively (A and B), cf. Singh et al. (2016) and Tieu et al. (2017). We ask whether similar preferences hold for Romanian and probe into the understudied role of prosody. Given adults’ greater sensitivity to prosody compared to children (Gotzner et al. 2013), we predict they might associate marked sau with the marked exclusive meaning more than children do. We tested Romanian-speaking adults and 5-year-olds using a forced-choice task, in which two puppets made guesses about what would happen, using either neutral sau or marked sau. While adults preferred neutral sau to describe contexts in which both disjuncts were true and marked sau for contexts in which only one disjunct was true, children selected the two disjunctions indiscriminately. We conclude that, unlike adults, children do not distinguish between prosodically marked and unmarked forms of disjunction.