Semantics in Language Acquisition

Classical statue sentences (‘Ringo hit himself’ meaning ‘Ringo hit his statue’) are a long-standing puzzle for binding theories. We enrich the Partition theory (Schwarzschild, 1996) to allow semantic partitions (based on contextual contrasts) to explain acquisition experiments. The semantic partitions, in turn, correspond to a syntactic analysis of bimorphemic versus monomorphic reflexives. Only morphologically complex anaphors allow near-reflexive reference to a statue. Two experiments on the a