Does “Q-Spreading” Come with Presupposition Spreading?
The goal of this study is to introduce a new type of evidence into the debate on the nature of quantifier spreading by looking at the presuppositionality of “every”. The author suggests that the existence presupposition triggered by “every” may serve as a probe into children’s semantics of sentences like “Every boy read a book” because it applies only to the restrictor of the quantifier, and, therefore, can be used to determine which elements the child includes in the restrictor by establishing to which parts of the sentence the child applies the presupposition. Q-spreading (Philip 1995) and Full Competence (Crain et al. 1996, Rakhlin 2007) theories make distinct predictions with respect to the contexts in which the child should be able to assign a truth-value to a universally quantified sentence and those in which a presupposition failure should be triggered. Given that children treat “every” as presuppositional, if they assign sentences like “Every boy read a book” adult-like semanti
