Adults' Representations of Balinese Universal Quantifiers

DOI

10.2991/prasasti-18.2018.23How to use a DOI?

Keywords

acquisition; universal quantifier; distributive meaning; collective meaning

Abstract

Balinese universal quantifiers have not been explored, particularly, by Indonesian scholars. The main purpose of current study is to investigate how Balinese adults represent the meanings of universal quantifiers in Balinese. The study employed picture selection tasks and involved thirty-seven Balinese undergraduate students at the Udayana University. The picture selection tasks basically require that the participants match a Balinese sentence containing a distributive or collective quantifier to stimuli consisting three pictures depicting events with universal quantifiers. The findings show that the participants can separate the distributive meaning of sebilang ‘every/each’ (e.g., sebilang anak cerike ento ngisi bal ‘every child is carrying a ball’) from the collective meaning of makejang ‘all’ (e.g., makejang anak cerike ento ngisi bal ‘all the children are carrying a ball’). Specifically, 76% of the participants assigned canonical distributive and collective meanings to each/every and all respectively, while 24% of them assigned the meanings non-canonically (i.e., the collective meaning was represented to each/every, while the distributive meaning was represented to all). The later figure seems to relate to the possible ambiguous nature of Balinese universal quantifiers. In short, the results of current study suggest that the adults are able to distinguish the distributive meaning from the collective one in using Balinese universal quantifiers. The results, however, need further testing to children to find out if they are able to represent the meanings canonically as well.

Copyright

© 2018, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press.

Open Access

This is an open access article distributed under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/).

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TY  - CONF
AU  - I Nyoman Aryawibawa
PY  - 2018/08
DA  - 2018/08
TI  - Adults' Representations of Balinese Universal Quantifiers
BT  - Proceedings of the Fourth Prasasti International Seminar on Linguistics (Prasasti 2018)
PB  - Atlantis Press
SP  - 116
EP  - 120
SN  - 2352-5398
UR  - https://doi.org/10.2991/prasasti-18.2018.23
DO  - 10.2991/prasasti-18.2018.23
ID  - Aryawibawa2018/08
ER  -