McKercher, D: The Polysemy of ‘with‘ in First Language Acqui

The English preposition ‘‘with‘‘ is polysemous in that it has multiple distinct senses. It can be used to mark instruments (‘‘He ate with a fork‘‘), accompaniments (‘‘He ate with a friend‘‘, ‘‘He ate pizza with a salad‘‘), manner (‘‘He ate with enthusiasm‘‘) and attributes (‘‘He ate pizza with anchovies‘‘). How do children learning English as their first language deal with the polysemy of ‘‘with‘‘? This book presents evidence from a corpus study and three psycholinguistic experiments that suggests that children begin with a general meaning of accompaniment. This leads to over-generalization such that children occasionally answer questions such as "What is he eating with?" with a "food" answer. In production, errors of the form "He‘‘s going to cut the knife with the apple" can be elicited and statements of the form "She‘‘s eating cake with a fork" are sometimes answered as true even when the fork is simply present but not being used. This book will be of interest to linguists and psycholinguists who have wondered about the meanings of prepositions and about how multiple meanings are dealt with in first language acquisition.