Children’s non-adultlike interpretations of telic predicates across languages

Understanding when a sentence describes an event with an inherent endpoint (a telos) and when the endpoint has to be reached for the sentence to be true is a crucial step in the acquisition of sentence-level semantics.1 The acquisition literature has documented different types of misinterpretations of telic sentences by children, yet a comprehensive analysis of these child interpretations across languages is still lacking. The task is not easy, for, on the surface, these non-adultlike interpretations appear to be scattered and contradictory, defying a unified account. This paper identifies three such patterns of non-adultlike interpretations, with the goal of providing a uniform account for these recurring but seemingly contradictory patterns found in language development.