Acquiring a meaning for *more*

What must the meaning of a functional word be like, such that we can acquire it? The word more, and its counterparts in many other languages, can be used to describe comparisons between any quantities that people are able to represent. For linguists, the study of such an item can provide insight into the nature of functional meanings. For psychologists, it can help to reveal how people represent and reason about quantities. For philosophers, it can bear on important metasemantic questions about meaning underspecification. I focus on a particular line of research in language acquisition and cognitive development that reveals early-acquired, fine-grained understanding of more’s syntactic and semantic commitments, especially when it combines with nouns and verbs. Across development, just as nominal quantification with more is tightly connected to the cognitive distinction between ‘object’ and ‘substance’, verbal quantification with more is tightly linked to that between ‘event’ and ‘process’. An appropriate semantic analysis will therefore key more’s interpretive realization to the kinds of formal features that unify these conceptual domains. But why should we observe such patterning? I suggest that the metasemantics of more crucially depends on class-level conceptual features in extralinguistic cognition. Such a theory can explain why a functional item just like more occurs across languages, and directly support an ‘all-at-once’ acquisition story.

Preprint version (updated version forthcoming as a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of Philosophy of Linguistics)