The second property of major significance to develops in modern linguistic understandings lies in the fact that in Kannada negation comes at the end of the sentence and the quantified object linearly precedes it. This means there is no capacity for confounding linear order and hierarchical relations, as there is in English. This can be used to test whether the observation for English-speaking infants of considering hierarchical organisation more than linear order when deciding scope ambiguity is cross-linguistic, or just a product of English's confounded linear order. Specifically, analysing the sentence "I didn't read two books" (in Kannada), if what matters is linear order, Kannada speaking children's preferred interpretation would be one where 'two books' has wider scope than negation (i.e., there are two books I did not read), and if what matters is hierarchical organisation, their preferred interpretation would be the opposite (i.e., that it is not the case that I read two books). Lidz and Musolino (2002) found that they prefer the second, hierarchical interpretation, just like English-speaking children. This has been used to argue that infants universally represent sentences not as mere strings of adjacent words, but as hierarchical objects, a regular talking point among Chomskyans and nativists.
The second property of major significance to develops in modern linguistic understandings lies in the fact that in Kannada negation comes at the end of the sentence and the quantified object linearly precedes it. This means there is no capacity for confounding linear order and hierarchical relations, as there is in English. This can be used to test whether t?he observation for English-speaking infants of considering hierarchical organisation more than linear order when deciding scope ambiguity is cross-linguistic, or just a product of English's confounded linear order. Specifically, analysing the sentence "I didn't read two books" (in Kannada), if what matters is linear order, Kannada speaking children's preferred interpretation would be one where 'two books' has wider scope than negation (i.e., there are two books I did not read), and if what matters is hierarchical organisation, their preferred interpretation would be the opposite (i.e., that it is not the case that I read two books). Lidz and Musolino (2002) found that they prefer the second, hierarchical interpretation, just like English-speaking children. This has been used to argue that infants universally represent sentences not as mere strings of adjacent words, but as hierarchical objects, a regular talking point among Chomskyans and nativists.