Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping

dc.contributor.authorHacquard, Valentine
dc.date.accessioned2023-09-18T18:40:15Z
dc.date.available2023-09-18T18:40:15Z
dc.date.issued2022-12-06
dc.description.abstractWords have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word’s meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via SYNTACTIC BOOTSTRAPPING. But while formal theories argue for principled links between meaning and syntax, actual syntactic evidence about meaning is noisy and highly abstract. This paper examines the role that syntactic bootstrapping can play in learning modal and attitude verb meanings, for which the physical context is especially uninformative. I argue that abstract syntactic classifications are useful to the child, but that something further is both necessary and available. I examine how pragmatic and syntactic cues can combine in mutually constraining ways to help learners infer attitude meanings, but need to be supplemented by semantic information from the lexical context in the case of modals.
dc.description.urihttps://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000922000605
dc.identifierhttps://doi.org/10.13016/dspace/m6oi-yxrm
dc.identifier.citationHACQUARD, V. (2022). Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping. Journal of Child Language, 1-24.
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/1903/30528
dc.language.isoen_US
dc.publisherCambridge University Press
dc.relation.isAvailableAtCollege of Arts & Humanitiesen_us
dc.relation.isAvailableAtLinguisticsen_us
dc.relation.isAvailableAtDigital Repository at the University of Marylanden_us
dc.relation.isAvailableAtUniversity of Maryland (College Park, MD)en_us
dc.subjectattitude verbs
dc.subjectmodality
dc.subjectpragmatics
dc.subjectsyntactic bootstrapping
dc.titleBeing pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping
dc.typeArticle
local.equitableAccessSubmissionNo

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