Aspects of modality

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 2006.Includes bibliographical references (p. 205-214).It is a cross-linguistically robust fact that the same modal auxiliaries come in different flavors: epistemic, deontic, ability, teleological... This fact is neatly captured in a system where each modal has a single lexical entry, where the difference in flavor comes from contextually-provided accessibility relations (cf. Lewis 1973, Kratzer 1981). Equally robust, however, are the phenomena that suggest that epistemics and a subset of deontics are interpreted higher than the remaining flavors (subsumed under the label 'root modals'). The goal of this dissertation is to show that a unified analysis of modal auxiliaries is maintainable, while still providing some principled explanation for the relative ordering of tense, aspect and the various modals in Cinque's (1999) hierarchy, based on evidence in French and Italian. To make sense of the relative scope of modals w.r.t. tense and aspect, I start with the empirical puzzle that aspect interacts differently with the various modal flavors. Perfective aspect on roots in French and Italian yields 'actuality entailments' (cf. Bhatt 1999), that is, an uncancelable inference that the proposition expressed by the complement holds in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world(s).(cont.) I propose that this inference obtains when aspect scopes above the modal, and must therefore take the actual world as its world argument. Because epistemics/deontics are interpreted above aspect, they are immune to the effect. To derive the height problem, I propose to relativize the accessibility relation of a modal to an event, instead of a world: the accessibility relation has a free event variable, which needs to be bound locally, either by aspect (i.e., a quantifier over events), the speech event, or an embedding attitude verb. Further selectional restrictions on the event type each accessibility relation requires limits the possible combinations of event binders and accessibility relations. The resulting binding possibilities reduce the systematic constraints on the range of a modal's interpretations to independently-motivated syntactic assumptions on locality and movement, and explain why the various flavors of the same modal auxiliaries are interpreted at different heights.by Valentine Hacquard.Ph.D

Bootstrapping attitudes

This paper explores two classic problems at the semantics-pragmatics interface from a learner's perspective. First, the meaning that speakers convey often goes beyond the literal meaning of the sentences they utter. Second, not all content encoded in utterances has equal standing: some is foregrounded, some backgrounded. Yet a sentence does not formally distinguish what a speaker asserts from what she presupposes or merely implicates. For this reason, the child acquiring a language has a daunting task. She must both extract the literal meaning from the overall message, and separate the background assumptions that are linguistically required from those that are incidental. This paper discusses the ways in which the syntax might guide the child with this daunting task, through a few case studies on children's acquisition of attitude verbs

Aspects of "Too" and "Enough" Constructions

No abstract

Hope For Syntactic Bootstrapping

We explore children’s use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want, and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but have syntactic distributions predictive of semantic properties, we hypothesize that syntax may serve as an important cue to learning their meanings. Using a novel methodology, we replicate previous literature showing an asymmetry between acquisition of think and want, and we additionally demonstrate that interpretation of a less frequent attitude verb, hope, patterns with type of syntactic complement. This supports the view that children treat syntactic frame as informative about an attitude verb’s meaning

Finding the force: a novel word learning experiment with modals

This study investigates the semantic and pragmatic challenges of acquiring the force of English modals, which express possibility (e.g., might) and necessity (e.g., must). Children seem to struggle with modal force through at least age 4, over-accepting both possibility modals where adults would prefer necessity modals, and necessity modals in possibility situations. These difficulties are typically blamed on pragmatic or conceptual immaturity. In this study, we sidestep these immaturity issues by investigating the challenges of modal learning through a novel word learning experiment with adults, for different 'flavors' of modals: epistemic (knowledge-based) versus teleological (goal-based), and comparing novel modals with actual English modals. We find that when learning possibility modals, adult learners behave as expected: they accept novel modals in necessity situations, both in epistemic and teleological contexts, but less often after they've learned a pragmatically more appropriate necessity modal. However, when learning necessity modals, participants manage to learn the right force (i.e., reject them in possibility situations) for epistemic scenarios only; with teleological scenarios, they accept them in possibility situations. We propose that an overlap in modal flavor explains their behavior, specifically, the competition with an ability interpretation in teleological but not epistemic scenarios, which could also contribute to children's difficulty with necessity modals reported in the acquisition literature

Three-Year-Olds\u27 Understanding of Desire Reports Is Robust to Conflict

In this paper, we present two experiments with 3-year-olds, exploring their interpretation of sentences about desires. A mature concept of desire entails that desires may conflict with reality and that different people may have conflicting desires. While previous literature is suggestive, it remains unclear whether young children understand that (a) agents can have counterfactual desires about current states of affairs and (b) agents can have desires that conflict with one\u27s own desires or the desires of others. In this article, we test preschoolers\u27 interpretation of want sentences, in order to better understand their ability to represent conflicting desires, and to interpret sentences reporting these desires. In the first experiment, we use a truth-value judgment task (TVJT) to assess 3-year-olds\u27 understanding of want sentences when the subject of the sentence has a desire that conflicts with reality. In the second experiment, we use a game task to induce desires in the child that conflict with the desires of a competitor, and assess their understanding of sentences describing these desires. In both experiments, we find that 3-year-olds successfully interpret want sentences, suggesting that their ability to represent conflicting desires is adult-like at this age. Given that 3-year-olds generally display difficulty attributing beliefs to others that conflict with reality or with the child\u27s own beliefs, these findings may further cast some doubt on the view that children\u27s persistent difficulty with belief (think) is caused by these kinds of conflicts

Clause types and speech acts in speech to children

The question of how and when children learn to associate clause type with its canonical function, or speech act, is currently unknown. It is widely observed that declaratives tend to result in assertions, interrogatives in questions, and imperatives in requests. Although such canonical links between clause type and speech acts are principled, they are known to be defeasible. In this corpus study, we investigate how parents talk to their children in the first years of life, and ask how their input might support this mapping, and to what extent it might pose difficulties. We find that the expected link between clause type and speech act is robust in the input, particularly between declaratives and assertions, both of which also occur most frequently. In addition, the non-canonical mappings that do occur are characterized formally, e.g., non-interrogative questions nearly always exhibit rising prosody, and non-imperative requests often contain a modal

On double access, cessation and parentheticality

Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has either disregarded the oddity (e.g., Abusch 1997: 39) or treated it as a reflex of a particular dialect (e.g., Kratzer 1998: 14). The goal of the paper is to argue—based on a corpus study—that a present-under-past sentence is grammatical, but modulated by two, interacting pragmatic phenomena: cessation and parentheticality

Consonant Confusability: An MEG Study

Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003

The semantics and pragmatics of belief reports in preschoolers

Children under 4 years have been claimed to lack adult-like semantic representations of belief verbs like think. Based on two experiments involving a truth-value judgment task, we argue that 4-year olds' apparently deviant interpretations arise from pragmatic difficulty understanding the relevance of belief, rather than from conceptual or semantic immaturity