39 research outputs found
-hii: Modality Meets Exclusivity
This work examines the meaning of the Hindi particle ā-hiiā and sheds new light on the link between modality and words like āonly.ā Our two new judgment studies reveal that ā-hiiā indicates exclusivity (like \u27only,\u27 and other similar lexical items) and also can associate with either the MIN or MAX of a scale of propositional alternatives. More specifically, the alternatives are ordered based on speaker conceptions of likelihood or of desirability, and which endpoint is felicitous with ā-hiiā depends on which scale is made salient by the discourse context. Since existing analyses of \u27only\u27 and \u27even\u27 are insufficient for capturing the presuppositions of ā-hiiā that are revealed by the experimental data, we draw on the recent theoretical literature on modality to map these ranking types of ā-hiiā to epistemic, bouletic, and teleological modality types that form its core scalar felicity condition. Besides helping to formalize the varied types of speaker expectations needed by ā-hiiā, this move helps to explain some differences between the likelihood and desirability contexts\u27 patterning of data in our experimental results
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Learning about the Structure of Scales: Adverbial Modification and the Acquisition of the Semantics of Gradable Adjectives
This work investigates childrenās early semantic representations of gradable adjectives (GAs) and proposes that infants perform a probabilistic analysis of the input to learn about abstract differences within this category. I first demonstrate that children as young as age three distinguish between relative (e.g., big, long), maximum standard absolute (e.g., full, straight), and minimum standard absolute (e.g., spotted, bumpy) GAs in the way that the standard of comparison is set and how it interacts with the discourse context. I then ask if adverbs enable infants to learn these differences. In a corpus analysis, I demonstrate that statistically significant patterns of adverbial modification are available to the language learner: restricted adverbs (e.g., completely) are more likely than non-restricted adverbs (e.g., very) to select for maximal GAs with bounded scales. Non-maximal GAs, which are more likely to be modified by adverbs in general, are more likely to be modified by a narrower range, predominantly composed of intensifiers (e.g., very). I then ask if language learners recruit this information when learning new adjectives. In a word learning task employing the preferential looking paradigm, I demonstrate that 30-month-olds use adverbial modifiers they are not necessarily producing to assign an interpretation to novel adjectives. Adjectives modified by completely are assigned a
Collectivity, distributivity, and the interpretation of numerical expressions in child and adult language
Sentences containing plural numerical expressions (e.g., two boys) can give rise to two interpretations (collective and distributive), arising from the fact that their representation admits of a part-whole structure. We present the results of a series of experiments designed to explore childrenās understanding of this distinction and its implications for the acquisition of linguistic expressions with number words. We show that preschoolers access both interpretations, indicating that they have the requisite linguistic and conceptual machinery to generate the corresponding representations. Furthermore, they can shift their interpretation in response to structural and lexical manipulations. However, they are not fully adult-like: unlike adults, they are drawn to the distributive interpretation, and are not yet fully aware of the lexical semantics of each and together, which should favor one or another interpretation. This research bridges a gap between a well-established body of work in cognitive psychology on the acquisition of number words and more recent work investigating childrenās knowledge of the syntactic and semantic properties of sentences featuring numerical expressions.Peer reviewe
Context sensitivity and the semantics of count nouns in the evaluation of partial objects by children and adults
Copyright Ā© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. Previous research has documented that children count spatiotemporally-distinct partial objects as if they were whole objects. This behavior extends beyond counting to inclusion of partial objects in assessment and comparisons of quantities. Multiple accounts of this performance have been proposed: children and adults differ qualitatively in their conceptual representations, children lack the processing skills to immediately individuate entities in a given domain, or children cannot readily access relevant linguistic alternatives for the target count noun. We advance a new account, appealing to theoretical proposals about underspecification in nominal semantics and the role of the discourse context. Our results demonstrate that there are limits to which children allow partial objects to serve as wholes, and that under certain conditions, adult performance resembles that of children by allowing in partial objects. We propose that children's behavior is in fact licensed by the inherent context dependence of count nouns
Do Mandarin count classifiers individuate: Experimental evidence from a quantity judgment task
The interaction of syntax, prosody, and discourse in licensing French wh-in-situ questions
International audienceThe current experiment addresses the proposal by Cheng and Rooryk (2000) that wh-in-situ questions in French are marked by an obligatory rising contour, which is the result of an intonation morpheme [Q:] in C. Twelve native French speakers participated in a production study in which they produced the target interrogatives, along with a range of similar sentences. While most participants were perceived to assign wh-in-situ questions a sentence-final rise, a minority was not. Moreover, the rise associated with wh-in-situ was smaller than the rise exhibited in yes no questions, which C&R claim to be licensed by the same morpheme. Given that these two results are unexpected under C&R's account, we conducted a further acoustic analysis of the productions, which revealed that for sentences lacking a sentence-final rise, the in situ wh-word had an elevated high pitch accent. A statistical analysis shows a negative correlation between the height of the pitch accent assigned to the wh-word and the presence and height of the sentence-final rise, indicating that instead of the sentence-final rise for wh-in-situ questions being optional, it may instead be variable and predictable by focus placed on the wh-word, for discourse reasons. We discuss three possibilities for the status Of the intonation morpheme concerning yes no and wh-questions and the role of information structure in French wh-in-situ questions. (C) 2012 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved
Lexical Disambiguation in Verb Learning: Evidence from the Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Frame in English and Mandarin Chinese
When presented with a novel verb in a transitive frame (X is Ving Y), young children typically select a causative event referent, rather than one in which agents engage in parallel, non-causative synchronous events. However, when presented with a conjoined-subject intransitive frame and Y are Ving), participants (even adults, as we show) are at chance. Although in some instances, children older than three can obtain above-chance-level performance, these experiments still appear to rely upon a within-experiment contrast with the transitive frame. This leads us to ask whether children can achieve success with the intransitive frame without such a contrast among constructions, and map a novel verb appearing in such a frame onto a non-causative meaning. Building on recent evidence that adverbial modifiers can support word learning for adjectives and for verbs (when both nominal and verbal candidate interpretations are considered) by directing children to a particular construal of a scene, we test the hypothesis that a semantically informative modifier, together, will provide children with additional lexical information that allows them to narrow down verb meaning and identify a non-causative interpretation for a novel verb appearing in the conjoined-subject intransitive frame. We find that for English-speaking children and adults it does, but only when together directly modifies the verb phrase, suggesting that participants appeal to compositionality and not just the brute addition of another word, even one that is semantically meaningful, to arrive at the intended interpretation. Children acquiring Mandarin Chinese, in contrast, do not succeed with the translation-equivalent of together (although adult speakers do), but they do with dou (roughly, the distributive quantifier "each"). Our results point to a valuable source of information young children learning verbs: modifiers with familiar semantics