Finding modal force

This dissertation investigates when and how children figure out the force of modals, that is, when and how they learn that can/might express possibility, whereas must/have to express necessity. Learning modal force raises a logical “Subset Problem”: given that necessity entails possibility, what prevents learners from hypothesizing possibility meanings for necessity modals? Three main solutions to other Subset Problems have been proposed in the literature. The first is a bias towards strong (here, necessity) meanings, in the spirit of Berwick (1985). The second is a reliance on downward-entailing environments, which reverse patterns of entailment (Gualmini & Schwarz, 2009). The third is a reliance on pragmatic situational cues stemming from the conversational context in which modals are used (Dieuleveut et al., 2019). This dissertation assesses the viability of each, by examining the modals used in speech to and by 2-year-old English children, through a combination of corpus studies and experiments testing the guessability of modal force based on their context of use. I show that negative and other downward-entailing contexts are rare with necessity modals, making them impractical on their own. However, the conversational context in which modals are used in speech to children is highly informative about both forces. Thus, if learners are sensitive to these conversational cues, they, in principle, do not need to rely either on a necessity bias nor on negative environments to solve the Subset Problem. Turning to children’s own productions, I show that children master possibility modals very early: by age 2, they use them productively, and in an adult-like way. However, they struggle with necessity modals: they use them less frequently, and not in an adult-like way. Their modal uses show no evidence for a necessity bias. To assess how children actually figure out modal force, and which of the available cues children use to figure out modal force, I then examine which aspects of children’s input best predict their mastery of modals. Preliminary results suggest that negation is predictive of children’s early success with necessity modals, and that frequency of modal talk, but not of particular lexemes, also contributes to their early success

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

Distinctions between primary and secondary scalar implicatures

International audienc

Finding the force: How children discern possibility and necessity modals

International audienceThis paper investigates when and how children figure out the force of modals: that possibility modals (e.g. can/might) express possibility, and necessity modals (e.g. must/have to), necessity. Modals raise a classic subset problem: given that necessity entails possibility, what prevents learners from hypothesizing possibility meanings for necessity modals? Three solutions to such subset problems can be found in the literature: the first is for learners to rely on downward-entailing environments (Gualmini and Schwarz 2009); the second is a bias for strong (here, necessity) meanings; the third is for learners to rely on pragmatic cues, stemming from the conversational context (Dieuleveut et al. 2019, Rasin and Aravind 2020).&nbsp; This paper assesses the viability of each of these solutions, by examining the modals used in speech to and by 2-year-old children, through a combination of corpus studies and experiments testing the guessability of modal force based on their context of use. Our results suggest that given the way modals are used in speech to children, the first solution is not viable, and the second unnecessary. Instead, we argue that the conversational context in which modals occur is highly informative as to their force, and sufficient, in principle, to sidestep the subset problem. Our child results further suggest an early mastery of possibility, but not necessity modals, and show no evidence for a necessity bias.</p

Modal Acquisition Studies

This project contains supplementary files for papers related to the NSF grant BCS#1551628 "Acquiring the language of possibility" (PI Valentine Hacquard (UMD), Co-PI Ailis Cournane (NYU)