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Hope for syntactic bootstrapping

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Kaitlyn Harrigan ,
Valentine Hacquard  and
Jeffrey Lidz
Kaitlyn Harrigan*
Affiliation:
William & Mary
Valentine Hacquard*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland College Park
Jeffrey Lidz*
Affiliation:
University of Maryland College Park
*
Harrigan, Department of Psychological Sciences, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187-8795, kharrigan@wm.edu
hacquard@umd.edu
jlidz@umd.edu
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Abstract

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.

Keywords

language acquisitionsyntactic bootstrappingword learningattitude verbsverb learningsemanticspragmatics

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 95 , Issue 4 , December 2019 , pp. 642 - 682
Copyright
Copyright © 2019 Linguistic Society of America

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