Nick and Chia-Hsuan in BUCLD Proceedings
June 05, 2018
Linguistics
Learning attitude verb meanings in a morphologically-poor language, by
Nick Huang,
Chia-Hsuan Liao,
Valentine Hacquard and
Jeffrey Lidz, is now out in the Proceedings of the Boston University Conference on Language Development. The paper asks whether in Mandarin Chinese, despite its morphological poverty and regular silencing of arguments, patterns of usage might neverthelss differentiate the distributions of propositional
attitude verbs that express judgments of truth, such as
think, versus those that express preferences, such as
want, so that a child acquiring the language might use this distinction to
infer the semantic class of an unknown verb.
