Nick Huang and the Attitude All Stars in Language Acquisition

Syntactic bootstrapping attitude verbs despite impoverished morphosyntax.

Now in Language Acquisition, "Syntactic bootstrapping attitude verbs despite impoverished morphosyntax," which argues that even in a language with null arguments and little morphology – such as Mandarin Chinese – children assign belief semantics to verbs whose complement clauses resemble the declarative main clauses of their language, and desire semantics to others. The first author is alum Nick Huang *19, now at the National University of Singapore, leading an all-star crew of Aaron Steven White *15 (Rochester), Chia-Hsuan Liao *20 (National Tsing Hua University), Valentine Hacquard and Jeff Lidz.