Valentine and Jeff in Handbook of Mental Lexicon

On acquiring the modal vocabulary, and using syntax as evidence of meaning.

Now out, the Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon, featuring two articles by local talent: "Logic and the lexicon: Insights from modality" by Valentine Hacquard, and  "Children's use of syntax in word learning" by Jeff Lidz. The two papers jointly report on much work done over the past fifteen years with the help of three NSF grants (BCS-1124338, BCS-1551629, and BCS-1551628), Third Man Alexander Williams, and an amazing crew of students, including Shevaun Lewis, Alexis Wellwood, Aaron Steven White, Rachel Dudley, Kate Harrigan, Nick Huang, Chia-Hsuan Liao, Anouk Dieuleveut, Annemarie van Dooren, Mina Hirzel, Tyler Knowlton and Laurel Perkins.

Logic and the lexicon

This chapter focuses on a special instance of logical vocabulary, namely modal words, like “might” or “must,” which express possibility and necessity. Modal statements involve a complex interplay of morphology, syntax, semantics, and pragmatics, which make it particularly challenging to identify what lexical meanings the modal words encode. This chapter surveys how possibilities and necessities are expressed in natural language, with an eye toward cross-linguistic similarity and variation, and introduces the framework that formal semantics inherits from modal logic to analyze modal statements. It then turns to the challenges—for both the semanticist and for the child learner—of figuring out the right division of labor between semantics and pragmatics for modal statements, and the exact lexical contributions of the modal words themselves.

Children's use of syntax in word learning 

This chapter investigates the role that syntax plays in guiding the acquisition of word meaning. It reviews data that reveal how children can use the syntactic distribution of a word as evidence for its meaning and discusses the principles of grammar that license such inferences. We delineate the role of thematic linking generalizations in the acquisition of action verbs, arguing that children use specific links between subject and agent and between object and patient to guide initial verb learning. In the domain of attitude verbs, we show that children’s knowledge of abstract links between subclasses of attitude verbs and their syntactic distribution enable learners to identify the meanings of their initial attitude verbs, such as think and want. Finally, we show that syntactic bootstrapping effects are not limited to verb learning but extend across the lexicon.