Valentine at UMass

The force is with her.

At the end of this first week of March, Valentine Hacquard is up at UMass Linguistics giving two talks on her research, overpowering Sam the Minuteman with the inexorable advance of a Testudo Formation. One of the two is abstracted below.

Must the force be with you?

Children have been shown to struggle with the force of modals: they tend to accept possibility modals (like might) in environments where adults prefer necessity modals (like must), and necessity modals in environments where adults require possibility modals. In this talk, I present various studies which test the robustness of children’s modal difficulties, probe the potential linguistic and nonlinguistic sources of these difficulties, and point to how children eventually overcome them. (Joint work with Ailis Cournane, Anouk Dieuleveut, Mina Hirzel, Annemarie van Dooren)