Research

Although psycho-/neuro-linguistics has assumed a distinction between morphological and syntactic structure building as in traditional theoretical linguistics, this distinction has been increasingly challenged by theoretical linguists in recent years. Opposing a sharp, lexicalist distinction between morphology and syntax, non-lexicalist theories propose common morpho-syntactic structure-building operations that cut across the realms of “morphology” and “syntax,” which are considered distinct territories in lexicalist theories. Taking advantage of two pairs of contrasts in Mandarin Chinese with desirable linguistic properties, namely, compound versus simplex nouns (the “morphology” contrast, differing in morphological structure complexity per lexicalist theories) and separable versus inseparable verbs (the “syntax” contrast, differing in syntactic structure complexity per lexicalist theories), we report one of the first pieces of evidence for shared neural responses for morphological and syntactic structure complexity in language comprehension, supporting a non-lexicalist view where shared neural computations are employed across morpho-syntactic structure building. Specifically, we observed that the two contrasts both modulated neural responses in left anterior and centro-parietal electrodes in an a priori 275:400 ms time window, corroborated by topographical similarity analyses. These results serve as preliminary yet prima facie evidence toward shared neural computations across morphological and syntactic structure building in language comprehension.

The ability to represent both local and nonlocalsyntactic dependencies emergesin an infant’ssecond year of life, raising questions about how these early syntactic representations interact with language learning in other domains. Using wh-questions as our case study, we investigate how infants’ syntactic dependency acquisition interacts with their early lexical development. Prior work finds that 18-month-olds represent fronted wh-phrases as nonlocal arguments in object wh-questions with known verbs. Here, we show that 19–21-month-olds (range: 18;29–21;26) do the same when interpreting unknown verbs. We introduce a novel Violation of Fit method, a cross-modal extension of the Violation of Expectations paradigm. Infants saw dialogues with novel verbs in object wh-questions (e.g., What is the girl gonna gorp?), transitive polar questions (Is the girl gonna gorp the toy?), or intransitive polar questions (Is the girl gonna gorp?). At test, infants viewed a causal event (e.g., a girl knocks over a tower), and we measured their attention as an indication of whether they considered the verbs to be a good fit for this type of event. Across the age range, we found that infants who heard wh-question dialogues attended similarly to the test events as infants who heard canonical transitive dialogues, and unlike infants who heard intransitive dialogues. Thus,19–21-month-oldstreat object wh-questions with a novel verb as transitive when relating them to scenes. This suggests that immediately after wh-dependency representations are first acquired, they are available to feed verb learning.

In acquiring a syntax, children must detect evidence for abstract structural dependencies that can be realized in variable ways in the surface forms of sentences. In What did David fix?, learners must identify a nonlocal relation between a fronted object of the verb (what) and the phonologically null ‘gap’ in canonical direct object position after the verb, where it is thematically interpreted. How do learners identify a nonadjacent dependency between an expression and something that has no overt phonological form? We propose that identifying abstract syntactic dependencies requires statistical inference over both overt linguistic material and unsatisfied grammatical expectations: noticing when a predicted argument for a verb is unexpectedly missing may serve as evidence for the gap of an argument movement dependency. We provide computational support for this hypothesis. We develop a learner that uses predicted but unexpectedly missing objects of verbs to identify possible gaps of object movement, and identifies which surface morphosyntactic properties of sentences are correlated with these possible movement gaps. We find that it is in principle possible for a learner using this mechanism to identify the majority of sentences with object movement in child-directed English, and that prior knowledge of which verbs require objects provides an important guide for identifying which surface distributions characterize object movement. This provides a computational account for why verb argument-structure knowledge developmentally precedes the acquisition of movement in a language like English. More broadly, these findings illustrate how statistical learning and learning from violated expectations can be combined to novel effect in the domain of language acquisition.

In syntactic bootstrapping, children draw on syntactic information to constrain their hypotheses about word meanings. We review evidence for syntactic bootstrapping, focusing primarily on the acquisition of verb meanings. For verbs describing physical actions, children can use the argument structure from event descriptions to zero in on the verb meaning. For attitude verbs, which refer to mental states, the syntactic distribution is informative about their semantics. By making use of systematic syntax-semantics correspondences, syntactic bootstrapping provides a foothold for word learning when cues from the physical world are underinformative.

This textbook introduces fundamental concepts and results in the theory of first language acquisition, bringing together linguistic phenomena on the one hand and learning and cognitive development on the other. Grammar and development are woven together through a range of case studies that provide students with the tools to think about (a) what is already understood about language acquisition; (b) what methods we use to identity children's grammatical knowledge; and (c) how to approach problems in any area of grammatical acquisition.

I explore what modification and negation tell us about the logical form of resultatives: a resultative relates the events of its two parts, but is a predicate of a third event, a change, equal to neither. This is important for explaining the construction—most significantly, the direct object restriction—and understanding how it differs from others that seem similar. It also shapes how we might use resultatives in the analysis of synthetic causatives.

Standard accounts of modals and conditionals fail to derive the correct meaning of anankastic conditionals like ‘If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train’, where it seems as if the modal in the consequent is restricted by the embedded complement of want (you go to Harlem), rather than by the whole antecedent (you want to go to Harlem). This has led to proposals for a special semantics for want (Condoravdi and Lauer, 2016) or a covert purpose clause associated with teleological (goal-oriented) modality (von Fintel and Iatridou, 2005). In this paper, we show that the apparent non-compositionality of anankastic conditionals is more general, and can be replicated with other modal flavors and attitude verbs: all can trigger what we call “harmonizing readings”. We offer a pragmatic account that generalizes across modal flavors and attitudes. Specifically, we argue that harmonizing arises when the meaning of the antecedent together with background assumptions gives rise to a modal inference that matches in flavor with the consequent modal. Our account predicts when harmonizing is possible and when it isn’t, without relying on any lexical or syntactic idiosyncrasies.

This article presents two experiments testing English children’s understanding of the “force” of modals, asking whether they understand that can expresses possibility and have_to expresses necessity. Prior studies show that children tend to over-accept necessity modals in possibility situations and argue this behavior stems from conceptual difficulties reasoning about open possibilities. However, these studies typically test modal force using epistemic modality (knowledge-based), which is less input-frequent than nonepistemic modalities (actual-world priorities or goals) and involves speaker perspective-taking. Our results with more familiar teleological (goal-oriented) modality show that preschoolers have an adult-like understanding of possibility can, but they seem to treat necessity have_to as a possibility modal, in affirmative (Experiment 1) and arguably in negative sentences (Experiment 2). We take these systematic errors to call into question conceptual accounts. We argue that younger preschoolers’ difficulties with modal force are due to word-learning challenges: They treat necessity modals as possibility modals.

In this paper, I discuss new data on wh-movement in the Francoprovençal language Valdôtain Patois (ValPa) in support of overt-covert movement: overt movement with deletion of higher copies. wh-phrases in ValPa can either be fronted or occur clause-internally. Based on empirical evidence, I argue that ValPa clause-internal wh-phrases do not appear in-situ, but rather are displaced to the Low Left Periphery at the edge of vP. Furthermore, using evidence from intervention effects, binding, inverse scope, and parasitic gaps, I argue that clause internal wh-phrases do not remain in the Low Left Periphery, but overtly move to the position they take scope in. The different word-orders are then derived via a copy deletion mechanism, meaning that the optionality is not accounted for in narrow syntax.

Children use correlations between the syntax of a clause and the meaning of its predicate to draw inferences about word meanings. On one proposal, these inferences are underwritten by a structural similarity between syntactic and semantic representations: learners expect that the number of clause arguments exactly matches the number of participant roles in the event concept under which its referent is viewed. We argue against this proposal, and in favor of a theory rooted in syntactic and semantic contents – in mappings from syntactic positions to thematic relations. We (i) provide evidence that infants view certain scenes under a concept with three participant relations (a girl taking a truck from a boy), and (ii) show that toddlers do not expect these representations to align numerically with clauses used to describe those scenes: they readily accept two-argument descriptions (“she pimmed the truck!”). This argues against syntactic bootstrapping theories underwritten by mappings between structural features of syntactic and semantic representations. Instead, our findings support bootstrapping based on grammatical and thematic content. Children’s earliest inferences may rely on the assumption that the syntactic asymmetry between subject and object correlates with a difference in how their referents relate to the event described by the sentence.