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The importance of modeling pragmatic syntactic bootstrapping

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 February 2023

Toben H. MINTZ Open the ORCID record for Toben H. MINTZ [Opens in a new window]
Toben H. MINTZ*
Affiliation:
Departments of Psychology and Linguistics, University of Southern California, USA
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Email: tmintz@usc.edu
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Extract

Syntactic bootstrapping is based on the premise that there are probabilistic correspondences between the syntactic structure in which a word occurs and the word’s meaning, and that such links hold, with some degree of generality, cross-linguistically. The procedure has been extensively discussed with respect to verbs, where it has been proposed as a mechanism for constraining the massive ambiguity that arises when inferring the meaning of a verb that is used to describe an event (Fisher, Hall, Rakowitz & Gleitman, 1994; Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman, Cassidy, Nappa, Papafragou & Trueswell, 2005). In her keynote paper (Hacquard, 2022), Hacquard focuses on classes of verbs for which inferences about meaning are arguably even harder, because they involve concepts that have no observable counterparts: these are attitude verbs such as think and want, and modals such as must and can. She walks us through, in meticulous detail, the limits of a purely syntactic bootstrapping mechanism, and she describes how augmenting syntactic information with pragmatic information, via pragmatic syntactic bootstrapping (Hacquard, 2022; Hacquard & Lidz, 2019), might address these limitations. The proposal is exciting, and the detail with which Hacquard works through these examples is impressive; she supports her arguments with behavioral experiments, corpus analyses, and two very targeted computational analyses. In this commentary I suggest that Hacquard’s proposal is laid out in sufficient detail such that a comprehensive computational modeling effort would be fruitful for evaluating and further developing her account.

Type
Invited Commentary
Information
Journal of Child Language , Volume 50 , Issue 5: Special Issue on Syntactic Bootstrapping , September 2023 , pp. 1065 - 1068
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Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press

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References

Fisher, C., Hall, D. G., Rakowitz, S., & Gleitman, L. R. (1994). When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. Lingua, 92(C), 333–375. https://doi.org/10.1016/0024-3841(94)90346-8Google Scholar
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Hacquard, V. (2022). Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping. Journal of Child Language, 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0305000922000605Google Scholar
Hacquard, V., & Lidz, J. (2019). Children’s attitude problems: Bootstrapping verb meaning from syntax and pragmatics. Mind & Language, 34(1), 73–96. https://doi.org/10.1111/mila.12192Google Scholar
Huang, N., White, A. S., Liao, C. H., Hacquard, V., & Lidz, J. (2021). Syntactic bootstrapping of attitude verbs despite impoverished morphosyntax. Language Acquisition, 29(1), 27–53. https://doi.org/10.1080/10489223.2021.1934686Google Scholar
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