Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping

The importance of modeling pragmatic syntactic bootstrapping

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.

There might be more to syntactic bootstrapping than being pragmatic: A look at grammatical person and prosody in naturalistic child-directed speech

In 'Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping', Hacquard (2022) argues that abstract syntax is useful for word learning, but that an additional cue, pragmatics, is both necessary and available for young children during the first steps of language acquisition. She focuses on modals and attitude verbs, where the physical context seems particularly impoverished as the sole basis for deriving meanings, and thus where linguistic cues may be particularly helpful. She convincingly shows how pragmatic and syntactic cues could be combined to help young language learners learn and infer the possible meanings of attitude verbs such as "think", "know" or "want". She also argues that, in some circumstances, syntax and pragmatics would need to be supplemented by semantic information from context - for instance, in the case of modals such as "might", "can", or "must". We agree with Hacquard on the importance of the synergies between these different cues to meaning, and wish to add two other aspects of the input that might also be used by young children in these contexts. The aspects we describe can only be noticed when one analyzes concrete examples of what children hear in their everyday lives, something which Hacquard does very often in her work (e.g., Dieuleveut, van Dooren, Cournane & Hacquard, 2022; Huang, White, Liao, Hacquard & Lidz, 2022; Yang, 2022). Taking into account different cues for meaning would help the field go beyond current models of syntactic bootstrapping, and create an integrated picture of the synergies between different levels of linguistic information.