Valentine Hacquard
Datos Biográficos
| ID | 795918 |
|---|---|
| NOMBRE | Valentine Hacquard |
| NOMBRES | Valentine |
| APELLIDO | Hacquard |
| FIRMA | HACQUARD V |
| AFILIACIONES | University of Maryland, College Park |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3854-0312 |
| VERIFICADO | Sí |
| TOTAL DE OBRAS | 19 |
| TOTAL DE CITAS | 43 |
| TOTAL COMO AUTOR | 19 |
| TOTAL COMO EDITOR | 0 |
| PRIMER AÑO DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2003 |
| AÑO MÁS RECIENTE DE PUBLICACIÓN | 2026 |
| ÍNDICE H | 2 |
Word learning challenges explain nonadult possibility language comprehension in preschoolers
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 epi…
Mapping modal verbs to meanings
Modals (e.g., can, must) vary along two dimensions of meaning: “force” (i.e., possibility or necessity), and “flavor” (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] ...). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor dimensions of modals. However, given the complex one-to-many mappings from forms to meanings, it is not clear what force or flavor children assign to th…
Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping
Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word’s meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via syntactic bootstrapping . But while formal theories argue for principled links between meaning and syntax, actual syntactic evidence about meanin…
Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals
This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input childre…
Syntactic bootstrapping attitude verbs despite impoverished morphosyntax
Attitude verbs like think and want describe mental states (belief and desire) that lack reliable physical correlates that could help children learn their meanings. Nevertheless, children succeed in doing so. For this reason, attitude verbs have been a parade case for syntactic bootstrapping. We assess a recent syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, in which children assign belief semantics to verbs whose complement clauses morphosyntactically resemb…
Do children know wh anything? 3-year-olds know the ambiguity of wh -phrases in Mandarin
Wh-phrases in Mandarin have an interrogative (like English what) and an indefinite (like English a/some) interpretation. Previous comprehension studies find that children can access both interpretations around 4.5 years old; studies with younger children focus on production and find that children between 2 and 4.5 do not reliably produce the indefinite interpretation in naturalistic speech or in elicited imitation tasks. In this article, we use c…
Finding the force
On the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs
Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few c…
Hope for syntactic bootstrapping
We explore children's use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want , and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but have syntactic distributions predictive of semantic properties, we hypothesize that syntax may serve as an important cue to learning their meanings. Using a novel methodology, we replicate previous literature showing an asymmetry between acquisition of…
The Anatomy of a Comparative Illusion
Comparative constructions like More people have been to Russia than I have are reported to be acceptable and meaningful by native speakers of English; yet, upon closer reflection, they are judged to be incoherent. This mismatch between initial perception and more considered judgment challenges the idea that we perceive sentences veridically, and interpret them fully; it is thus potentially revealing about the relationship between grammar and lang…
Children’s comprehension of pronouns and definites
We present an experiment which tests children’s comprehension of the requirementsof use of pronouns and definites. An adult-like use of definites and pronouns imposes differentbut related requirements. In the case of definites, a unique referent is required in the context,whereas in the case of a pronoun, the referent in the context has to be salient. In this experiment,we use a novel word task to test three-year-olds’ sensitivity to these requir…
Discovering the factivity of "know"
How do children discover which linguistic expressions are associated with presuppositions? Do they take a direct strategy of tracking whether linguistic expressions are associated with particular speaker presuppositions? This strategy may fail children who are trying to learn about the presuppositions of so-called 'soft' presupposition triggers, which can be readily used even when the relevant would-be presupposed content is not part of the commo…
Modals
Epistemics and attitudes
This paper investigates the distribution of epistemic modals in attitude contexts in three Romance languages, as well as their potential interaction with mood selection. We show that epistemics can appear in complements of attitudes of acceptance (Stalnaker 1984), but not desideratives or directives; in addition, emotive doxastics ( hope , fear ) and dubitatives ( doubt ) permit epistemic possibility modals, but not their necessity counterparts. …
Measuring and Comparing Individuals and Events
This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insights of Hackl (2000) and Bale & Barner (2009), we show that more behaves uniformly when it combines with nominal and verbal predicates: (i) it cannot combine with singular count NPs or perfective telic VPs; (ii) grammatical properties of the predicates determine the scale of comparison—plural marked NPs and habitual VPs are compared on a scale of cardin…
Embedding epistemic modals in English
The question of whether epistemic modals contribute to the truth conditions of the sentences they appear in is a matter of active debate in the literature. Fueling this debate is the lack of consensus about the extent to which epistemics can appear in the scope of other operators. This corpus study investigates the distribution of epistemics in naturalistic data. Our results indicate that they do embed, supporting the view that they contribute se…
On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries
The Question-Answer Requirement for scope assignment
This paper focuses on children’s interpretation of sentences containing negation and a quantifier (e.g., The detective didn’t find some guys). Recent studies suggest that, although children are capable of accessing inverse scope interpretations of such sentences, they resort to surface scope to a larger extent than adults. To account for children’s behavioral pattern, we propose a new factor at play in Truth Value Judgment tasks: the Question–Ans…
Consonant Confusability
Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003)
On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries
The Question-Answer Requirement for scope assignment
This paper focuses on children’s interpretation of sentences containing negation and a quantifier (e.g., The detective didn’t find some guys). Recent studies suggest that, although children are capable of accessing inverse scope interpretations of such sentences, they resort to surface scope to a larger extent than adults. To account for children’s behavioral pattern, we propose a new factor at play in Truth Value Judgment tasks: the Question–Ans…
On the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs
Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few c…
Consonant Confusability
Proceedings of the Twenty-Ninth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society: General Session and Parasession on Phonetic Sources of Phonological Patterns: Synchronic and Diachronic Explanations (2003)
The Question-Answer Requirement for scope assignment
This paper focuses on children’s interpretation of sentences containing negation and a quantifier (e.g., The detective didn’t find some guys). Recent studies suggest that, although children are capable of accessing inverse scope interpretations of such sentences, they resort to surface scope to a larger extent than adults. To account for children’s behavioral pattern, we propose a new factor at play in Truth Value Judgment tasks: the Question–Ans…
On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries
Measuring and Comparing Individuals and Events
This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insights of Hackl (2000) and Bale & Barner (2009), we show that more behaves uniformly when it combines with nominal and verbal predicates: (i) it cannot combine with singular count NPs or perfective telic VPs; (ii) grammatical properties of the predicates determine the scale of comparison—plural marked NPs and habitual VPs are compared on a scale of cardin…
Embedding epistemic modals in English
The question of whether epistemic modals contribute to the truth conditions of the sentences they appear in is a matter of active debate in the literature. Fueling this debate is the lack of consensus about the extent to which epistemics can appear in the scope of other operators. This corpus study investigates the distribution of epistemics in naturalistic data. Our results indicate that they do embed, supporting the view that they contribute se…
Epistemics and attitudes
This paper investigates the distribution of epistemic modals in attitude contexts in three Romance languages, as well as their potential interaction with mood selection. We show that epistemics can appear in complements of attitudes of acceptance (Stalnaker 1984), but not desideratives or directives; in addition, emotive doxastics ( hope , fear ) and dubitatives ( doubt ) permit epistemic possibility modals, but not their necessity counterparts. …
Modals
Discovering the factivity of "know"
How do children discover which linguistic expressions are associated with presuppositions? Do they take a direct strategy of tracking whether linguistic expressions are associated with particular speaker presuppositions? This strategy may fail children who are trying to learn about the presuppositions of so-called 'soft' presupposition triggers, which can be readily used even when the relevant would-be presupposed content is not part of the commo…
The Anatomy of a Comparative Illusion
Comparative constructions like More people have been to Russia than I have are reported to be acceptable and meaningful by native speakers of English; yet, upon closer reflection, they are judged to be incoherent. This mismatch between initial perception and more considered judgment challenges the idea that we perceive sentences veridically, and interpret them fully; it is thus potentially revealing about the relationship between grammar and lang…
Children’s comprehension of pronouns and definites
We present an experiment which tests children’s comprehension of the requirementsof use of pronouns and definites. An adult-like use of definites and pronouns imposes differentbut related requirements. In the case of definites, a unique referent is required in the context,whereas in the case of a pronoun, the referent in the context has to be salient. In this experiment,we use a novel word task to test three-year-olds’ sensitivity to these requir…
Hope for syntactic bootstrapping
We explore children's use of syntactic distribution in the acquisition of attitude verbs, such as think, want , and hope. Because attitude verbs refer to concepts that are opaque to observation but have syntactic distributions predictive of semantic properties, we hypothesize that syntax may serve as an important cue to learning their meanings. Using a novel methodology, we replicate previous literature showing an asymmetry between acquisition of…
On the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs
Attitude verbs, such as think, want, and know, describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few c…
Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals
This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input childre…
Syntactic bootstrapping attitude verbs despite impoverished morphosyntax
Attitude verbs like think and want describe mental states (belief and desire) that lack reliable physical correlates that could help children learn their meanings. Nevertheless, children succeed in doing so. For this reason, attitude verbs have been a parade case for syntactic bootstrapping. We assess a recent syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, in which children assign belief semantics to verbs whose complement clauses morphosyntactically resemb…
Do children know wh anything? 3-year-olds know the ambiguity of wh -phrases in Mandarin
Wh-phrases in Mandarin have an interrogative (like English what) and an indefinite (like English a/some) interpretation. Previous comprehension studies find that children can access both interpretations around 4.5 years old; studies with younger children focus on production and find that children between 2 and 4.5 do not reliably produce the indefinite interpretation in naturalistic speech or in elicited imitation tasks. In this article, we use c…
Finding the force
Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping
Words have meanings vastly undetermined by the contexts in which they occur. Their acquisition therefore presents formidable problems of induction. Lila Gleitman and colleagues have advocated for one part of a solution: indirect evidence for a word’s meaning may come from its syntactic distribution, via syntactic bootstrapping . But while formal theories argue for principled links between meaning and syntax, actual syntactic evidence about meanin…
Mapping modal verbs to meanings
Modals (e.g., can, must) vary along two dimensions of meaning: “force” (i.e., possibility or necessity), and “flavor” (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] ...). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor dimensions of modals. However, given the complex one-to-many mappings from forms to meanings, it is not clear what force or flavor children assign to th…
Word learning challenges explain nonadult possibility language comprehension in preschoolers
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 epi…
Linguistics (18 obras) · Psychology (16 obras) · Philosophy (14 obras) · Computer Science (13 obras) · Language Development and Disorders (9 obras) · Verb (9 obras) · Language, Discourse, Communication Strategies (8 obras) · Modal verb (8 obras) · Syntax, Semantics, Linguistic Variation (8 obras) · Cognitive psychology (7 obras)