Acquiring the language of possibility

Overview

Our project investigates the connections between semantic variation, language change and language acquisition, in the domain of modality. Insights from formal semantics show constraints in how modality is expressed, and how it interacts with systems like tense and aspect. Insights from historical linguistics show that modal expressions evolve in constrained ways as well. This raises interesting questions for language acquisition: How do children figure out the patterns of their input language? Do they innovate, and if so, are their innovations in line with, or even responsible for, language change? By probing how children acquire modal words, and the kinds of innovations they make and fail to make, we hope to further our understanding of how modality can (and cannot) be expressed in natural language.

The way languages across the world express modality shows both variation and convergence. In a language like English, the same modal word (e.g., must) can express different flavors of modality (Kratzer 1981): “Jo must eat fish”, for instance, can express a likelihood that Jo is a fish eater (‘epistemic’ necessity) or an obligation Jo has to eat fish (‘deontic’ necessity). In a language like St’at’imcets, the same modal word can be used to express both possibility and necessity (Rullmann et al. 2008). How do children figure out the modals of their language? What expectations, if any, do they bring to this learning problem?

Some questions we are interested in:

• How do children figure out whether their modals can express different flavors?
• How do children figure the underlying force of their modals (possibility/necessity)?
• How do children’s modals differ from those of their parents? What kinds of errors do children make? Are these errors of the right type to underlie the kinds of syntactic and semantic unidirectionality found in modal change?
• What does modal change look like in synchrony?

We address these questions through a combination of: (i) cross-linguistic analyses and comparisons; (ii) behavioral experiments testing children and adults’ modal comprehension and production; (iii) corpus analyses, looking at how modals are used in speech to children across different languages, and comparing how children’s modal sentences differ from those of their parents, and change over the developmental process.

Our project is supported in part by NSF grant #BCS-1551628.

Papers

For additional materials and supplementary files, please go to https://osf.io/v9ure/
• Cournane, Ailis (2020). 'Learning modals: a grammatical perspective'. Language & Linguistics Compass 14(10), pp. 1-22.
• Cournane, Ailis (2021). 'Revisiting the Epistemic Gap: It’s not the thought that count'. Language Acquisition 28(3), pp. 215-240.
• Cournane, Ailis and Ana Teresa Pérez-Leroux (2020). 'Leaving obligations behind: Epistemic incrementation in preschool English. Language Learning & Development 16(3), pp. 270-291.
• Cournane, Ailis and Valentine Hacquard (2022). 'Methods for studying modality in language acquisition'. Modality in underdescribed languages: Methods and Insights. De Gruyter.
• Cournane, Ailis, Mina Hirzel, and Valentine Hacquard (2023). 'Mapping modal verbs to meanings: an elicited production study on ‘force’ and ‘flavor’ with young preschoolers'. Language Acquisition. DOI 10.1080/10489223.2023.2173074
• Cournane, Ailis and Sandrine Tailleur (2021). 'La production épistémique chez l’enfant francophone: une étude comparative. [Epistemic production in francophone children: a comparative study]'. Arboressences 10. pp. 47-72
• Cournane, A. & Veselinović, D., (2022) '“If they must, they will: Children overcommit to likeliness inferences from deontic modals”, Glossa: a journal of general linguistics 7(1). doi: https://doi.org/10.16995/glossa.5802
• Dieuleveut, Anouk (2021). Finding Modal Force. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Maryland.
• Dieuleveut, Anouk, Ailis Cournane, and Valentine Hacquard (2021). 'Finding the force: a novel word learning experiment with modals’. In Proceedings of ELM 1.
• Dieuleveut, Anouk, Annemarie van Dooren, Ailis Cournane, and Valentine Hacquard (2019). ‘Learning modal force: evidence from children’s production and input’. In Proceedings of the 22nd Amsterdam Colloquium.
• Dieuleveut, Anouk, Annemarie van Dooren, Ailis Cournane, and Valentine Hacquard (2019). ‘Acquiring the force of modals: sig you guess what sig means?’. In Proceedings of BUCLD 43. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
• Dieuleveut, Anouk, Annemarie van Dooren, Ailis Cournane, and Valentine Hacquard (2022). 'Figuring out modal force: Evidence from children's production and input'. Natural Language Semantics 30, pp. 269-310. DOI 10.1007/s11050-022-09196-4
• van Dooren, Annemarie (2017). Dutch must more structure. Proceedings of the Northeastern Linguistics Society 47.
• van Dooren, Annemarie (2020). 'The temporal perspective of epistemics in Dutch'. Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung 24.
• van Dooren, Annemarie (2020). Modals and their complements in Dutch and beyond. Ph.D. Thesis. University of Maryland.
• van Dooren, Annemarie, Anouk Dieuleveut, Ailis Cournane and Valentine Hacquard (2017). Learning what ‘must’ and ‘can’ must and can mean. Proceedings of the 21st Amsterdam Colloquium. Supplement.
• van Dooren, Annemarie, Anouk Dieuleveut, Ailis Cournane, and Valentine Hacquard (2022). 'Figuring out root and epistemic uses of modals: The role of the input'. Journal of Semantics.39(4), pp. 581-616
• van Dooren, Annemarie, Maxime Tulling, Ailis Cournane, and Valentine Hacquard (2019). ‘Discovering modal polysemy: lexical aspect might help’. In Proceedings of BUCLD 43. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
• Hacquard, Valentine and Ailis Cournane (2016). 'Themes and variations in the expression of modality'. Proceedings of the 46th Annual Meeting of the Northeastern Linguistics Society (NELS 46), pp.21-42.
• Hacquard, Valentine (2022). 'Logic and the lexicon: Insights from modality'. In A. Papafragou, J. Trueswell, and L. Gleitman (eds.) The Oxford Handbook of the Mental Lexicon. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
• Veselinović, Dunja and Ailis Cournane (2020). 'The grammatical source for missing epistemic meanings for modal verbs in child BCS. In T. Ionin, & J. E. MacDonald (Eds.), Formal Approaches to Slavic Linguistics 26 (pp. 417–436). Ann Arbor, MI: Michigan Slavic Publications.

Groundwork

• Cournane, A. (2014). In search of L1 evidence for diachronic reanalysis: mapping modals. Language Acquisition 21(1), 103-117.
• Cournane, A. (2015). Modal Development: Input-Divergent L1 Acquisition in the Direction of Diachronic Reanalysis. PhD Dissertation. University of Toronto.
• Cournane, A. (2015). Revisiting the Epistemic Gap: evidence for a grammatical source. Proceedings of the 39th Boston University Conference on Language Development. Somerville, MA: Cascadilla Press.
• Cournane, A. (2016) Functional category omissions as evidence for upwards reanalysis. Toronto Working Papers in Linguistics.
• Hacquard, V. (2013) 'On the grammatical category of modality'. In M. Aloni, M. Franke and F. Roelofsen (eds.) Proceedings of the 19th Amsterdam Colloquium.

the ModSquad