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The Acquisition of Semantics
The Acquisition of Semantics
WORD MEANING
Perhaps the most obvious way that language conveys
meaning is through words. Every language contains
thousands of vocabulary items that refer to concepts
ranging from the concrete and mundane (bottle, ball)
to the abstract and unusual (ponder, perplex). The
primary challenge for acquiring word meanings is
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ARGUMENT STRUCTURE
Argument structure refers to the linguistic structure
that a word (usually a verb) projects into the syntax
by virtue of its meaning. The reason that the word
give takes three arguments in a sentence is because
the meaning of the word directly involves three
key participants (the giver, the receiver, and the
item given). Moreover, different syntactic positions
in a structure carry different semantic implications.
For example, the subject of a transitive sentence is
likely to be agentive in some way while the subject
of a passive sentence is not. The mapping between
syntactic positions and semantic roles is by no means
transparent, but it is also far from arbitrary (see Ref 16
for discussion).
The systematic links between form and meaning
in argument structure have been argued to be
critical for the language acquisition process. Pinker17
argued that children could use their knowledge of
verb meanings to help them figure out syntactic
representations: knowing about the three participants
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any time that the phrase every girl is true, the phrase
some girl is also true; similarly, two is a subset of three
so that any time that someone knows three languages,
it is also true that they know two languages. It is
pragmatically inappropriate42 to use the weaker terms
(some, two) when the stronger terms are true, but it is
not strictly speaking semantically false. Children must
therefore learn not only the meanings of quantifiers
but also their pragmatic implications.
A final, and perhaps more difficult problem
posed by quantifiers is the fact that their interpretation
also depends on the scope they take in a sentence.
Scope itself is often ambiguous and does not depend
on the linear order of elements in a sentence. For
example, a sentence such as Every student knows
three languages has two interpretations depending on
the scope of the phrase three languages. If the phrase
is interpreted with narrow scope (corresponding to its
actual position in the sentence), the sentence means
that every student knows three languages, but not
necessarily the same ones (e.g., Billy knows languages
A, B, and C while Suzy knows languages D, E, F, and
so on). However, the sentence can also be interpreted
so that three languages has wide scope in which case
the sentence means that there are three particular
languages (A, B, and C) and every student knows them.
Knowledge of scope requires children to understand
and interpret semantic relations that go well beyond
the physical form of the sentence.
Research on childrens interpretation of quantifiers has suggested that they possess a range of biases
for how to interpret them. One of these biases concerns scope directly: children prefer a surface structure
interpretation of scope43 such that the first quantifier
in the sentence gets wide scope and quantifiers later in
the sentence get narrow scope. For example, 4-yearold children preferentially interpret a sentence such
as Every horse didnt jump to mean that for all the
horses in the game, none of them jumped, where the
first quantifier in the sentence (every) has wide scope
and the negation (didnt) takes narrow scope. Adults
get this interpretation as well, but they also find it
easy to interpret the sentence so the first quantifier
has narrow scope and negation gets wide scope: not
all the horses jumped, but a few of them did. Another
bias that has been found in childrens quantifier interpretations is a general desire to spread their meaning
throughout the sentence.4446 For example, 4-yearolds preferentially interpret the sentence Every boy is
riding a donkey as if the quantifier every should be
applied to all the nouns. Thus, they will correctly claim
that the sentence is false if there is a boy who is not
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CONCLUSION
The structure of semantics is as complex and as
broad as the range of concepts we can think about.
The acquisition of any particular area of semantics depends on the specific nature of the meaning
involved as well as the way that meaning is mapped
into linguistic forms. In some areas, such as word
learning, childrens primary challenge seems to be
identifying the specific concepts being targeted from
among all the possible meanings available. In other
areas, such as argument structure, children appear
to have a good idea of what the possible meanings
could be and need to learn how those are properly mapped into various structures. In the areas
of tense and aspect and quantification, childrens
semantic knowledge is closely linked to other parts
of cognition, including their computational abilities
and their ability to assess the larger situational context. The acquisition of semantics, therefore, is not
a unified act but requires children (as well as the
researchers who study them) to draw on a varied range of concepts, strategies, and abilities to be
successful.
REFERENCES
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