Linguistics General Meeting: Aquisition of clause types and speech acts

Dan Goodhue, Jeff Lidz, Yu’an Yang and Valentine Hacquard will present a project they have been developing on children's acquisition of clause types and speech acts, reporting some preliminary results of work they've done. Here's an overview of the topic.

When a speaker says: “Is Zoe home?”, we typically understand them not to know whether Zoe is home, and to be requesting this information from their interlocutor. When instead a speaker says: “Zoe is home.”, we typically understand them to believe that Zoe is home, and to be sharing this fact with their interlocutor. This project investigates when and how children figure this out. When do they figure out that interrogative clauses like “Is Zoe home?” are typically used to ask questions, and that declarative clauses like “Zoe is home” are typically used to make assertions? And how do they do it? How can they realize what speech act a speaker performs with an utterance without yet knowing the clause type used to perform it? And how can they figure out clause types without yet understanding the speech acts performed? We hypothesize that infants figure out both form and function in tandem during the second year of life, so that it can serve as a crucial precursor to the acquisition of basic syntactic features, and that their growing knowledge of each mutually constrains the acquisition of the other.