LangSci Lunch Talk: Rachel Dudley (LING)
Food and ideas bring people together. Our weekly lunch talk series provides students and faculty with the opportunity to present their in-progress work to a supportive, interdisciplinary audience.
Propositional attitude verbs (e.g.: want, think, know, hope
(1) Finiteness of complement → representational vs. preferential
a. Mary {wants/*thinks} John to go to the store
b. Mary {*wants/thinks} John went to the store
a. Mary {knows/thinks} John went to the store
b. Mary {knows/*thinks} where John went
Despite a rich literature on the relationship between a verb’s meaning and its syntactic distribution, there is much less work showing that children can use these kind of syntactic differences to learn attitude verbs (Asplin 2002, Harrigan et al 2015, White et al 2014), or that these syntactic differences are even attested in speech to children.
In this talk, I’ll present some evidence that (i) the input does manifest the appropriate syntactic differences to learn even a closely related pair of verbs like "think" and "know", and (ii) there are individual differences in the input that might relate to individual differences in children’s understanding of these verbs.
