Join the Linguistics department on Friday, March 1st, at 5057 Woodward, room 10302, for a talk hosted by Misha Becker.

Short biography

Misha Becker is a Professor of Linguistics at UNC Chapel Hill, where she has taught since 2002. She is also the chair of that department (since 2018). She received her PhD from UCLA in 2000

Abstract

It is well known that children’s learning of verb meanings is constrained and aided by the argument structures that verbs participate in—an intransitive verb, like sleep, is more likely to mean something you do by yourself than to describe an act of transfer, whereas a ditransitive verb, like give, has the opposite tendency (Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman et al., 2005; i.a.). The contribution of argument structure to verb learning is particularly strong for mental state verbs, like think, for which little to no observable evidence supports their lexical meaning. The argument structure hallmark of these verbs is that they take a propositional (clausal) complement (John thinks that tomorrow is Thursday; e.g., Snedeker & Gleitman, 2004).

In this talk I extend the principles of verb learning via syntax, known as Syntactic Bootstrapping, to adjectives that label internal mental states—namely, emotion and mental state adjectives. These adjectives, like happy, sad, mad, afraid, and concerned, likewise take propositional complements in the form of tensed clauses (I’m happy that you’re feeling better), infinitival clauses (I’m afraid to go in there) and about-PPs (I’m concerned about the outcome of the meeting). I show that this set of complements distinguishes these adjectives from other classes of adjectives in speech to children (corpus analysis), and I present experimental evidence that adults and children use the presence of these complements to infer that an unknown adjective has an emotion or mental state meaning.

This work represents an on-going collaborative project with Prof. Kristen Syrett at Rutgers University.