Abstract
For those new to research on the acquisition of semantics, this volume provides both a grounding in tradition and a state-of-the-art snapshot of current research; for those already steeped in the literature, this forward-looking collection is a genuine pleasure. The editors have assembled a set of authors which includes both leading lights as well as younger scholars at the forefront of new ideas. The book opens with an insightful introduction to the history and breadth of the field, and sets the stage for the chapters that follow. Syrett (Chapter 1) gives an excellent summary of modern research in lexical and truth-conditional semantics, and in its wake, research on the acquisition of meaning in grammar. She shines a light on all the major touchstones in this domain, beginning with the seminal work of Chomsky and Fodor in the 1960s and 1970s. She traces several paths of research in lexical semantics, acknowledging the pioneering work of Clark, Bowerman, Gleitman, Jackendoff, Partee, Pinker, and others. Syntactic and semantic bootstrapping are given equal recognition. Following a doff of the hat to foundational textbooks and theoretical publications in formal semantics, she contextualizes subsequent acquisition work in areas such as quantifier scope and negation by researchers including Crain, Gualmini, Lidz, and Musolino. Also mentioned are some of the best books published on experimental design, and key publications in acquisition at the semantics–pragmatics interface, by authors such as Amaral, Clark, Musolino, Noveck, and Papafragou. The literature selected for this introductory narrative reads like an exemplary syllabus for a crash course on semantics in language development.
The volume itself is divided into five sections in an attempt to capture some of the main avenues of research. The first section collects three papers on the acquisition of the mental lexicon. Clark (Chapter 2) begins at the beginning, asking how it is that children first make links between lexical items, before grouping them into larger semantic domains as they create a complex lexical network. Previous findings on cross-linguistic variation in semantic domains are expertly summarized, as is the importance of interaction with caregivers. Next, two experiments are discussed by Wagner (Chapter 3) that attempt to test whether typologically prevalent temporal concepts such as the deictic center, past/future asymmetry, and remoteness are readily available to all children or dependent on grammaticalization in the L1. Wagner gives an honest evaluation of the results, which point to a need for further experimental refinement, and seem to call ultimately for a more fine-grained comparative linguistic approach. Similarly, the study by Horvath et al. (Chapter 4) is exploratory rather than conclusive. They use a previously developed language development survey to see whether interpretations such as manner vs. result or durative vs. punctual make some verbs harder to learn than others. The finding that punctuality appears to lead to delays in acquisition across languages is intriguing, but the authors acknowledge limitations in the methodology. Future work ought to weigh comprehension as well as production, and rely less on assumptions that other languages follow patterns similar to English (relative verb frequency, differences in unaccusativity, and earlier verb acquisition in verb-final languages are all likely to influence patterns of development).
The second section covers acquisitional research on telicity. Van Hout (Chapter 5) provides a detailed overview of relevant work on compositionality, and puts forward an original explanation of why children accept unbounded interpretations of phrases which encode endstates in the adult grammar. In the following chapter, Schultz (Chapter 6) draws an interesting comparison between typically developing children acquiring telic verbs in German and children with Specific Language Impairment, showing that only the former exhibit a strong endstate orientation. These chapters raise fascinating questions given lexical variation in the encoding of, for example, transitional state versus endstate as the nucleus of achievement verbs across languages (Botne, 2003).
In the third section, four papers explore the linking between syntactic structure and interpretation in acquisitional contexts. Scott et al. (Chapter 7) report on two experimental tasks whose results suggest that even for children under 2 years old, structural subjects are not equated with proto-agents, and early linking is both more syntactic and more complex than is often assumed. Ambridge et al. (Chapter 8) take a usage-based approach in testing whether children aged 4–6 are able to perform construction–meaning mapping by analogy from structural patterns, without relying on language-specific rules or constraints. While the results do appear to falsify the hypothesis that lexically based formulae seed abstract syntax (in parallel with a similar refutation in L2 research by Bardovi-Harlig & Stringer, 2017), the authors conclude with a lucid discussion of alternation explanations that compel further research. The next two chapters examine how information in embedded clauses fuels the acquisition of propositional attitude verbs such as think, know, and want. White et al. (Chapter 9) propose that given differences across languages in the subordinate realization of tense, children may rely on more abstract cues, anchoring semantic components such as belief or desire to clause types, with the features then instantiated on the basis of regularities in such types. The paper by de Villiers (Chapter 10) presents a fascinating argument linking the acquisition of embedded finite complement structures to the development of Theory of Mind. Although discussion is limited to developmental questions, there are unmistakable implications for hypothesized links between language and cognition in autism.
The fourth section deals more directly with issues in formal semantics. Crain and Zhou (Chapter 11) present convincing evidence from three original experiments in L1 Mandarin that supports Chierchia’s (2013) unified analysis of wh-questions, existential expressions, and disjunctive elements. This is followed by a lucid review paper by Syrett (Chapter 12), in which the author weaves together research findings in three distinct areas of semantics, all involving ambiguity, to argue that children aged 4–6 have access to abstract operations at the interpretive interface. Moreover, the range of interpretations they entertain sheds light on the nature of adult grammar.
In the final section, attention turns to phenomena involving both semantics and pragmatics. Tieu et al. (Chapter 13) present a review of experiments on four distinct phenomena – scalar implicature, presupposition, homogeneity, and vagueness – that each result in interpretations that resist a true/false interpretation. Acquisitional evidence is shown to illuminate representational theory in each case. Scalar implicature is taken up again in the next chapter by Barner et al. (Chapter 14), who experimentally investigate the nature of epistemic reasoning in children’s computations of so-called ‘ad hoc’ implicatures (inferences based on contextual scales), and conclude that 4-year-olds can arrive at such implicatures even in the absence of Gricean protocol. Lastly, Brunetto and Roeper (Chapter 15) examine children’s understanding of ‘near-reflexives,’ in which people act upon representations of themselves, such as pictures or sculptures, equating image with self (reminiscent of Magritte’s famous painting The Treachery of Images, which shows a pipe accompanied by the text ‘This is not a pipe’). This fascinating study reveals, among other things, that young children have a strong command of near-reflexivity, that the morphological complexity of anaphors matters, and that 4- and 5-year-olds can make robust semantic distinctions even in infelicitous pragmatic contexts.
One notable research topic that is perhaps under-represented in this volume is event semantics, whose coverage is here restricted to two studies on telicity. Following the MIT Lexicon Project in the 1980s and early, influential studies of the acquisition of argument structure (e.g., Gropen et al., 1991, 1989), Levin’s (1993) comprehensive survey highlighted dozens of syntax–semantic linking regularities, involving phenomena such as datives, locatives, causatives, and passives, with detailed attention to constructional subtypes. However, this may not be so much a flaw in the volume as representative of a lacuna in contemporary acquisition research, as many such links between grammar and meaning in language development remain underexplored. This does not take away from the impressive scope of the volume overall, and the exemplary quality of the selected studies.
The limited space of a book review makes it difficult to do justice to the range and detail of this outstanding collection of writings on the emergence and development of semantic knowledge. This is indubitably the brightest constellation of chapters on semantics in language acquisition for many years, and should be considered a must-read for anyone interested in this topic. Collectively, the papers leave the reader not only with a deeper knowledge of contemporary L1 semantics research, but with the sense that there is vast potential to shine further light on the relations between syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in language development.