User talk:Gsoyoye/sandbox

POS Semantics

Semantics, in general, is about meanings. However, knowing a language is not merely a matter of associating words with concepts; but also, knowing of how to put words together in a hierarchical structure (Wen Jan on Innateness and Language, Chomsky 2012). The Poverty of the Stimulus argues that there is something inside of the language learner that directs the organization of meanings, which then in turn help develop a grammar. Howard proposes that this is done with the use of semantic constraints as a way to force grammars to have some properties and not others. In talking about poverty of the stimulus and how the mind acquires and processes language, universal grammar comes up as an argument. linguists in the book, Oxford Handbook of Universal Grammar talk about the innate knowledge of language as something that "makes it possible for learners to acquire the complex system of knowledge that undergirds the ability to produce and understand novel sentences." [oxford handbook] It is the constraints of Universal Grammar that makes it possible for learners to navigate their experiences in the identification of a grammar for the language they are exposed to. [oxford handbook] Cowie on innateness and language also talks about the importance of these constraints, the constraints in the universal grammar is what allows the understanding of a language. [Cowie, F. (2008, January 16)]

Gleitman in her work on "hard words", gives an explanation for the understanding of credal verbs (e.g., think and know), she explains that a "multiple-cue processing machinery" is what people use to people produce speech and parse the speech that they hear. [Gleitman, hard words] The poverty of the stimulus argument can be a tool of explaining acceptability judgements task that many researchers use for studies. The ambiguity of sentences as well, in language learners interpretation of them, does not rely on their experiences but on their understanding of them, and this understanding of them is constructed within the boundaries of constraints. Berwick stresses that the phenomenon of constrained ambiguity is ubiquitous in the languages that human children naturally acquire needs to be considered before any external experience. [R. C. Berwick et al. ⁄Cognitive Science (2011)]

Research on Semantics with Evidence from POS

REDIRECT Syntactic bootstrapping

a well known method for word learning in the field of linguistics, is a method that heavily relies on universal grammar. [Landau & Gleitman, 1985; Gleitman, 1990] Infants as young as 17 months have been known to associate words with meanings, a child's experience of a scene paired with a sentence doesn't tell the child what one word in the sentence means. In studies with novel words like those conducted in [Hirsh-Pasek and Golinkoff (1996)], children were able to make association using constraints on what subjects and objects are. [Gertner, Fisher, and Eisengart (2006)] cross-linguistically, as well as an aspect of universal grammar, subjects of basic transitive clauses tend to name agents, and objects tend to name patients [jackendoff 1972]. Gleitman, in her study on how cridal verbs works, taalks about the general problem of how children can't parse meanings solely on experience. In her study she tested participsnts ability to form sentences in a conversation between a child and a parent based on what they watched with no audio. The participants basicslly had to guess what the converstation between mother and child was. In the experiment, the psrticipsntds were unsble to accurately guess the conversation especially if it had to do with clidal verbs. This problem is a problem within the argument of poverty of the stimulus [gleitman 91?]

Gsoyoye (talk) 15:35, 14 November 2017 (UTC)[reply]

Research on Yes/No questions, WH-questions as well as the method of using elicited productions as a test to what errors children make, have shown children's constraints on interpreting questions. [Jul 24, 2001 Grant Goodal), Ting Xu and William Snyder 2011]

Errors in child language as Explained by POS argument

Universal findings on how learners acquire syntactic knowledge for which there is little, if any, decisive evidence from the environment gives an explanation for POS argument. children as they acquire language are known to make errors they have never heard in their environment, the specific nature of these errors shows that children have an innate processor parsing sentences in their minds. [ crain language acquisition in the absence of experience] Errors like wanna contractions that restrain children's production to only cases where want and to are next to each other in that manner. Universal grammar views the task of language learning as the acquisition of mappings of sentences and meanings.[ Crain] The other thing that Crain mentions, is the semantics of these errors. There are certain errors that produces no communication however, the errors that children make do not hinder the semantics of their sentences. [Crain]

REFERENCES

Gertner, Y., Fisher, C., & Eisengart, J. (2006). Learning words and rules: Abstract knowledge of word order in early sentence comprehension. Psychological Science, 17, 684-691. Gleitman, L. (1990). The structural sources of verb meanings. Language Acquisition 1:3–55. Hirsh-Pasek, K., & Golinkoff, R. (1996). The origins of grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Jackendoff, R. (1972). Semantic interpretation in generative grammar. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press Gleitman, Lila & Cassidy, Kimberly & Nappa, Rebecca & Papafragou, Anna & C. Trueswell, John. (2005). Hard Words. Language Learning and Development. 1. 23-64. 10.1207/s15473341lld0101_4.

Xu, T., & Snyder, W. (2010). Children’s 2Aux negative questions: Elicited production versus spontaneous speech.

Berwick, R. C., Pietroski, P., Yankama, B., & Chomsky, N. (2011). Poverty of the stimulus revisited. Cognitive Science, 35(7), 1207-1242.

Goodall, G. (1991). Wanna-contraction as restructuring. In Interdisciplinary approaches to language (pp. 239-254). Springer Netherlands.?

the problem of the gleitman in distinghuishing modas, think, know, want don't have the evifdence out there. the problem of generalizing what this words mean you can't tell what else is in the category based on what you see. how the world could have worked, if it was just experience then there will be more han one way a child can acquire th