Does language development drive language change? A common account of language change attributes the regularity of certain patterns to children's learning biases. The present study examines these predictions for change-in -progress in the use of must in Toronto English. Historically, modal verbs like must start with root (deontic) meanings, eventually developing epistemic (probability) meanings in addition. Epistemic uses increase over successive generations, phasing out root uses (INCREMENTATION). The modal becomes unambiguously epistemic and eventually disappears from the language. Such cyclic changes are predictable and common across languages. To explore whether children contribute to incrementation and loss, we tested intuitions about must in preschoolers (n = 141) and adults (n = 29). In a picture-preference task (deontic vs. epistemic), children selected epistemic interpretations of ambiguous sentences (e.g., Michelle must swim) at higher rates than adults. Two context-based preference tasks tested children's overall sensitivity to the presence of modals. We found sensitivity in deontic contexts. In epistemic contexts, where must is optional and functions like an evidential marker, we found little discrimination, and general avoidance of the modal. These results (epistemic overgeneration, must-avoidance) correspond to predictions of the incrementation hypothesis, suggesting children likely play an active role in language change, beyond well-known overregularization processes.
In this study, we address the mapping problem for modal words: how do children learn the form-tomeaning mappings for words like could or have to in their input languages? Learning modal words poses considerable challenges as their meanings are conceptually complex and the way these meanings are mapped to grammatical forms and structures is likewise complex and cross-linguistically variable. Against a backdrop of how cross-linguistic modal systems can vary, we focus on new work highlighting the developmental roles of the following: (a) syntactic categories of modal words, (b) interrelationships between modal 'force' (possibility and necessity) and 'flavour' (root and epistemic), (c) semantic representations for modal forms and (d) children's own emerging modal systems, as a whole, which show that the way they map forms to the 'modal meaning space' (considering both force and flavour dimensions) diverges from how adults do, even if the same forms are present. Modality provides a rich natural laboratory for exploring the interrelationships between our conceptual world of possibilities, how concepts get packaged by the syntax-semantics of grammatical systems, and how child learners surmount these form-meaning mapping challenges. 1 | INTRODUCTION In this study, we focus on the mapping problem (Gleitman, 1990) for modal words: How do children learn the form-to-meaning mappings for modal forms like could or have to in their input languages? MODALITY is a category of language defined by meaning (Kratzer, 1981),
This chapter confronts the two principal arguments levelled against the child-as-innovator approach to language change: (1) child innovations cannot underlie historical innovations because child innovations resolve before adulthood, when they could diffuse (e.g. Traugott and Dasher 2005; Diessel 2011), and (2) parallels must hold between child innovations and historical innovations, but parallels do not hold in the domain of morphosyntax (e.g. Diessel 2012). I argue that both parallel and oppositional alignments are predicted by the two possible innovation-types children make when solving the Mapping Problem (Clark 1977, 1993, i.a.); in short, different L1A processes underlie different types of change. I further argue that input-divergent analyses at most need to persist into the teenage years, when they can be diffused via the sociolinguistic change powerhouse of teenage peer groups (e.g. Labov 2012), and may also be reinforced and prolonged in childhood via peer-to-peer acquisition and bilingualism contexts.
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