Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals: The Role of the Input

Abstract

This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input children hear may help or hinder them in uncovering the flavor flexibility of modals. Our results show that the way parents use modals may obscure the fact that they can express epistemic flavors: modals are very rarely used epistemically. Yet, children eventually figure it out; our results suggest that some do so even before age 3. To investigate how children pick up on epistemic flavors, we explore distributional cues that distinguish roots and epistemics. The semantic literature argues they differ in “temporal orientation” (Condoravdi, 2002): while epistemics can have present or past orientation, root modals tend to be constrained to future orientation (Werner 2006; Klecha, 2016; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2018). We show that in child-directed speech, this constraint is well-reflected in the distribution of aspectual features of roots and epistemics, but that the signal might be weak given the strong usage bias towards roots. We discuss (a) what these results imply for how children might acquire adult-like modal representations, and (b) possible learning paths towards adult-like modal representations.

Deontic priority in the lexicalization of impossibility modals

“…): children tend to acquire the epistemic meanings of modals later than non-epistemic (root) meanings, including deontic meanings. Although the precise cause of this effect is still under debate (see Van Dooren et al 2022 for a recent perspective), it is in principle possible that non-deontic modal meanings are conceptually more complex than deontic ones, providing a unified explanation for DP and the epistemic gap.…”

The acquisition of English modal constructions: a corpus-based analysis

“…More recent studies have shown that epistemic modals are not very well attested in the input (<8% of modal utterances), particularly in Dutch (Van Dooren, Dieuleveut, Cournane & Hacquard, 2017;Van Dooren, Tulling, Cournane & Hacquard, 2019). Caregivers are more inclined to use adverbs epistemically, and moderate positive correlations in overall usage rates of epistemic adverbs have been evidenced between children and parents (Cournane, 2021).…”

Being pragmatic about syntactic bootstrapping

“…Second, from a conceptual standpoint, the concepts underlying root meanings may be more easily accessible than those underlying epistemic ones, even if both types of concepts may be in place in infancy, as we saw in our discussion of attitude verbs. Third, from a frequency standpoint, modals in children's input are overwhelmingly used to express root flavors (van Dooren et al, 2022). Finally, from a pragmatic standpoint, root meanings may be particularly salient in discourse: root modals can routinely be used for indirect requests ("you have to go!"…”

“…To investigate what might give away epistemic meanings, van Dooren et al (2022) examined distributional cues that distinguish root and epistemic modals in speech to children, using the Manchester corpus of CHILDES (Theakston, Lieven, Pine & Rowland, 2001;McWhinney, 2000). After reviewing the various ways in which the formal literature argues that root and epistemic uses differ, van Dooren et al show that the most promising avenue is an interpretative constraint on the 'TEMPORAL ORIENTATION' of modals (Condoravdi, 2002): root modals tend to be 'FUTURE-ORIENTED', in saying that a future state of affairs is possible or necessary.…”

“…This is in part driven by recent methodological innovations that allow us to test theoretical generalizations through large scale semantic and syntactic acceptability judgments (e.g., White & Rawlins, 2018). Third, a growing number of corpus studies are starting to examine not just morpho-syntactic, but semantic and pragmatic features of children's input (e.g., Becker, 2015;Dudley et al, 2018;Rasin & Aravind, 2021;van Dooren et al, 2022), providing us with a clearer picture of what information is actually available in children's input. We are thus in a much better position to ask which information children actually make use of, which they ignore, and what hypotheses they make or fail to make on the basis of that information, getting us closer to the identification of the underlying linguistic knowledge that drives children's hypotheses about meaning.…”