Week of March 6

Harvard LangCog

 

Megan Gotowski (MIT)   Title: Word Learning in the Adjectival Domain: Categorizing Subjective Adjectives   Abstract: The word learning process requires that children pair forms with meanings. Adjectives like easy and fun pose particular challenges as these words not only lack a visual referent, but are context-dependent (Kennedy & McNally 2005) and encode speaker subjectivity (Bylinina 2014). In this talk, I discuss what syntactic cues are available that enable learners to recognize and subcategorize subjective adjectives, focusing on five subclasses in particular (the TOUGH, PRETTY, SMART, TASTY, and TALL-class). These adjectives are found in overlapping environments. Importantly for the learner, however, each class is associated with a unique distributional signature (Bylinina 2014) or cluster of frames (Landau & Gleitman 1985). Here I present the results of a word learning study that is based on the Human Simulation Paradigm (Gillette et al. 1999) with a scripted dialogue format (see e.g., Yuan & Fisher 2009; Arunachalam & Waxman 2010). Learners recruit syntactic information and provide responses that indicate the influence of the syntax on learning in the adjectival domain. I argue that these results provide support for the importance of multiple frames, consistent with Mintz (2003), and point to the need for tracking adjectives across contexts.   Tuesday March 7 | 5:30-7:00 PM | William James Hall #1550