10 found
Order:
  1. On the event relativity of modal auxiliaries.Valentine Hacquard - 2010 - Natural Language Semantics 18 (1):79-114.
    Crosslinguistically, the same modal words can be used to express a wide range of interpretations. This crosslinguistic trend supports a Kratzerian analysis, where each modal has a core lexical entry and where the difference between an epistemic and a root interpretation is contextually determined. A long-standing problem for such a unified account is the equally robust crosslinguistic correlation between a modal’s interpretation and its syntactic behavior: epistemics scope high (in particular higher than tense and aspect) and roots low, a fact (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   46 citations  
  2.  16
    The Semantics and Pragmatics of Belief Reports in Preschoolers.Shevaun Lewis, Valentine Hacquard & Jeffrey Lidz - 2012 - Proceedings of Salt 22:247-267.
    No categories
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   17 citations  
  3. On the interaction of aspect and modal auxiliaries.Valentine Hacquard - 2009 - Linguistics and Philosophy 32 (3):279-315.
    This paper discusses the interaction of aspect and modality, and focuses on the puzzling implicative effect that arises when perfective aspect appears on certain modals: perfective somehow seems to force the proposition expressed by the complement of the modal to hold in the actual world, and not merely in some possible world. I show that this puzzling behavior, originally discussed in Bhatt (1999, Covert modality in non-finite contexts) for the ability modal, extends to all modal auxiliaries with a circumstantial modal (...)
    Direct download (6 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   16 citations  
  4.  41
    Children's attitude problems: Bootstrapping verb meaning from syntax and pragmatics.Valentine Hacquard & Jeffrey Lidz - 2019 - Mind and Language 34 (1):73-96.
    How do children learn the meanings of propositional attitude verbs? We argue that children use information contained in both syntactic distribution and pragmatic function to zero in on the appropriate meanings. Specifically, we identify a potentially universal link between semantic subclasses of attitude verbs, their syntactic distribution and the kinds of indirect speech acts they can be used to perform. As a result, children can use the syntax as evidence about the meaning, which in turn constrains the kinds of pragmatic (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   6 citations  
  5.  45
    The Question–Answer Requirement for scope assignment.Andrea Gualmini, Sarah Hulsey, Valentine Hacquard & Danny Fox - 2008 - Natural Language Semantics 16 (3):205-237.
    This paper focuses on children’s interpretation of sentences containing negation and a quantifier (e.g., The detective didn’t find some guys). Recent studies suggest that, although children are capable of accessing inverse scope interpretations of such sentences, they resort to surface scope to a larger extent than adults. To account for children’s behavioral pattern, we propose a new factor at play in Truth Value Judgment tasks: the Question–Answer Requirement (QAR). According to the QAR, children (and adults) must interpret the target sentence (...)
    Direct download (4 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   12 citations  
  6.  46
    Semantic Information and the Syntax of Propositional Attitude Verbs.Aaron S. White, Valentine Hacquard & Jeffrey Lidz - 2018 - Cognitive Science 42 (2):416-456.
    Propositional attitude verbs, such as think and want, have long held interest for both theoretical linguists and language acquisitionists because their syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties display complex interactions that have proven difficult to fully capture from either perspective. This paper explores the granularity with which these verbs’ semantic and pragmatic properties are recoverable from their syntactic distributions, using three behavioral experiments aimed at explicitly quantifying the relationship between these two sets of properties. Experiment 1 gathers a measure of 30 (...)
    No categories
    Direct download (2 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark   4 citations  
  7.  26
    Three-Year-Olds' Understanding of Desire Reports Is Robust to Conflict.Kaitlyn Harrigan, Valentine Hacquard & Jeffrey Lidz - 2018 - Frontiers in Psychology 9.
  8. On double access, cessation and parentheticality.Daniel Altshuler, Valentine Hacquard, Thomas Roberts & Aaron Steven White - 2015 - In S. D'Antonio, M. Wiegand, M. Moroney & C. Little (eds.), Proceedings of SALT 25. pp. 18-37.
    Arguably the biggest challenge in analyzing English tense is to account for the double access interpretation, which arises when a present tensed verb is embedded under a past attitude—e.g., "John said that Mary is pregnant". Present-under-past does not always result in a felicitous utterance, however—cf. "John believed that Mary is pregnant". While such oddity has been noted, the contrast has never been explained. In fact, English grammars and manuals generally prohibit present-under-past. Work on double access, on the other hand, has (...)
    Direct download  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  9.  35
    Finding the force: How children discern possibility and necessity modals.Anouk Dieuleveut, Annemarie van Dooren, Ailís Cournane & Valentine Hacquard - 2022 - Natural Language Semantics 30 (3):269-310.
    This paper investigates when and how children figure out the force of modals: that possibility modals (e.g., _can_/_might_) express possibility, and necessity modals (e.g., _must_/_have to_) express necessity. Modals raise a classic subset problem: given that necessity entails possibility, what prevents learners from hypothesizing possibility meanings for necessity modals? Three solutions to such subset problems can be found in the literature: the first is for learners to rely on downward-entailing (DE) environments (Gualmini and Schwarz in J. Semant. 26(2):185–215, 2009 ); (...)
    Direct download (3 more)  
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark  
  10. The labeling problem in syntactic bootstrapping : main clause syntax in the acquisition of propositional attitude verbs.Aaron Steven White, Valentine Hacquard & Jeffrey Lidz - 2018 - In Kristen Syrett & Sudha Arunachalam (eds.), Semantics in language acquisition. Philadelphia: John Benjamins.
     
    Export citation  
     
    Bookmark