Temporal orientation and the acquisition of attitude verbs

How do children figure out the meanings of attitude verbs such as want and know, which describe abstract mental states? Previous work has suggested that children could use pragmatic-syntactic bootstrapping to acquire the split between desire verbs (want, need, try—preferential attitudes) and belief verbs (know, think—representational attitudes). However, some languages, such as Dutch, do not seem to show such reliable syntactic differences between belief verbs and desire verbs. This project therefore aims to examine another possible source of evidence learners could draw on: temporal orientation, which has also been suggested to be key to the acquisition of root and epistemic modals (van Dooren et al., 2022). A rich formal literature has observed that desire verbs are typically future-oriented, while belief verbs can be non-future-oriented (Condoravdi, 2002; Klecha, 2016). We are currently examining a corpus of child-directed speech in English to ask (1) whether temporal orientation tracks the belief/desire split in children’s input and (2) whether surface temporal-aspectual features, which are more directly observable by a learner, correlate with temporal orientation. Our preliminary results suggest that desire verbs are indeed strongly associated with future temporal orientation, and that non-future temporal orientation tracks representationality. Surface temporal-aspectual features such as tense and aspect correlate reliably with temporal orientation, but they would likely only be transparent to a learner in finite contexts. Overall, sensitivity to temporal orientation appears to be a promising strategy in acquiring the belief/desire split, but it may need to combine with other syntactic and pragmatic cues to support attitude verb learning. 

With Valentine Hacquard, Jeff Lidz, and Alice Jesus

Poster presented at MACSIM 10