LingLunch : Mora Maldonado

Thursday 23 June 2022, 12:00 to 13:00
Organisation: 
Karen De Clercq et Ira Noveck (LLF)
Lieu: 

LLF – Bât. ODG – 5e étage – Salle du conseil (533)

Mora Maldonado
Learnability and constraints on the semantics of clause-embedding predicates
(joint work with Jennifer Culbertson and Wataru Uegaki)

Responsive predicates are clause-embedding predicates like English know and guess that can take both declarative and interrogative clausal complements. The meanings of responsive predicates when they take a declarative complement and when they take an interrogative complement are hypothesized to be constrained in systematic ways across languages, suggesting that these constraints represent semantic universals. We report an artificial  language learning experiment showing that one of these proposed constraints is indeed reflected in the inferences participants make while learning a novel responsive predicate. Our results add support to a growing body of evidence linking semantic universals to learning.