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Annual Review of Linguistics

Volume 8, 2022

On the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs

Abstract

Attitude verbs, such as and , describe internal mental states that leave few cues as to their meanings in the physical world. Consequently, their acquisition requires learners to draw from indirect evidence stemming from the linguistic and conversational contexts in which they occur. This provides us a unique opportunity to probe the linguistic and cognitive abilities that children deploy in acquiring these words. Through a few case studies, we show how children make use of syntactic and pragmatic cues to figure out attitude verb meanings and how their successes, and even their mistakes, reveal remarkable conceptual, linguistic, and pragmatic sophistication.

Keyword(s): attitude verbs, indirect speech acts, syntactic bootstrapping, theory of mind, word learning
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2022-01-14
2024-04-19
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On the Acquisition of Attitude Verbs
Annual Review of Linguistics 8, 193 (2022); https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-032521-053009
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-032521-053009
/content/journals/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-032521-053009
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