Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Syntactic vs. semantic bootstrapping
Reading: Grimshaw, J. 1994. Lexical reconciliation. In Gleitman & Landau (Eds.) The
Acquisition of the Lexicon.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press; 411-430
Also on this topic:
Bloom, P. 1994. Possible names: The role of syntax-semantics mapping in the acquisition of nominals. In Gleitman & Landau (Eds.) The Acquisition of the Lexicon.
Cambridge,
MA: MIT Press.
Pinker, S. 1994. How could a child use verb syntax to learn verb semantics? In Gleitman
& Landau (Eds.) The Acquisition of the Lexicon.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 377-410
Fisher, C, D. J. Hall, S. Rakowitz and L. Gleitman. 1994. When it is better to receive than to give: Syntactic and conceptual constraints on vocabulary growth. In Gleitman &
Landau (Eds.) The Acquisition of the Lexicon.
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 333-375
The issue :

How do children acquire words? The acquisition of a morpheme in the lexicon combines syntactic and semantic information.

How do children pair concepts with their phonological realization? Nouns can be acquired by pairing strings of sounds with concepts inferred from the world using constraints on word learning (Markman 1994), e.g., by the naming game

Bloom 1994 - nouns are acquired by syntax-semantics mapping.

How are verbs acquired? Would it be in the same way as nouns?
Gleitman (1994) – Children infer verb meaning by using the syntactic arguments which appear in the sentence (subcategorization frames).
Verb meaning is acquired in non-ostensive (not ongoing) contexts (Tomasello
& Kruger)
Blind children learn verb meaning without “observing” the situation.
Syntactic bootstrapping (Fisher et al 1994): Syntactic cueing of word meaning.
Children rely on a verb’s syntactic subcategorization frames to learn its meaning. The learner represents the linguistic input that is to be paired with the extralinguistic input, acquired by inspecting ongoing events, by a parse tree within which previously learned nominals as well as the novel verb occur.
Semantic bootstrapping (Pinker 1994): Semantic cueing of syntax / word meaning . A verb’s content is learned from its situation of use. The semantics of at least some verb forms are acquired without syntax.

Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Syntactic vs. semantic bootstrapping
Lexical reconciliation (Grimshaw 1994)
There is a principled relation between the syntax and the semantics of a verb.
Lexical semantics representation of a predicate > argument structure
Argument structure + parametric properties of phrase structure > s-structure
Many verb meanings are compatible with most events
1. a. The donkey is ----ing
b. The donkey is ----ing the rose to the rabbit
2.
The rabbit is ----ing the rose from the donkey
There is no situation in which (2a) is true while (2b) is false
2. a. We killed the dragon
b. The dragon died
>>> Observation of the world is not enough
>>> Subcategorization frames contain critical information
3. a. He put the book in his room b.
He wrote the book in his room
4. a. He became a doctor b.
He shot a doctor
>>> Only a few cases of one-to-one mapping from subcategorization frames to meaning
>>> Analysis across sentence types is required for sets of frames

Dr. Sharon Armon-Lotem
Syntactic vs. semantic bootstrapping
5. a. I know her b.
I know that she is here
6. a. ani makir ota b.
ani yodea she hi po
>>> Clustering of different senses under a single morpheme varies across languages.
>>> A predictable relationship does not hold
>>> Without knowing about meaning it is not possible to know how to group subcategorizations together
>>> We need a way to use the two sources of information > Reconciliation
Reconciliation

Semantic-to-syntactic mapping provide predictive mechanism. Semantics predicts syntax where UG makes it possible

The subcategorization structure provided by the syntax serves as a checking mechanism. Syntax eliminate wrong semantic candidates where possible