Syntactic Bootstrapping - Summary

Thu Nov 1 08:37:21 UTC 2007

Dear all, 

Some weeks ago I posted a query concerning a central issue in the Syntactic 
Bootstrapping approach. Specifically, I was interested to know whether or 
not SynBoot proponents claim that syntactic-semantic correlations underlying 
SynBoot are innate. 

First of all, many thanks for the replies of the following people: 

Misha Becker
Ruth Berman
Gedeon Déak
Doug Harris
Evan Kidd
Lorraine McCune
Letitia Naigles, which sent me her paper Naigles & Swenson (2006)
Matthew Saxton
and a scholar preferring to remain anonym, who sent me passages from his 
book which he’s writing 

The following summary is based on issues raised by the anonym scholar’s 
message, including not only SynBoot proponents’ views. In the summary below, 
responses by the other researchers listed above are integrated. This summary 
includes only issues directly related to SynBoot. The discussion also raised 
other relevant topics, such as innateness and the issue on relationships 
between lexical/lexical-semantic and grammatical aspects in lg dev., above 
all in the context of "emergence of grammar from the lexicon" (Bates & 
Goodman, 1999), but these topics will be summarized in separate messages. 

1. Introduction
 - „[
] the original proponents of the syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis 
claim that [syntactic-semantic] links are not innately specified but are 
acquired ‘during the course of learning’ (Gleitman, 1990: 41)“.
 - But „different people make different assumptions (and those assumptions 
aren't always easy to tie down, or test experimentally!)”
 - Evan: „this one is hard to pin down, probably because there are many 
different levels at which one could specify innate knowledge.” 

2. Innate knowledge
 - The underlying knowledge on syntactic frames „could be largely innate 
(e.g., Pinker, 1989)”
 - Evan: “ my understanding is that Cindy Fisher and her colleagues argue for 
an innate endowment that is based on structure-event role mapping, such that 
children expect there to be, for instance, an agent and patient in 
transitive sentence,and map these semantic roles onto the NPs in the 
sentence. This, of course,could be traced to general-cognitive biases.“
 - Evan: „Similarly, Lidz Gleitman, and Gleitman (2004) argued for innate 
knowledge of the theta principle, to which Goldberg (2004) wrote a 
response.“
 - Naigles & Swenson (2006: 221): „Gleitman (1990; see also Fisher & 
Gleitman, 2002; Fisher et al., 1991; Pinker, 1989) has proposed that 
correspondences related to the theta criterion (Chomsky, 1981) are innately 
given“ – ***in contradiction with the quotation concerning Gleitman (1990) 
above***, but it is perhaps the case that Naigles & Swenson and the anonym 
researcher mean here different sets of  syntactic-semantic correlations: 
concerned with correspondences between semantic and syntactic roles (Naigles 
& Swenson) or between syntactic-semantic correspondences in verbs, such as 
transitivity-causality (the anonym researcher).
 - Naigles & Swenson (2006): In Lidz et al.’s (2003) view, "syntax/semantics 
correspondences such as transitive/affected-object are universal and innate“ 
(p. 228) 

3. Role of Input and Domain-General Cognitive Abilities 

3aThe underlying knowledge on syntactic frames could be “constructed by 
forming abstractions across instantiations of this pattern in the input 
(e.g., Tomasello, 2003).“
 - this view is also found in Evan’s message: „if there is no innate 
knowledge then there is a lower bound on syntactic bootstrapping, such that 
it only becomes useful once children have learned some construction-specific 
frames” 

3b. Also, children might be guided by the number of arguments in the input 
sentences (Fisher,  1996; 2002) 

3c. Also, children might be guided by „morphological cues“ in the input in 
form of function words, „such as 'and', 'with'“ or copulas ('are') to derive 
“an intransitive interpretation” and, consequently, non-causative 
interpretation, „as shown most clearly in the study of Kidd et al (2001)“
(***I’d be most grateful for the full reference or even the full text of 
this study by Kidd et al.***) 

4. Naigles & Swenson’s (2006) conclusions:
 - „some such [syntactic] frames might carry general, possibly innate, 
meanings that would be stable across languages. Further specificity for a 
given verb could be gleaned from the accompanying scenes and/or the multiple 
frames in which the verb was used.“ (p. 225)
 - „children’s abilities to learn some words without the syntactic 
information, to compare the statistical and/or pragmatic patterns of use of 
different types of words, and so to induce some syntax/semantics 
correspondences by matching these words with specific morphosyntactic 
patterns.“ (p. 226).
 - „The evidence concerning the development of syntactic bootstrapping 
suggests that the use of syntax to learn novel words is fragile between 18 
and 24 months of age and fully operational at 24 months“, which suggests 
that „some syntax/semantics correspondences, if couched generally, could be 
universal and so available before 18 months whereas other correspondences, 
obviously language-specific, must be learned and so are not readily 
available to 1-year-olds.“ (pp. 227-8)
 - similar view by Misha Becker:“ The way I understand syntactic 
bootstrapping is that there is innate knowledge of likelihoods/tendencies in 
the mapping between sentence frames and meanings. [
] “ So it doesn't solve 
the entire problem of lexical learning, it just provides some constraints in 
the form of tendencies. My understanding is that these are innate, and then 
language particular constraints or options (e.g. null arguments) come in by 
way of learning.“ 

5. Abstract syntactic categories in child language or not?
 - Evan recommends the lecture of Fisher’s (2002) reply to Tomasello (2000). 
Tomasello challenges the very SynBoot idea (syntactic structures facilitate 
learning of words) in that he (as I think, correctly) assumes that 
children’s representations underlying their early constructions are 
lexically based and not abstract syntactic categories, such as ‚verb’ or 
‚transitivity’. Fisher agree partially with that: Children’s abstract 
syntactic categories develop gradually, „However, incomplete syntactic 
knowledge need not mean that abstract knowledge of sentence structure can 
play no useful role in early language use and acquisition.“ (p. 272)
 - Evan also recommends the lecture of Chang et al. (2006), a connectionist 
study showing „how abstract knowledge and concrete experience are balanced 
in the development and use of syntax.“ (from abstract) 

5. Syntactic and Distributional/Correlational Bootstrapping
 - As Ruth Berman pointed out, SynBoot „claims have been made mainly for verb 
argument structure, not necessarily for other features of the grammar -- 
which is also an interesting question.“
 - Indeed, the more ‚classical’ SynBoot strang is, as I understand it, 
concerned with the learning of verb meanings (or rather: components of their 
meanings, such as causality), i.e., with the ‘induction problem’ of 
inferring word meanings. This is in contrast with Distributional and 
Semantic Bootstrapping, which are traditionally concerned with what Pinker 
called the ‚bootstrapping problem’ of categorization of words and syntactic 
units.
 - Interestingly enough, however, a number of recent studies by SynBoot 
proponents (e.g., Booth & Waxman, 2003; Fisher et al., 2006; Bernal, 2006; 
Name, 2007) or cited by them as providing support for SynBoot (e.g.,
Blenn et al., 2002; Höhle et al., 2006; Ketrez, 2003) constitute something 
of a renaissance of the Distributional Bootrapping idea (Maratsos & 
Chalkley, 1980; more recent accounts: Mintz, 2005; Freudenthal et al., 
2007): Their results suggests that distributional syntactic cues (e.g., word 
order, determiner-noun cooccurrences, morphological markers) facilitate the 
task of segmentation/categorization of lexical and syntactic units. 

Finally, for the summary to be complete, the following comment by Doug 
Harris, which, however, has nothing to do with bootstrapping operations of 
(language) learning:
 - „Speaking of _bootstrapping_, I heard an interesting variation of that 
(source) word the other day, I believe it was on NPR, while I was _so_ 
otherwise engaged I couldn't make a written note to myself on it: A man was 
talking about, I believe, how his town would struggle together after some 
disaster or other and "pull its bootstrings up" and work toward recovery, or 
whatever. I'm sorry I can't be more precise on the source.“ 

Again, many thanks and best regards
Susanna 

References 

Bates, E., & Goodman, J. C. (1999). On the emergence of grammar from the 
lexicon. In B. MacWhinney (Ed.), The Emergence of language (pp. 29–79). 
Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum. 

Bernal, S. (2006). De l'arbre (syntaxique) au fruit (du sens): Interactions 
des acquisitions lexicale et syntaxique chez l'enfant de moins de 2 ans. 
Doctoral dissertation. Paris: Université Paris VI. 

Blenn, L., Seidl, A., & Höhle, B. (2002). Recognition of phrases in early 
language acquisition: The role of morphological markers. In B. Skarabela, S. 
Fish, & A. H.-J. Do (Eds.), BUCLD 26. Proceedings of the 26th Annual Boston 
University Conference on Language Development, November 2-4, 2001, in 
Boston, MA, Vol. 1 (pp. 138–149). Somerville Mass.: Cascadilla Press. 

Booth, A. E., & Waxman, S. R. (2003). Mapping words to the world in infancy: 
Infants' expectations for count nouns and adjectives. Journal of Cognition 
and Development, 4, 357–381. 

Chang, F., Dell, G. S., & Bock, K. (2006). Becoming syntactic. Psychological 
Review, 113(2), 234–272. 

Chomsky, N. (1981). Lectures on government and binding. Amsterdam: Mouton de 
Gruyter. 

Fisher, C. (1996). Structural limits on verb mapping: The role of analogy in 
children's interpretations of sentences. Cognitive Psychology, 31(1), 41–81. 

Fisher, C. (2002). The role of abstract syntactic knowledge in language 
acquisition: A reply to Tomasello (2000). Cognition, 82, 259–278. 

Fisher, C., & Gleitman, L. R. (2002). Language acquisition. In R. Gallistel, 
& H. Pashler (Eds.), Stevens' handbook of experimental psychology / 
ed.-in-chief Hal Pashler: Vol. Vol. 3. Learning, motivation, and emotion. 3. 
ed (pp. 445–496). New York, NY: Wiley. 

Fisher, C., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. R. (1991). On the semantic content 
of subcategorization frames. Cognitive Psychology, 23, 331–392. 

Fisher, C., Klingler, S. L., & Song, H.-j. (2006). What does syntax say 
about space? 2-year-olds use sentence structure to learn new prepositions. 
Cognition, 101(1), B19-B29. 

Freudenthal, D., Pine, J. M., & Gobet, F. R. (2007). Simulating the 
noun-verb asymmetry in the productivity of children's speech. In R. L. 
Lewis, A. Polk, & J. E. Laird (Eds.), Proceedings of the 8th International 
Conference on Cognitive Modelling (pp. 109–114). Hove UK: Psychology Press. 

Gleitman, L. R. (1990). The structural sources of verb meaning. Language 
Acquisition, 1(1), 3–55. 

Goldberg, A. E. (2004). But do we need Universal Grammar? Comment on Lidz et 
al. (2003). Cognition, 94, 77–84. 

Höhle, B., Schmitz, M., Müller, A., & Weissenborn, J. (2006). The 
lexicon/syntax interface in developing grammar: The role of function words 
in the acquisition of content words. ISIS 2006. XVth Biennal International 
Society on Infant Studies Conference, Kyoto, Japan, Jun 19-23, 2006. 

Ketrez, N. (2003). Is it possible to bootstrap any lexical category 
information from word order in a flexible-word-order language? BOOT-LA: 
Bootstrapping in Language Acquisition: Psychological, Linguistic, and 
Computational Aspects, Bloomington, Apr 21-23, 2003. 

Kidd et al (2001) ??? 

Lidz, J. L., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. R. (2003). Understanding how input 
matters: Verb learning and the footprint of universal grammar. Cognition, 
87(3), 151–178. 

Lidz, J. L., Gleitman, H., & Gleitman, L. R. (2004). Kidz in the 'hood: 
Syntactic bootstrapping and the mental lexicon. In D. Geoffrey Hall, & S. R. 
Waxman (Eds.), From many strands. Weaving a lexicon (pp. 603–636). 
Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. 

Maratsos, M., & Chalkley, M. (1980). The internal language of children's 
syntax: The ontogenesis and representation of syntactic categories. In K. E. 
Nelson (Ed.), Children's language. Vol. 2. New York NY: Gardner. 

Mintz, T. (2005). Categorizing words from distributional information in the 
input. Paper presented at the symposium "The Interaction of Input and 
Learning Mechanisms in Language Acquisition: Four Case Studies", Xth 
International Congress for the Study of Child Language (X IASCL Congress), 
Berlin, July 25-29, 2005. 

Naigles, L., & Swensen, L. D. (2006). Syntactic supports for word learning. 
In E. Hoff, & M. Shatz (Eds.), Blackwell Handbook of Language Development. 
London: Blackwell Publishing. 

Name, M. Cristina. (2007). Bootstrapping sintático: O papel da ordem 
estrutural na aquisição de nomes e adjetivos [Syntactic bootstrapping: The 
role of structural order in the acquisition of nouns and adjectives]. Letras 
de Hoje, 42(1), 53–63. 

Pinker, S. (1989). Learnability and Cognition: The acquisition of argument 
structure. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. 

Tomasello, M. (2000). Do children have adult syntactic competence? 
Cognition, 74, 209–253. 

Tomasello, M. (2003). Constructing a language: A usage-based theory of 
language acquisition. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press. 

*****************************************************************
Susanna Bartsch
https://www.zas.gwz-berlin.de/mitarb/homepage/bartsch/
bartsch at zas.gwz-berlin.de
Zentrum fuer Allgemeine Sprachwissenschaft, Typologie
und Universalienforschung (ZAS)
Centre for General Linguistics, Typology, and Universals Research
Schuetzenstr. 18
10117 Berlin
Germany
Tel. +49 (0)30 20192562
Fax  +49 (0)30 20192402
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