Colloquium with Athulya Aravind (Yale University)

Undiscoverable meanings

Athulya Aravind, Yale University
(joint work with Gabor Brody)

Abstract: Explaining how children learn the meanings of words is one of developmental science’s success stories. On the received picture, learners infer word meanings by exploiting a variety of information sources. Three are especially useful: the word’s syntactic distribution, the speaker's attention and intentions, and general expectations about rational communication.  Here we explore the learning of presupposition triggers, a ubiquitous but special class of words for which every one of these information channels is absent by design. They encode information that everyone in the conversation already takes for granted, making that part of the meaning unattended to and uninformative by definition. Nothing in the word’s syntax signals their presuppositionality: they share distribution with presupposition-free counterparts. How, then, do children figure out that the presupposition is part of a word’s meaning, let alone that it is presupposed? 

In this talk, I will articulate this learning problem, ground it empirically using case studies from both child and adult learners, and attempt a solution. The learning problem decomposes into two: the discovery problem (registering that the presupposed content is part of the word’s meaning) and the packaging problem (determining that it is presupposed rather than asserted). If all the child ever encountered were ‘typical’ uses of triggers, the discovery problem might indeed be unsolvable. We suggest that presuppositions are instead discovered from atypical, informative uses. Packaging, the easier problem, can run on the typical uses, where the content's systematic redundancy signals its presuppositional status. Separating discovery from packaging identifies the core issues, makes the problem tractable, and yields clear predictions about the course of learning, the evidence that drives it, and intermediate meanings learners may entertain along the way.