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Syntactic Bootstrapping

Syntactic Bootstrapping is a theory that proposes that verbs, presented in their syntactic frames, provide a source of information about their meaning(1). When children are presented with a sentence that includes an unfamiliar verb they look to extralinguistic context clues to help them in determining what the definition of that verb is(1). According to Gleitman’s definition of Syntactic Bootstrapping verbs are learned with a delay because the linguistic information that supports their acquisition is not available during the early stages of language acquisition. This would seem to show the importance of early acquisition of verb meaning in children is pivotal to language development. The first appearance of empirical evidence of Syntactic Bootstrapping comes from research done by Roger Brown in 1957. In his research he showed that “preschool-aged children selected different aspects of a picture as the meaning of the novel word zup depending on whether he had told them this is a zup, this is some zup, or this is zupping.”(Blackwell)

Level 2
Evidence for Syntactic Bootstrapping

Two pieces of evidence are provided for the existence of Syntactic Bootstrapping. Verb Syntax and Verb meaning have been shown to be related by research in linguistics by Bowerman, Fisher, Gleitman, Jackendoff, Levin, Naigles, and Pinker which provides the first piece of evidence for Syntactic Bootstrapping. This combined research has shown that verbs with different meanings have different syntactic privileges of occurrence(1). The second piece of evidence provided for Syntactic Bootstrapping comes from research by Naigles and Kako. This research asserts that through experimental research children have demonstrated that they make use of syntax to provide them clues in verb meaning. For example, research with 2 year olds using sentences with nonsense-verbs has shown that they interpret those verb meanings using the sentence frame in which the verb was presented(1).

Level 3
Representation and Mechanisms underlying Syntactic Bootstrapping

1) Early Abstraction: Biases present in children cause them to represent abstract mental vocabularies and this causes “rapid generalization of newly acquired syntactic knowledge to new verbs.”

2) Independent Encoding of Syntactic Structure: Young children gather facts about verbs that are unknown to them through the experience they gain in listening to language.

3) Structure-Mapping: “Syntactic bootstrapping originates in an unlearned bias toward one-to-one mapping between referential terms in sentences and semantic arguments of predicate terms.”

Level 4
Research on Syntactic Bootstrapping

Level 5
Challenges to the Validity of Syntactic Bootstrapping Across Languages

While the theory of Syntactic Bootstrapping has strong support in the English language how well does it stand up in languages across the world with other semantic and syntactic rules.

1)	The first challenge comes from the question of how Syntactic Bootstrapping works in languages that do not use “argument.” The answer to this challenge comes from research on the Mandarin Chinese Language. First it was found that while using informative Syntactic frames the verbs used were able to provide the necessary information to work out the context of the sentences provided to the participants.  Secondly the frames used in this study were found to “cue the appropriate class of verbs.”  This means that children using Mandarin Chinese can use context clues from the Syntactic frames they are presented to decide what “class” the verb they are hearing belongs to and thus attribute more accurate meaning to that verb, this is Syntactic Bootstrapping.  Lastly it was found that sentence frames that are used in Mandarin, but not English, and these frames were found to correspond with “new” subclasses of verbs.

- Lee, J. N., & Naigles, L. R. (2005). The Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese: A Role for Syntactic Bootstrapping. Developmental Psychology, 41(3), 529-540. doi:10.1037/0012-1649.41.3.529

2)	The second challenges asks how a Syntactic frame used in a given language works when that specific frame can have multiple meanings. The answer to this challenge comes from findings that these frames can have general meanings that are stable across languages and not just specifically English.  Once again the language speakers can infer from context clues as to the meaning of the verbs in the Syntactic frames presented.

3)	 The third challenge deals with “how the meanings of language-specific morphosyntactic patterns might be acquired.” The answer is to this problem is that children have the ability to learn some verbs without Syntactic information.

Level 5
Future Directions on the Theory of Syntactic Bootstrapping

Chierchia, G. (1994). Syntactic bootstrapping & the acquisition of noun meanings: The mass-count issue. In B. Lust, M. Suner, J. Whitman, B.  Lust, M.  Suner, J. 	Whitman (Eds.), Syntactic theory & first language acquisition: Cross-linguistic perspectives, Vol. 1: Heads, projections, & learnability (pp. 301-318). Hillsdale, NJ England: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc.

Gawlitzek-Maiwald, I., & Tracy, R. (1996). Bilingual bootstrapping. Linguistics, 34(5), 901-926. doi: 10.1515/ling.1996.34.5.901

Lee, J. N., & Naigles, L.  R.  (2005). The Input to Verb Learning in Mandarin Chinese: A Role for Syntactic Bootstrapping. Developmental Psychology, 41(3), 529-540. doi: 10.1037/00121649.41.3.529

Naigles, L. R., & Hoff-Ginsberg, E.  (1995). Input to verb learning: Evidence for the plausibility of syntactic bootstrapping. Developmental Psychology, 31(5), 827- 837. doi: 10.1037/00121649.31.5.827