Shifting senses in semantic development

Ben Ambridge (New York University)
December 1, 2009 (Tuesday)
6:30 PM - 8:00 PM; Room 7102, The CUNY Graduate Center

Human language is filled with the ambiguous and non-literal. If I order some Beethoven from the music store, I have not ordered a lump of the composer, but rather some of his works; if I find the CD to be moving, it is the composer’s works that cause emotion, not the plastic CD itself. In each example, the surface meaning of the sentence seems uninterpretable, but by shifting the meaning of a critical constituent we can derive a reasonable interpretation. But the elasticity of meaning only stretches certain ways. Although ‘Beethoven’ can refer to his music, his music cannot refer to him — it is nonsensical to say that the 8th symphony was deaf. Similarly, ‘the CD’ can refer to his work, but not vice versa (e.g., the 8th symphony was shiny).

This systematic lexical ambiguity poses two challenges for a language learner: figuring out which senses a word is licensed to take in general, and resolving which sense a word should take in any particular situation. My work suggests that children have little-to-no difficulty with the latter, and solve the former by employing a productive learning strategy, whereby they assign senses to words which adults would rarely countenance. I’ll discuss mechanisms by which children might attain an adult-like lexicon with regard to some recent results on adult lexical representations.