The set of English modal verbs is widely recognized to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser, 1990). In this paper I offer an alternative explanation for the later emergence of epistemic interpretations by linking them to the development (...) of the child’s theory of mind (Wellman, 1990); if correct, this hypothesis might have important implications for the shape of the semantics of modal verbs. (shrink)

According to one view of alethic modality, to say that something is necessary is to say that we must take that thing to be true according to rules of thinking or linguistic rules. In other words, alethic modality is reduced to deontic modality with respect to thoughts or language. This view has been argued to have many philosophical advantages over the traditional view that takes alethic modality to describe something in the world. In this paper, I argue that the deontic (...) view also enjoys a wide range of empirical supports from linguistics and psychology. (shrink)

It has been argued that the primary acquisition of genericity in early child speech poses a problem for standard quantificational approaches to generics and instead motivates the claim that generics give voice to an innate, default mode of generalising. This article argues that analogous puzzles involving the acquisition of A‐quantifiers undermine the empirical support for a purely cognition‐based approach to generics. Instead, these acquisition puzzles should be solved by generalising the core insight of the cognitive defaults theory to these expressions, (...) reconciling formal semantic approaches with the role that cognitive development plays on lexical competence. (shrink)

It is widely assumed in the developmental literature that certain classes of modal expression appear later in language acquisition than others; specifically, epistemic interpretations lag behind non-epistemic interpretations. An explanation for these findings is proposed in terms of the child’s developing theory of mind, i.e. the ability to attribute to oneself and others mental representations, and to reason inferentially about them. It is hypothesized that epistemic modality crucially implicates theory-of-mind abilities and is therefore expected to depend on prior developments in (...) the child's ability to handle representations of mental representations. In support of this hypothesis, it is shown that autistic individuals have difficulty with epistemics. (shrink)

History is a complex subject. It is more propositional than procedural in nature (Nichol, 1984), and involves adductive thinking (Booth, 1983), where historical evidence and facts are 'teased out' and a convincing account of the past is then reconstructed through speculation, imagination and empathy (Nichol, 1984; Booth, 1983). The teaching and learning of history should not just be the transmission of knowledge, but rather it should involve a process whereby students and teachers interact in order to analyze evidence, raise questions (...) and hypotheses, synthesize facts, and communicate their ideas, understand others' viewpoints, consider values, reflect and engage in moral reasoning (Brophy, 1996). It is through this interaction that development of thinking in history will occur (Coltnam, 1975). The main focus of the research is on the language used in the history classroom, particularly during critical episodes when the teachers and students appeared to be engaged in the process of historical thinking. This research is particularly concerned with historical thought embedded in the language used in history classrooms. To investigate this, both high and low inference coding systems were adopted to code, describe and analyze the verbal behaviour that occurred. The data were gathered in six classes from schools in Singapore. They constituted two classes of above average students (Special stream), two classes of average students (Express stream) and two classes of below average (Normal stream) students. Audio and video recordings were made of two lessons from each of the six classes. These lessons were transcribed, coded and analyzed to ascertain which contexts were more conducive for the production of higher order thought. It was found that a complex interrelationship of factors including pedagogic activity, type of teacher talk and student talk, and even more importantly the interaction between them, determined whether or not there was historical thinking. The findings revealed that there was historical thinking when explicit and implicit contact was established during interaction between the teacher and the students. For explicit contact to he made the teacher and the students needed to be language game (Wittgenstein, 1972). This is where the teacher made those moves that elicited student responses that demonstrated historical thinking. For implicit contact to be made the element of voice (as in the concept of “voice” described in Bakhtin's theory on the dual-voicing and polyphony) becomes essential. During such episodes the teacher mediated between the characters in history, his or her own talk and that of the students. These responses which were often dramatised, the teacher used first and second person forms (dual voicing) to evoke empathy and imagination. In doing so they also engaged in a dialogic interaction with the characters of the past and there was back channelling. There were evidences of such dialogues in all the Special, Express and Normal stream lessons but in various contexts. These dialogues reveal that the nature of talk and interaction is distinct to the subject history. (shrink)

We examine two connectionist networks—a fractal learning neural network (FLNN) and a Simple Recurrent Network (SRN)—that are trained to process center-embedded symbol sequences. Previous work provides evidence that connectionist networks trained on infinite-state languages tend to form fractal encodings. Most such work focuses on simple counting recursion cases (e.g., anbn), which are not comparable to the complex recursive patterns seen in natural language syntax. Here, we consider exponential state growth cases (including mirror recursion), describe a new training scheme that seems (...) to facilitate learning, and note that the connectionist learning of these cases has a continuous metamorphosis property that looks very different from what is achievable with symbolic encodings. We identify a property—ragged progressive generalization—which helps make this difference clearer. We suggest two conclusions. First, the fractal analysis of these more complex learning cases reveals the possibility of comparing connectionist networks and symbolic models of grammatical structure in a principled way—this helps remove the black box character of connectionist networks and indicates how the theory they support is different from symbolic approaches. Second, the findings indicate the value of future, linked mathematical and empirical work on these models—something that is more possible now than it was 10 years ago. (shrink)