"Mismatches" of Form and Interpretation

The theme of this conference, expressed as "semantics meets acquisition," has an amusing ring to it as it hearkens back to B movie titles such as "Wolfman meets Frankenstein." This latent reference to movie monsters turns out to be apt, in a certain sense, as when I think about the twin issues of acquisition and semantics, and how to put them together, it does seem a monstrously hard problem indeed. Were this presented to me as an abstract problem in a form that I didn't recognize as really about learning and meaning, I'm sure I would throw up my hands and soon declare the problem insoluble. But this of course would be a misjudgment, as it is contradicted by the simple daily facts of the world.