Main clause syntax and the labeling problem in syntactic bootstrapping ⇤

In English, the distinction between belief verbs, such as think, and desire verbs, such as want, is tracked by the tense of those verbs’ subordinate clauses. This has led some authors within the syntactic bootstrapping literature to propose that subordinate clause tense is an integral part of the acquisition of belief and desire predicates. This proposal is problematic since the correlation between tense and the belief v. desire distinction is not crosslinguistically robust, yet the acquisition profile for these verbs appears to be identical crosslinguistically. Thus, a story on which a particular syntactic feature—such as tense—cues the learner to the appropriate label for a particular semantic distinction—belief v. desire—will not work unmodified. Our proposal in this chapter is that, rather than being cued to a semantic distinction, like belief v. desire, by a particular syntactic feature, like subordinate clause tense, learners may utilize more abstract syntactic cues, whose instantiation is constrained to a small set of possible syntactic feature configurations, but must ultimately be tuned to the syntactic distinctions present in a particular language.