Acquiring the language of possibility: consequences for language variation and change

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Humans have a special capacity to think and talk about possibilities beyond the here and now, enabling them to talk about impossible or hypothetical situations, such as what the world might be like if dinosaurs had survived, or whether next summer may be warmer than this one. How do children acquiring their first language figure what we are then discussing, when mere possibilities, unlike apples or naps, cannot be directly observed? And how do they come to use words, such as the modals "may" and "must", that are dedicated to saying what is possible or likely? This project pursues these developmental puzzles by probing how the use of modal words by children either matches or differs from that of their caregivers. The results will provide insights into two broader issues. What are the natural and unnatural ways of expressing possibility in human languages? And do the errors that children make sometimes lead to changes in modal language over time?The project will be the most comprehensive linguistic study of modal development to date and will include both a series of behavioral experiments, and a corpus study of naturalistic speech between children and their caregivers. The experiments build on generalizations from studies of how modals change their meanings over time in the history of a language, and how they vary across languages. By exploiting this integration of theories of linguistic meaning and child development with theories of language change and variation, the project will bridge communities of researchers that are too seldom in contact. Outreach events supported by this project will enable high school students to participate in linguistic research on the language of possibility. Languages and dialects vary in how they talk about possibility, but also exhibit a common foundation. By understanding both how languages may vary and what is common among them, students who participate in the planned outreach activities will gain insight into the capacity that we share as humans for language and for the processes and representations that underlie abstract thought.