This coming week, we are having our first talk of the McGill Linguistics Colloquium series of the 2023-2024 academic year! The talk will be given by Dr.Valentine Hacquard (University of Maryland) on Friday, September 29th at 3:30PM at Sherbrooke 680, room 1041(10th floor). The details of the talk are given below.
Title: Endless possibilities in child language
Abstract: Children have been shown to struggle with the force of modals: they tend to accept possibility modals (like might) in environments where adults prefer necessity modals (like must), and necessity modals in environments where adults require possibility modals. In this talk, I present various studies which test the robustness of children’s modal difficulties, probe the potential linguistic and nonlinguistic sources of these difficulties, and point to how children eventually overcome them.