Ailís Cournane

New York University, Linguistics, Faculty Member

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Ailís Cournane = IPA [e'li:ʃ kuɹ'nan]Assistant Professor, Department of Linguistics, New York University (NYU). Director, Child Language Lab @ NYU. I am interested in how children learn what words and structures mean, and how this learning process relates to the way languages change over time. My experiments and corpus studies focus on linguistic modality (e.g., must, have to, should, maybe), an area of language that expresses uncertain or non-factual information.I am co-PI, with Valentine Hacquard (UMD), of the NSF-funded project "Acquiring the Language of Possibility" that uses modals as a testing ground to explore the precise relationships between how languages differ from each other, how languages change over time, and how children learn language.

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Wishes before ifs: mapping "fake" past tense to counterfactuality in wishes and conditionals

HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe), Dec 31, 2022

Counterfactuals express alternatives that are contrary to the actual situation. In English, count... more Counterfactuals express alternatives that are contrary to the actual situation. In English, counterfactuality is conveyed through conditionals ("If pigs had wings, they could fly") and wish-constructions ("I wish pigs had wings"), where the past tense morpheme marks non-actuality rather than past temporal orientation. This temporal mismatch seemingly complicates the already challenging task of mapping abstract counterfactual meaning onto these linguistic expressions during first language acquisition. In this paper, we investigated the role of linguistic transparency on the acquisition of different counterfactual constructions with a corpus study on the spontaneous production of English-speaking children between the ages of 2-to-6. We extracted wish-utterances from 52 corpora available on CHILDES to compare children's wish productions with those of adults, and additionally extracted counterfactual conditional utterances for 6 children to provide a comparative longitudinal overview of counterfactual wishes and conditionals. Our results support the idea that complexity of form-to-meaning mapping influences the emergence of counterfactual language. First, we observed a substantial number of productive errors in children's speech, where they produce counterfactuals with present tense marking instead of past. These errors are consistent with a stage where children have yet to figure out that the past tense is an obligatory component of English counterfactual constructions signaling a present non-actuality, rather than a past event on the timeline. Second, our results show that wish-constructions, which are linguistically more transparent than counterfactual conditionals, generally emerge before counterfactual conditionals in children's speech. This suggests that in English, counterfactual wishes might be easier to acquire than counterfactual conditionals.

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