bootstrapping (N.)

In the study of child language ACQUISITION, a suggested DISCOVERY PROCEDURE whereby children make deductions about the SEMANTICS or SYNTAX of a language from their observations of language use. In semantic bootstrapping, children are thought to use semantic information to make deductions about syntax – for example, knowing something about the meaning of a VERB (e.g. that give involves a giver, a gift and a receiver) may help them to work out semantic ROLES and thus syntactic REALIZATIONS. In syntactic bootstrapping, the child uses syntactic or morphological information to make deductions about semantics – for example, using INFLECTIONAL clues to distinguish types of WORD, thus providing a means of assigning preliminary meanings to unfamiliar words. In prosodic bootstrapping, ACOUSTIC CUES in the speech signal (e.g. INTONATION, PAUSE) help the child to identify syntactic boundaries, even before LEXICAL knowledge is available. The term derives from mythology (where Baron Münchhausen saves himself by lifting himself up by his own bootstraps) and computing (where it refers to a short program used to load a longer program from disk into the computer, thus enabling the longer program to operate the computer).