Bootstrapping (linguistics)

Bootstrapping (also semantic bootstrapping, English for boot loop, something like: on your own boots [ from the bottom ] out ) refers to a system developed by Steven Pinker and Lila Gleitman concept in linguistics and developmental psychology that seeks to explain how children when learning to talk recognize meaning of unfamiliar terms. Children utilize existing linguistic knowledge to build new knowledge of language, on a different level of language. Certain linguistic information thus represent boarding aids that facilitate the acquisition of additional language structures. This involves the idea with one that children word meanings on the one hand can be derived from non-verbal communication, and on the other hand also the context of the new terms, concerning information on already known persons or things, or even the grammar used.

The underlying idea behind this is that children are able to associate certain semantic categories - such as " person " or " thing " - using a series of connection rules ( linking rules). The use of these rules takes the children (along with an innate knowledge of word categories) to the discovery of syntactic rules. Syntactic bootstrapping, referring to derived information about syntactic properties of words in their position in the sentence and use this information to new cases with the same syntactic positions.