About

Valentine Hacquard is a researcher whose work focuses on the semantics and pragmatics of modals and conditionals, particularly exploring the meaning and interpretation of anankastic conditionals. Her research addresses the challenges standard accounts face in deriving the correct meaning of conditionals like 'If you want to go to Harlem, you have to take the A train,' where the modal in the consequent is influenced by the embedded complement of the verb 'want' rather than the entire antecedent. Hacquard's work contributes to understanding the non-compositionality of anankastic conditionals and extends this phenomenon to other modal flavors and attitude verbs, introducing the concept of "harmonizing readings." She offers a pragmatic account that generalizes across different modal flavors and attitudes, explaining how the meaning of the antecedent combined with background assumptions can give rise to modal inferences that align with the consequent modal. This approach predicts when harmonizing readings are possible without relying on lexical or syntactic idiosyncrasies. Her contributions are published in venues such as the Proceedings of Sinn und Bedeutung, reflecting her engagement with formal semantics and the philosophy of language.

Research topics

• Computer Science
• Psychology
• Linguistics
• Cognitive psychology
• Sociology
• Philosophy
• Epistemology
• Mathematics
• History

Selected publications

• Untangling Possibility from Necessity in Child Language: Comparing French and English

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2026-04-09

  articleSenior author

  International audience

  Publisher

• When do children map clause types to canonical speech acts?

  Digital Repository at the University of Maryland (University of Maryland College Park) · 2026-01-01

  otherOpen accessSenior author

  The clause types of declarative and interrogative map to the different speech act functions of asserting and questioning, respectively. Declaratives and interrogatives also consistently differ in their prosody and syntactic organization. Specifically, polar interrogatives are formed through subject–auxiliary inversion, whereas wh-interrogatives are formed with the corresponding wh-word. We are interested in infants’ understanding of these clause types and speech acts, as well as how they develop their knowledge of them. A previous study we conducted found that 18 month olds can link polar interrogatives to an uninformed speaker. Building on this finding, we are conducting a study testing the polar interrogative knowledge with 15 month olds, as well as a new dimension: whether 18 month olds can link wh-interrogatives to an uninformed speaker. In this study, we show infants videos featuring two bears with differing levels of knowledge about an object in a box, prompting an informative exchange.

  PublisherDOI

• Gleason Modal Acquisition

  Open MIND · 2026-01-01

  otherOpen access

  This project seeks to learn more about how children aged 2-5 acquire modal verb force. HSP and corpus methods will be used to assess children's modal competence and determine which factors drive that competence most strongly.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• The Acquisition of Modal Force in French

  OSF Preprints (OSF Preprints) · 2026-01-20

  other

  Previous studies show that English-speaking 4–5-year-olds struggle with necessity modals (e.g., have to), often over-accepting them in possibility contexts, despite their early mastery of possibility modals (can, might). What underlies these difficulties with necessity modals? One possibility is input frequency: in English child-directed speech, necessity modals are less frequent than possibility modals (28% vs. 72%). To test this hypothesis, we examined French, a language in which the frequency pattern is reversed. In French, necessity modals ("falloir", "devoir") are more frequent than possibility modals ("pouvoir") (62% vs. 38%), with "falloir" alone accounting for 53% of modal utterances. If frequency of exposure drives acquisition, French-speaking children should perform better overall, with performance on "falloir" comparable to "pouvoir" and better than "devoir". We found that French-speaking children show the same difficulties with necessity modals as their English-speaking peers. This suggests that children’s problems with necessity modals reflect more general learning challenges, rather than differences in input frequency.

  Publisher

• The Acquisition of Modal Force in French

  Open Science Framework · 2026-01-01

  articleOpen access

  Previous studies show that English-speaking 4–5-year-olds struggle with necessity modals (e.g., have to), often over-accepting them in possibility contexts, despite their early mastery of possibility modals (can, might). What underlies these difficulties with necessity modals? One possibility is input frequency: in English child-directed speech, necessity modals are less frequent than possibility modals (28% vs. 72%). To test this hypothesis, we examined French, a language in which the frequency pattern is reversed. In French, necessity modals ("falloir", "devoir") are more frequent than possibility modals ("pouvoir") (62% vs. 38%), with "falloir" alone accounting for 53% of modal utterances. If frequency of exposure drives acquisition, French-speaking children should perform better overall, with performance on "falloir" comparable to "pouvoir" and better than "devoir". We found that French-speaking children show the same difficulties with necessity modals as their English-speaking peers. This suggests that children’s problems with necessity modals reflect more general learning challenges, rather than differences in input frequency.

  PublisherDOI

• Children's Understanding of Necessity Modals: Evidence from French

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2025-11-06

  articleOpen access

  International audience

  PublisherOA PDF

• Children’s Understanding of Modal Force: Evidence from French

  HAL (Le Centre pour la Communication Scientifique Directe) · 2025-09-11

  article

  International audience

  Publisher

• Word learning challenges explain nonadult possibility language comprehension in preschoolers.

  Developmental Psychology · 2025-09-02

  articleSenior author

  This article presents two experiments testing English children's understanding of the "force" of modals, asking whether they understand that can expresses possibility and have_to expresses necessity. Prior studies show that children tend to over-accept necessity modals in possibility situations and argue this behavior stems from conceptual difficulties reasoning about open possibilities. However, these studies typically test modal force using epistemic modality (knowledge-based), which is less input-frequent than nonepistemic modalities (actual-world priorities or goals) and involves speaker perspective-taking. Our results with more familiar teleological (goal-oriented) modality show that preschoolers have an adult-like understanding of possibility can, but they seem to treat necessity have_to as a possibility modal, in affirmative (Experiment 1) and arguably in negative sentences (Experiment 2). We take these systematic errors to call into question conceptual accounts. We argue that younger preschoolers' difficulties with modal force are due to word-learning challenges: They treat necessity modals as possibility modals. (PsycInfo Database Record (c) 2026 APA, all rights reserved).

  PublisherDOI

• Mapping modal verbs to meanings: an elicited production study on “force” and “flavor” with young preschoolers

  Language Acquisition · 2023-03-28 · 29 citations

  articleSenior author

  Modals (e.g., can, must) vary along two dimensions of meaning: “force” (i.e., possibility or necessity), and “flavor” (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] …). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor dimensions of modals. However, given the complex one-to-many mappings from forms to meanings, it is not clear what force or flavor children assign to the modals being tested. In this study, we use a sentence-repair task to test which modals 3- and 4-year-old children themselves prefer to produce in teleological (goal-oriented) and epistemic (knowledge-based) possibility and necessity contexts, and how these preferences differ from those of adults. Our results provide a first controlled look at which modals children use to express the major flavor and force dimensions of modal verb meanings. We shed new light on children’s modal systems, and show that learners generally distinguish modal flavors but struggle distinguishing forces.

  PublisherDOI

• Figuring Out Root and Epistemic Uses of Modals: The Role of the Input

  Journal of Semantics · 2022 · 18 citations

  Senior authorCorresponding
  • Computer Science
  • Linguistics
  • Psychology

  Abstract This paper investigates how children figure out that modals like must can be used to express both epistemic and “root” (i.e. non epistemic) flavors. The existing acquisition literature shows that children produce modals with epistemic meanings up to a year later than with root meanings. We conducted a corpus study to examine how modality is expressed in speech to and by young children, to investigate the ways in which the linguistic input children hear may help or hinder them in uncovering the flavor flexibility of modals. Our results show that the way parents use modals may obscure the fact that they can express epistemic flavors: modals are very rarely used epistemically. Yet, children eventually figure it out; our results suggest that some do so even before age 3. To investigate how children pick up on epistemic flavors, we explore distributional cues that distinguish roots and epistemics. The semantic literature argues they differ in “temporal orientation” (Condoravdi, 2002): while epistemics can have present or past orientation, root modals tend to be constrained to future orientation (Werner 2006; Klecha, 2016; Rullmann & Matthewson, 2018). We show that in child-directed speech, this constraint is well-reflected in the distribution of aspectual features of roots and epistemics, but that the signal might be weak given the strong usage bias towards roots. We discuss (a) what these results imply for how children might acquire adult-like modal representations, and (b) possible learning paths towards adult-like modal representations.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Recent grants

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

  NSF · $272k · 2016–2022

• Doctoral Dissertation Research: Learning attitude verb meanings

  NSF · $18k · 2015–2016

• Acquiring the semantics and pragmatics of attitude verbs

  NSF · $380k · 2011–2016

Frequent coauthors

• Jeffrey Lidz

  University of Maryland, College Park

  16 shared

• Ailís Cournane

  New York University

  7 shared

• Rachel Dudley

  6 shared

• Anouk Dieuleveut

  University of Geneva

  5 shared

• Pranav Anand

  University of California, Santa Cruz

  5 shared

• Kaitlyn Harrigan

  William & Mary

  4 shared

• Alexis Wellwood

  University of Southern California

  4 shared

• Aaron Steven White

  University of Rochester

  4 shared

Education

• PhD, Linguistics

  MIT

  2006