Bootstrapping

Bootstrapping alludes to a German legend about a Baron Münchhausen, who was able to lift himself out of a swamp by pulling himself up by his own hair. In later versions he was using his own boot straps to pull himself out of the sea which gave rise to the term .

Linguistics

Syntactic bootstrapping is the idea that children use syntactic knowledge they have developed to help learn what words mean -- semantics builds on top of syntax.

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