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Researchers have long debated the means by which children learn the argument structure of verbs. Making syntactic generalizations often entails learning the semantics of different verbs, complicating and delaying the acquisition process. This study investigates four- to twelve-yearolds' and adults' knowledge of animacy hierarchy restrictions on postverbal word order in Sesotho double object applicatives, constructions where verb semantics is kept constant. Performance on forced-choice elicited production tasks showed that four-year-olds have early knowledge of the animacy hierarchy restrictions, providing evidence of syntactic generalization even on low-frequency constructions. Although there were no verb frequency effects, performance was also better on the highest-frequency animacy constructions. The results suggest that learning restrictions on verb-argument structure is facilitated when verb semantics is not a confound, but that construction frequency also plays a role in mastering the argument structure of verbs.

It is generally assumed that the nature of the input children hear, when combined with innate capacities for (language) learning, is sufficiently rich for language acquisition to succeed despite the presence of ungrammatical utterances. Little attention, however, has been given to how children learn grammatical constructions that are rare in the input, where both overt positive evidence and implicit negative evidence are limited. Such cases provide a unique window of opportunity for exploring the various languagelearning strategies children use, whether these exhibit certain ''innate'' semantic or syntactic predispositions, or whether more general learning mechanisms, such as statistical inference, are involved. This paper examines children's acquisition of double-object applicative constructions in the Bantu language Sesotho, where evidence for the order of postverbal objects is absent from the input, due in part to the high instance of ''unspecified object deletion,'' or object ellipsis. It finds that although three-to four-year-olds perform above chance on forced-choice elicited-production tasks, eightyear-olds are still not adult-like in their use of the syntactic restrictions that govern these constructions. The paper raises questions regarding the types of learning strategies children use under conditions of ellipsis, and the implications this has for theories of language acquisition.

A B S T R A C TTheorists of language acquisition have long debated the means by which children learn the argument structure of verbs (e.g. Bowerman, 1974Bowerman, , 1990Pinker, 1984Pinker, , 1989Tomasello, 1992). Central to this controversy has been the possible role of verb semantics, especially in learning which verbs undergo dative-shift alternation in languages like English. The learning problem is somewhat simplified in Bantu double object constructions, where all applicative verbs show the same order of postverbal objects. However, Bantu languages differ as to what that order is, some placing the benefactive argument first, and others placing the animate argument first. Learning the language-specific word-order restrictions on Bantu double object applicative constructions is therefore more akin