Affectedness and direct objects: The role of lexical semantics in the acquisition of verb argument structure

Do as I say, not as I do: A lexical distributional account of English locative verb class acquisition

“…In children under 30 months old, 75% of the locative utterances were TL structures, but only 44% of the transitive utterances were T structures. The TL bias is mirrored in existing empirical, diary and corpus studies (Bidgood et al, 2014;Bowerman, 1982;Gropen et al, 1991aGropen et al, , 1991bLaffut & Davidse, 2002). For example, Bidgood et al (2014) found in a novel verb ratings task that five-to six-year-old children accepted novel verbs in the TL locative structure but not the LT locative structure.…”

“…Pinker clearly distinguishes semantic bootstrapping from his semantic structure theory of linking (broad/narrow rules) in the conclusions of his locative paper (Gropen et al, 1991a), whereas our situational account relates to how children learn the semantic classes that support the narrow range rules. The distributional account is also different from syntactic bootstrapping theories, which argues that children use abstract syntactic frames to learn about verbs (Gleitman, 1990).…”

“…Furthermore, it is thought that the relative salience of arguments can determine structural choices independently of the verb (Bock 1982;Gleitman, January, Nappa & Trueswell, 2007;Goldberg, 1995). Indeed, Gropen et al (1991a) demonstrated that changes in the salience of LOCATION and THEME at test did change Figure 1. Distributional and situational accounts of children's acquisition of the English locative construction the structural choices that children made with novel locative verbs.…”

“…Although the English locative has been the focus of a handful of corpus, diary, empirical, elicitation and grammaticality judgment studies Bidgood, Ambridge, Pine, & Rowland, 2014;Bowerman, 1982;Gropen et al, 1991aGropen et al, , 1991bLaffut & Davidse, 2002), to our knowledge there exists no in-depth examination of the patterns of locative verbs in the language children hear and use. Of the few previous corpus studies of the English locative, some examine a small set of verbs, others use a small set of corpora, and others use only adult or non-naturalistic data.…”

“…He argued that children's early understanding of how locative verbs map to these structures involves innate "broad range" linking rules (Gropen, Pinker, Hollander, & Goldberg, 1991a). On this account, the broad range rule for the locative alternation links the two possible construals of a locative action as in (1) and (2).…”