A Connectionist Model of Verb Subcategorization

Much of the debate on rule-based vs. connectionist models in language acquisition has focussed on the English past tense. This paper investigates a new area, the acquisition of verb subcategorization. Verbs differ in how they express their arguments or subcategorize for them. For example, “She gave him a book.” is good, but “She donated him a book.” sounds odd. The paper describes a connectionist model for the acquisition of verb subcategorization and how it accounts for overgeneralization and learning in the absence of explicit negative evidence. It is argued that the model presents a better explanation for the transition from the initial rule-less state to final rule-like behavior for some verb classes than the symbolic account proposed by Pinker (1989).