Combining Syntactic Frames and Semantic Roles to Acquire Verbs

For any given utterance of a verb, the referential scene offers a wide array of potential interpretations. The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis (Landau & Gleitman, 1985) maintains that children could constrain these interpretations by exploiting systematic links between syntactic structure and verb meaning. A number of studies have provided support for this hypothesis. Children interpret a novel verb in a transitive sentence as referring to a relationship between two participants (Fisher, 2002; Naigles, 1990; Yuan & Fisher, 2006). Children also draw upon language-specific syntactic knowledge, such as word order in English, to map a novel verb to an appropriate event (Gertner, Fisher, & Eisengart, 2006). These findings suggest that the syntactic structure of an utterance can act as a zoom lens, limiting children’s interpretation of a verb to a particular aspect of the referential scene. However, the constraints from a single frame provide only highly abstract information about the meaning of a verb. To illustrate, consider encountering a novel transitive verb, as in “John blicked the doctor.” Occurrence in the transitive frame indicates that blick describes a relationship between two participants. A wide range of meanings are consistent with this constraint: blicked could mean anything from killed or murdered to loved or visited. Since many diverse meanings can map onto this single frame, the meaning of blick remains highly ambiguous. How do children overcome this ambiguity? Observation of a verb’s use across multiple scenes is one likely source of further constraint. However, Landau and Gleitman (1985) proposed that children could also use the set of frames a verb occurred in as an additional source of constraint on its meaning. For instance, the verb explain occurs in both a dative frame (1a) and in a sentential complement frame (1b). Each of these frames provides different constraints on the meaning of explain. Occurrence with direct and indirect objects (e.g., in a dative construction) suggests that the verb describes transfer of possession or motion towards a goal. Occurrence with sentential complements indicates that the verb denotes a predicate involving propositional content. Together, these constraints considerably narrow the potential meaning of explain: it involves the transfer of propositional content.