An essential part of the human capacity for language is the ability to link conceptual or semantic representations with syntactic representations. On the basis of data from spontaneous production, suggested that young children acquire such links on a verb-by-verb basis, with little in the way of a general understanding of linguistic argument structure. Here, we suggest that a receptive understa...

As children hear a novel verb in a NOUN-VERB-NOUN (i.e., NVN) structure, they generally infer that the verb is transitive, like the verb “hit” (Naigles, 1990; Yuan, Fisher, & Snedeker, 2012). However, the relationship between sentence structure and a verb’s transitivity status is not straightforward. Particularly, in typologically pro-drop languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, the object in a se...

Current syntactic accounts of English resultatives are based on the assumption that result XPs are predicated of underlying direct objects. This assumption has helped to explain the presence of reflexive pronouns with some intransitive verbs but not others and the apparent lack of result XPs predicated of subjects of transitive verbs. We present problems for and counterexamples to some of the b...

Children use syntax to guide verb learning. We asked whether the syntactic structure in which a novel verb occurs is meaningful to children even without a concurrent scene from which to infer the verb's semantic content. In two experiments, 2-year-olds observed dialogues in which interlocutors used a new verb in transitive ("Jane blicked the baby!") or intransitive ("Jane blicked!") sentences. ...

PREFACE 1. CONVERGENT. Does the set of cyclic operators have a non-empty interior?... 2. WEIGHTED. Is every part of a weighted shift similar to a weighted shift?. . . . 3. INVARIANT. If an intransitive operator has an inverse, is its inverse also intransitive? 4. TRIANGULAR. Is every normal operator the sum of a diagonal operator and a compact one? 5. DILATED. Is every subnormal Toeplitz operat...

objectives: nouns and verbs are the central conceptual linguistic units of language acquisition in all human languages. while the noun-bias hypothesis claims that nouns have a privilege in children’s lexical development across languages, studies on mandarin and korean and other languages have challenged this view. more recent cross-linguistic naming studies on children in german, turkish, engli...

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge—an interconnected causal network, where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms—causal islands—such that events in different mechanisms are not thought to be related even when they belong to the same...

As far as the transitivity of AF verbs is concerned, there are two conflicting hypotheses in the Austronesian literature. In the ergative hypothesis (Starosta 1997), AF verbs are uniformly identified as antipassive/intransitive; in the symmetrical-voice hypothesis (Kroeger 1993), AF verbs are claimed to be able to occur as transitive on a par with NAF verbs. In this paper, we address the issue ...