The time has come when well-organized and thoroughly worked out transfer grammars should be developed. Such a grammar should be composed of formal statements equating the construction-types of the input language with those of the output language and indicating the appropriate transformations which must be made to produce the target language constructions. In connection with the problem of struc...

This article reports the structure of associations among 101 common verbs and body parts. The verbs are those typically learned by children learning English prior to 3 years of age. In a free association task, 50 adults were asked to provide the single body part that came to mind when they thought of each verb. Analyses reveal highly systematic and structured patterns of associations that are a...

Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in training. We also used novel verbs that were of ...

Lexically based learning and semantic analogy may both play a role in the learning of grammar. To investigate this, 5-year-old German children were trained on a miniature language (nominally English) involving two grammatical constructions, each of which was associated with a different semantic verb class. Training was followed by elicited production and grammaticality judgement tests with ‘tra...

Psych verbs cause problems for learners of English as a foreign language, in many other languages. The problem-causing aspect these is that the person who defined experiencer and has emotion sometimes used sentence case subject object. Some arise when an object English. Foreign language think intransitive verbs, from which -ed / -ing adjectives derived. As result, are also misunderstood. In our...

In this paper I examine the types of events associated with ditransitive verbs that describe caused possession by looking at their lexical aspectual properties, a methodology that has proven fruitful for the exploration of (in)transitive verbs. I show that as a whole these ditransitives share a number of aspectual properties in common with (in)transitive verbs of change of state and motion, sug...

Psych verb constructions show peculiar properties. They appear to project the same θ -relations into inverse configurations (John fears sharks/Sharks frighten John). Furthermore, Experiencer Object psych verb constructions admit backward binding in apparent violation of familiar c-command conditions (Pictures of himself anger John). We offer a solution to both puzzles drawing crucially on data ...

Languages differ in how they package the components of an event into words to form sentences. For example, while some languages typically encode the manner of motion in the verb (e.g., running), others more often use verbs that encode the path (e.g., ascending). Prior research has demonstrated that children and adults have lexicalization biases; that is, they assume that novel motion verbs will...