"The subject-matter of universal grammar"
This semester, John Trueswell has been teaching a seminar focused on Lila Gleitman's recently-published collected works, Sentence First, Arguments Afterward: Essays in Language and Learning. Last week, the paper under discussion was Cynthia Fisher, Henry Gleitman, & Lila Gleitman, "On the semantic content of subcategorization frames", Cognitive Psychology, 1991. The start of its abstract:
This paper investigates relations between the meanings of verbs and the syntactic structures in which they appear. This investigation is motivated by the enigmas as to how children discover verb meanings. Well-known problems with unconstrained induction of word meanings from observation of world circumstances suggest that additional constraints or sources of information are required. If there exist strong and reliable parallels between the structural and semantic properties of verbs, then an additional source of information about verb meanings is reliably present in each verb’s linguistic context.
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