Abstract
This chapter reports on a study designed to investigate young children’s knowledge of three syntactic frames. The syntactic bootstrapping hypothesis, proposed by Landau & Gleitman (1985) and Gleitman (1990) suggests that children are able to use the syntactic frame in which a verb appears to determine something about the verb’s meaning. However empirical support for this view relies on the fact that children can distinguish the syntactic frames in a language. Although it would be making too great an assumption to predict that a child can identify the semantic components that make up the meaning of an unknown verb just on the basis of knowledge of syntactic frames, the frame in which a verb appears may help the child identify some aspects of the verb’s meaning, for example, whether it has a causative or contact meaning.
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Bavin, E.L., Growcott, C. (2000). Infants of 24-30 Months Understand Verb Frames. In: Perkins, M., Howard, S. (eds) New Directions In Language Development And Disorders. Springer, Boston, MA. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4157-8_16
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4615-4157-8_16
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