The paper was delivered as a commentary upon Michael Brent's presentat
ion 'Acquisition of subcategorization frames using aggregated evidence
from local syntactic cues' to the Penn Language Acquisition Conferenc
e, IRCS, University of Pennsylvania, 1992. It argues in support of usi
ng statistical techniques like Brent's to minimise the consequences of
errors and misanalyses, but concludes that the case for believing tha
t children acquire subcategorisation and other aspects of syntax on th
e basis of semantic and contextual cues remains strong.