ACQUISITION OF VERB CATEGORIES

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.