STRUCTURAL LIMITS ON VERB MAPPING - THE ROLE OF ANALOGY IN CHILDRENS INTERPRETATIONS OF SENTENCES

The structure of sentences in which a verb is used can provide hints a bout its meaning (Landau & Gleitman, 1985). One possible view of how t his works appeals to innate rules linking grammatical categories with semantic ones (e.g., if subject then agent). However, this view requir es considerable syntactic knowledge on the part of the child to use st ructural cues; The child must already be able to identify the grammati cal parts of a sentence-in a particular language-in order to gain acce ss to such rules. In this paper I propose an alternative route from st ructure to verb meaning and present evidence for its use. A task was d evised to deny preschoolers access to Linking rules like ''if subject then agent,'' by not identifying the subject. In three experiments, ch ildren learned novel verbs in different sentence contexts. The identit y of the subject and object of each sentence was hidden by using ambig uous pronouns (e.g., she and her). Thus only the number of arguments ( transitive vs intransitive sentences) and their marking by preposition (to vs from) could provide cues to verb meaning. Meanings were assess ed by asking children to point to the one performing the labeled actio n. Children's choices revealed sensitivity to both number and marking of arguments. These results suggest that very little explicit syntacti c knowledge is needed to give children some structural cues to verb me aning. I suggest that a sentence structure has an abstract, relational meaning of its own, independent of the identity of its arguments, tha t can be applied by analogy to the child's conceptual representation o f an event. (C) 1996 Academic Press, Inc.