THE STRUCTURE AND ACQUISITION OF ENGLISH DATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS

We present evidence that children acquire English datives, verb-partic le constructions,put-locatives, and causative/perceptual constructions all as a group. Our findings favor a parametric model of acquisition in which the acquired knowledge is not construction-specific; and they favor analyses in which all the constructions belong to a single synt actic class. On the basis of our results, we argue that acquisition of the entire class depends on the acquisition of two parametric propert ies. One property allows the grammar to generate double object datives , causative/perceptual constructions, put-locatives, and V-NP-Particle constructions. V-Particle-NP constructions and to-datives depend on t he combination of the first property with a second property.