The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure: Animacy and Thematic Alignment (Cambridge Studies in Linguistics, Series Number 141)

This book explains a well-known puzzle that helped catalyze the establishment of generative syntax: how children tease apart the different syntactic structures associated with sentences like John is easy/eager to please. The answer lies in animacy: taking the premise that subjects are animate, the book argues that children can exploit the occurrence of an inanimate subject as a cue to a non-canonical structure, in which that subject is displaced (the book is easy/\*eager to read). The author uses evidence from a range of linguistic subfields, including syntactic theory, typology, language processing, conceptual development, language acquisition, and computational modeling, exposing readers to these different kinds of data in an accessible way. The theoretical claims of the book expand the well-known hypotheses of Syntactic and Semantic Bootstrapping, resulting in greater coverage of the core principles of language acquisition. This is a must-read for researchers in language acquisition, syntax, psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. The Acquisition of Syntactic Structure: Animacy and Thematic Alignment 6 Contents 8 List of figures 11 List of tables 12 Acknowledgements 14 1 Introduction 18 2 The syntax of displacing and non-displacing predicates 31 2.1 Raising-to-subject and subject control: seem vs. claim 33 2.1.1 The structure of raising 36 2.1.2 The structure of control 42 2.1.3 Raising-to-object and object control: expect vs. persuade 45 2.2 Tough-constructions: easy vs. eager 47 2.2.1 Structure of tough-constructions 49 2.2.2 Related constructions 53 2.2.3 Structure of control adjective constructions 56 2.3 Unaccusatives and unergatives: arrive vs. dance 56 2.3.1 A semantically-driven syntactic distinction 57 2.3.2 Formal representations of unaccusativity 59 2.4 Passive 62 2.4.1 Structure of passive 63 2.4.2 A different displacing predicate 66 2.5 The learning problem 69 3 Argument hierarchies 78 3.1 The Animacy Hierarchy 80 3.1.1 Linguistic effects of animacy: morphosyntax and argument structure 81 3.1.2 Animacy, agency, degree of control, and teleological capability 86 3.2 The Thematic Hierarchy 92 3.2.1 A brief history of thematic roles 93 3.2.2 Formal accounts of thematic role assignment 96 3.3 Animacy and thematic roles in opaque constructions 101 3.3.1 Raising constructions across languages 103 3.3.1.1 Bleached control verbs, copy raising, and the sliding scale of raising–control 114 3.3.2 Tough-constructions across languages 120 3.4 Properties of derived subjects 126 3.4.1 Argument structure universals, and the “problem” of ergativity 131 3.5 A learning procedure 136 3.6 Summary 141 4 Animacy and adult sentence processing 143 4.1 Relative clauses 146 4.1.1 Reduced relative clauses 146 4.1.2 Subject vs. object relative clauses 153 4.2 Processing of raising and control 156 4.2.1 Sentence completion 157 4.2.2 Novel verb learning 164 4.3 Psycholinguistic effects of animacy on production of the passive 170 4.4 Summary 172 5 Animacy and children’s language 173 5.1 Development of the animacy concept 174 5.1.1 Featural properties of animates 175 5.1.2 Behavioral properties of animates 176 5.1.3 Intentional properties of animates 183 5.1.4 Further conceptual change 186 5.1.5 Agency 189 5.1.6 Summary 190 5.2 Children’s use of animacy in learning argument structure 191 5.2.1 The power and limitations of Semantic Bootstrapping 196 5.2.2 The power and limitations of Syntactic Bootstrapping 203 5.3 Children’s acquisition of displacing predicates 207 5.3.1 Acquisition of raising and control 209 5.3.2 Acquisition of tough-constructions 225 5.3.3 Acquisition of unaccusatives 244 5.3.3.1 Novel verb studies 245 5.3.3.2 Knowledge of the unaccusative-unergative distinction in the target language 250 5.3.4 Animacy and the acquisition of the passive 252 5.4 Summary 259 6 Modeling the acquisition of displacing predicates 262 6.1 Displacing predicates in the input to children 267 6.2 Computational modeling of language acquisition 273 6.2.1 Learning as generalization 275 6.2.2 Restricting the hypothesis space 278 6.3 Hierarchical Bayesian Models 282 6.3.1 A model of learning raising and control 284 6.3.2 A model of learning tough-constructions 293 6.3.3 A model of learning unaccusatives and unergatives 296 6.4 Summary of modeling results 298 7 Conclusions and origins 300 7.1 Origins of knowledge of the animacy distinction 303 7.2 Origins of knowledge of linguistic animacy and displacing predicates 306 7.3 Further questions 313 Appendix 315 Bibliography 317 Index 339 Syntax Of Displacing Predicates -- Argument Hierarchies -- Animacy And Adult Sentence Processing -- Animacy And Children's Language -- Modeling Displacing Predicates -- Conclusions And Origins. Misha Becker, University Of North Carolina, Chapel Hill. Includes Bibliographical References. This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure