ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on the problem of verb acquisition. The standard solution to the mapping problem is by appeal to principles of perception and pragmatic inference. Infants are said to pair occurrences of the sound /open/ with certain observed events because /open/ is the verb most likely for the caretaker to say when something is opening. A first problem in mapping verbs onto their real-world contexts is that caretaker speech is not a faithful running commentary on events in view. Verb learning begins just when the child shows rudimentary sensitivity to syntactic structure and has a working vocabulary of simple nouns. In principle, a systematic mapping between syntax and semantics could be one of the presuppositions that learners bring into the learning situation, part of the innate processing system that makes it possible to learn language. One assumption implicit in this hypothesized language-learning machinery is that some specific mappings between verb meanings and their syntactic expressions hold universally across languages.
