ABSTRACT
This chapter presents converging evidence from a special population also faced with sorting out verbs and their syntactic frames. It discusses the complex intertwining of syntax and semantics in the development of verb meanings. In several recent papers, Gleitman proposed the syntactic bootstrapping process: Children use the syntactic frames in which verbs are placed to help determine the meaning of novel verbs. The chapter discusses three hypotheses, namely, conservatism, maturation and lexical knowledge. The most recent theory concerning the retreat from overgeneralizations, put forth by Pinker relies partly on the child's increasing lexical knowledge to constrain each verb's argument structure. In sum, children need more than the real-world scene and their semantic biases to begin to learn many novel verbs. Determining the meaning of a verb is partly dependent on the syntactic frames in which it appears, and establishing those syntactic frames in which it can appear is partly a function of the meaning thus far constructed.
