ABSTRACT
This chapter delineates the nature of the overgeneralization problem and relates it to children's acquisition of verb argument structure. Baker proposed a theory of lexical conservatism which posits that there are no general syntactic rules that relate pairs of argument structures occurring with same verbs. As a consequence, Baker's theory predicts that children should not be prone to making overgeneralization errors. Dell and Berwick proposed a principle that has the same effect as Baker's theory: They suggest that children's usage of verbs in argument structures is constrained by the "subset principle". Pinker proposed a theory in which semantic constraints serve as conditions defining semantic classes of verbs that may or may not occur in particular argument structures. Braine, Brody, Fisch, Weisberger, & Blum proposed that children acquire canonical sentence schemas from experience with the language they are exposed to. The chapter indicates, the problem of explaining why children make argument structure errors and how they stop making them is unresolved.
