ABSTRACT
Discussions of the close relation between verbs and syntactic structures are not new to either linguistics or psychology. Linguists from very different traditions (e.g., Chafe, 1970; Chomsky, 1965; Fillmore, 1968) have relied on distinctions between verbs to illustrate and in some cases to motivate critical syntactic distinctions (for more recent work, see Grimshaw, 1990; Wierzbicka, 1988). Likewise, in psychology, models of language processing have explOited verb differences to demonstrate and explain differences in the retention and processing of syntax (e.g., Fodor, Garrett, & Bever, 1968; Wanner, 1974; more recently, Carlson & Tanenhaus, 1988; Shapiro, Zurif, & Grimshaw, 1987). Finally, in the field of language acquisition, the verb-syntax correspondence has been implicated in the acquisition of syntax (Bloom, 1970, 1981; Pinker, 1984, 1989; Tomasello, 1992). With few exceptions, this research involving verb-syntax relations has been uni-directional, focusing on what verbs and verb meanings reveal about syntax and syntactic acquisition (but see Bowerman, 1974, 1982; Jackendoff, 1983, 1990). Our work joins a recent reversal of this direction of focus (e.g., Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman & Gleitman, 1992); we study what syntax reveals about the acquisition and development of the verb lexicon.
