ABSTRACT
The lexical entry for a word must contain information about its pronunciation, syntactic usage, such as grammatical class and argument structure, and semantics. If these variables are correlated with each other, then information about one variable could guide inferences about one or more of the others. In fact, both syntactic and semantic bootstrapping proposals claim that the syntax and semantics of verbs are not arbitrarily related. Given relationships between a verb’s syntax and semantics, one could possibly infer something about a verb’s semantics from its syntactic role in sentences and vice versa (Gleitman, 1990; Pinker, 1989).
