Irani, Ava
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Publication Preface(2018-03-30) Irani, Ava; Šereikaitė, MilenaThe University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) is an occasional series published by the Penn Graduate Linguistics Society. The series has included volumes of previously unpublished work, or work in progress, by linguists with an ongoing affiliation with the Department, as well as volumes of papers from NWAV and the Penn Linguistics Colloquium/Conference. This volume contains selected papers from the 41st Penn Linguistics Conference, held from March 24-26, 2017 in Philadelphia, PA, at the University of Pennsylvania. Thanks go to Luke Adamson, Ryan Budnick, Andrea Ceolin, Nattanun Chanchaochai, Ava Creemers, Aletheia Cui, Kajsa Djärv, Amy Goodwin Davies, Helen Jeoung, Wei Lai, Nari Rhee, Caitlin Richter, Ollie Sayeed, Lacey Arnold Wade, Yosiane White, Hong Zhang for their help in editing. Since Vol. 14.2, PWPL has been an internet-only publication. As of September 2014, the entire back catalog has been digitized and made available on ScholarlyCommons@Penn. Please continue citing PWPL papers or issues as you would a print journal article, though you may also provide the URL of the manuscript. An example is below: Adamson, Luke 2018. Denominal verbs: past tense allomorphy, event frames and zero-categorizers. In University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics 24.1, ed. Ava Irani and Milena Šereikaitė, 1-10. Available at: http://repository.upenn.edu/pwpl/vol24/iss1 Publication in the University of Pennsylvania Working Papers in Linguistics (PWPL) does not preclude submission of papers elsewhere; copyright is retained by the author(s) of individual papers. The PWPL editors can be contacted at: U. Penn Working Papers in Linguistics, Department of Linguistics, 3401-C Walnut Street, Suite 300, C Wing, Philadelphia, PA 19104-6228 and working-papers@ling.upenn.edu. Ava Irani and Milena Šereikaitė, Issue EditorsPublication Learning From Positive Evidence: The Acquisition Of Verb Argument Structure(2019-01-01) Irani, AvaThis dissertation investigates how children acquire verb argument structure using positive evidence from the linguistic input. I discuss three case studies: the acquisition of raising and control verbs, the acquisition of causatives, and the acquisition of passives. When discussing these case studies, I address previous theories of verb argument structure learning that attempt to account for verb argument structure learning through indirect negative evidence (e.g., Pinker 1989), and I show that these approaches are inadequate in accounting for the developmental trajectory of the learner. Instead, I defend two learning models throughout the dissertation: the Sufficiency Principle (Yang 2016) and the Active Mapping Model. The Active Mapping Model of Language Acquisition illustrates how the learner uses conceptual and structural information in their language to form verb classes. In this model, there is no innate mapping between the conceptual and structural cues. Chapter 2 discusses the acquisition of raising and control verbs. Given three kinds of verbs, verbs that are purely raising, purely control, or verbs that can be both, the literature has foregrounded a learnability problem (Becker 2006). If some verbs can be both raising and control, then what prevents the learner from assuming that all verbs can take either structure? This learnability problem, known as the problem of overgeneralization (Baker 1979), then puts forth the question of how the learner retreats from this hypothesis to arrive at the adult grammar that also has pure raising and control verbs. Using the Sufficiency Principle, I show that the problem of overgeneralization does not arise, as the number of verbs that can be both raising and control do not meet the threshold of generalization determined by the Sufficiency Principle. I also argue against theories that propose indirect negative evidence to retreat from overgeneralization, and instead, I argue that raising and control verbs are learned from positive evidence in the input, which in this case is in the form of non-referential subjects. In Chapter 3, I discuss the acquisition of the causative alternation rule, which is a true case of overgeneralization, as seen by the errors made by children in their production data. In the acquisition of causatives, I demonstrate that the overgeneralization errors are predicted under the Active Mapping Model where the learner categorizes verbs into classes based on conceptual and structural cues. Given the learner's vocabulary size and verb classes, the causative alternation rule is found to be productive when the input the learner receives is examined. Thus, under this learning model, the child errors are predicted. Moreover, using the Sufficiency Principle to determine the threshold of generalization, I show that the learner retreats from overgeneralization when their vocabulary size increases, as the rule is then no longer productive when the input is examined. In this chapter, I also test the Sufficiency Principle experimentally, and find support for it in the results obtained from child participants. In Chapter 4, I use the Sufficiency Principle and the Active Mapping Model to examine the developmental trajectory of children's acquisition of passives. This chapter answers two questions: whether the passive construction is productive for the learner early on, and whether the asymmetry in the acquisition of actional and non-actional passives (e.g., Pinker et al. 1987) can be accounted for under the models of language learning assumed in this dissertation. Using the child production data and the input data, I show that the passive construction is productive in the input, and productive for the English-learning child. By examining Adam's vocabulary and verb classes, the passive rule is found to be productive for Adam given the number of passives present in the input. Moreover, under the Active Mapping Model, I show that the asymmetry in the acquisition of passives is predicted. This dissertation investigates whether the learner's developmental trajectory can be accounted for solely from the input data. In each of the cases discussed in the chapters of the dissertation, I demonstrate the role of the input in language acquisition. Furthermore, using the Active Mapping Model, I show that the innate linking between the verbs semantics and the syntactic structure is not only unnecessary, but also does not account for the full range of facts found in the child data.