- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contributors
- Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front
- 1 Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues to Categories Available to Young Learners
- 2 Finding Verb Forms Within the Continuous Speech Stream
- 3 Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration
- 4 Actions Organize the Infant’s World
- 5 Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event
- 6 Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants' Understanding of Motion Events
- 7 Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support
- 8 The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge
- 9 When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing
- 10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
- 11 Verbs, Actions, and Intentions
- 12 Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies
- 13 Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input
- 14 A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context
- 15 Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
- 16 Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children's Grammars
- 17 Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking Children
- 18 But Are They Really Verbs? Chinese Words for Action
- 19 Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese
- 20 East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs
- 21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn
- Author Index
- Subject Index
Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
- Chapter:
- (p.392) 15 Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
- Source:
- Action Meets Word
- Author(s):
Cynthia Fisher
Hyun-joo Song
- Publisher:
- Oxford University Press
This chapter argues that once children can identify the subject of a multiargument sentence as structurally prominent, they could assign a default interpretation to sentences containing a novel verb by assuming that the subject referent plays a semantically prominent role in the conceptual relation named by the verb. What counts as prominent will be determined by the situation and by the multidimensional attentional and representational biases of human perceivers.
Keywords: subject, sentence structure, verb meaning, multiargument sentence, novel verb
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Preface
- Contributors
- Introduction: Progress on the Verb Learning Front
- 1 Finding the Verbs: Distributional Cues to Categories Available to Young Learners
- 2 Finding Verb Forms Within the Continuous Speech Stream
- 3 Discovering Verbs Through Multiple-Cue Integration
- 4 Actions Organize the Infant’s World
- 5 Conceptual Foundations for Verb Learning: Celebrating the Event
- 6 Precursors to Verb Learning: Infants' Understanding of Motion Events
- 7 Preverbal Spatial Cognition and Language-Specific Input: Categories of Containment and Support
- 8 The Roots of Verbs in Prelinguistic Action Knowledge
- 9 When Is a Grasp a Grasp? Characterizing Some Basic Components of Human Action Processing
- 10 Word, Intention, and Action: A Two-Tiered Model of Action Word Learning
- 11 Verbs, Actions, and Intentions
- 12 Are Nouns Easier to Learn Than Verbs? Three Experimental Studies
- 13 Verbs at the Very Beginning: Parallels Between Comprehension and Input
- 14 A Unified Theory of Word Learning: Putting Verb Acquisition in Context
- 15 Who's the Subject? Sentence Structure and Verb Meaning
- 16 Verb Learning as a Probe Into Children's Grammars
- 17 Revisiting the Noun-Verb Debate: A Cross-Linguistic Comparison of Novel Noun and Verb Learning in English-, Japanese-, and Chinese-Speaking Children
- 18 But Are They Really Verbs? Chinese Words for Action
- 19 Influences of Object Knowledge on the Acquisition of Verbs in English and Japanese
- 20 East and West: A Role for Culture in the Acquisition of Nouns and Verbs
- 21 Why Verbs Are Hard to Learn
- Author Index
- Subject Index
