Learning Verbs that Lack Argument Structure : The case of raising verbs

Abstract

"In this paper, I address the question of how language learners come to distinguish the class of ‘raising’ predicates from other kinds of predicates. The class of raising predicates is a small class, containing verbs such as seem, appear, tend and a few others. What distinguishes these predicates from other main verbs is that while they share the morphosyntactic properties of main verbs (for example, they take regular verbal inflection, they follow negation, they do not invert in questions), raising verbs are auxiliary-like in their argument structure. In particular, they do not select a subject argument, or any other thematic arguments. The first question I pose is how a learner could figure out the syntactic properties of raising predicates so as to define them as a class. The second question I pose is: once we identify a good learning strategy, is there evidence that children make use of this strategy, and if so, at what age? To clarify, I am not concerned in this paper with how children acquire the syntactic operation of raising, or A-movement. Rather, what I am interested in is how learners come to identify this particular class of predicates, given their shared property of not selecting any NP arguments"