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Children use syntax to guide verb learning. We asked whether the syntactic structure in which a novel verb occurs is meaningful to children even without a concurrent scene from which to infer the verb's semantic content. In two experiments, 2-year-olds observed dialogues in which interlocutors used a new verb in transitive (\"lane bticked the baby!\") or intransitive (\"lane blicked!\") sentences. The children later heard the verb in holation (\"Find blicking!\") while watching a one-participant event and a two-participant event presented side by side. Children who had heard transitive dialogues looked reliably longer at the two-participant event than did those who had heard intransitive diahgues. This effect persisted even when children were tested on a different day 9 but disappeared when no novel verb accompanied the test events (Experiment 2). Thus, 2-year-olds gather useful combinatorial information about a novel verb simply from hearing it in sentences, and later retrieve that information to guide interpretation of the verb.

Two-year-olds use the sentence structures verbs appear in—subcategorization frames—to guide verb learning. This is syntactic bootstrapping. This study probed the developmental origins of this ability. The structure-mapping account proposes that children begin with a bias toward one-to-one mapping between nouns in sentences and participant roles in events. This account predicts that subcategorization frames should guide very early verb learning, if the number of nouns in the sentences is informative. In 3 experiments, one hundred and thirty-six 21- and 19-month-olds assigned appropriately different interpretations to novel verbs in transitive (\"He's gorping him!\") versus intransitive sentences (\"He's gorping!\") differing in their number of nouns. Thus, subcategorization frames guide verb interpretation in very young children. These findings constrain theoretical proposals about mechanisms for syntactic bootstrapping.

We analyze an intransitive construction involving verbs like Spanish matarse 'kill' whose subjects appear to have both internal and external argument properties. Examples include Juan se mató en un accidente de coche 'Juan got himself killed in a car accident', in which the subject's referent shows hybrid behavior between agent and patient as it needs to be engaged in an action leading to its accidental death. We propose that the subject's internal and external argument properties can be accounted for if subjects can bear two semantic roles by virtue of being associated with more than one distinct head in the syntax (Pineda & Berro 2020). We argue that such intransitive uses involve a distinct argument structure from transitive reflexives despite sharing the same surface form, cf., El sospechoso del homicidio se mató al estar rodeado por la policía 'The suspect killed himself when he was surrounded by the police'. The present account provides evidence that agents and external arguments do not always correlate since some verb classes can have identical surface form, despite involving underlyingly distinct argument alignment.

Focusing on the Shipibo language, I defend a simple \"dependent case\" theory of ergative case marking, where ergative case is assigned to the higher of two NPs in a clausal domain. I show how apparent failures of this rule can be explained assuming that VP is a Spell-Out domain distinct from the clause, and that this bleeds ergative case assignment for c-command relationships that already exist in VP and are unchanged in CP. This accounts for the apparent underapplication of ergative case marking with ditransitives, reciprocals, and dyadic experiencer verbs, as opposed to the applicatives of unaccusative verbs, which do have ergative subjects. Finally, I show how case assignment interacts with restructuring to explain constructions in which ergative case appears to be optional.

This paper analyzes intransitive alternations in relation to manner/result transitivity patterns. We focus on productivity and distribution in Romance, Greek, and English, where a major asymmetry is created by the (un)availability of monadic alternates featuring a stative cause as the single participant (e.g. Caffeine dehydrates; Covid kills). These constructions are contrasted with intransitive alternatives generally considered in the literature, like the Characteristic Property of Agent Alternation (e.g. This dog bites). Criteria like eventivity, episodicity, agentivity, and intentionality/volitionality are examined. We find that the types contrasted correspond to two structurally distinct kinds of predication. Major differences emerge between originally transitive structures where the object, even if unexpressed/unspecified, is assigned a place in the configuration (the type traditionally explored) vs. original atransitive variants consisting only of the external-argument-licensing head, with consequently different semantic and syntactic properties. This distinction also explains the apparently striking distribution of intransitivity alternations in psych verbs. We note that certain verbs, even if eligible for psych predication like bother or intimidate, can have other uses related to manner-of-behavior predications. We identify central conditions (eventivity, animacy/agenthood, defeasibility) regulating argument/event realization: in languages like English, whereas structurally monadic variants with a cause subject are generally unavailable (*Madrid bewitches/fascinates), manner-type alternatives are fully productive for verbs with non-psych uses, offering less-constrained conditions for object drop/ non-specification. In Romance and Greek, both structures are systematically available, offering distinct syntactic and semantic computations for intransitive variants across different verb classes.

As shown by Kayne (1975), Romance causatives with faire fall into two classes, faire infinitif (FI) and faire par (FP). We argue from Italian data that the properties of the two classes depend on the nature of the complement of fare: FI embeds a vP, FP a nominalized VP. The syntactic and semantic characteristics of these complements account straightforwardly for well-known differences between FI and FP, including the previously untreated \"obligation\" requirement in FI, absent in FP. Our analysis also accounts for another subtle restriction on the formation of FP: the existence of an animacy requirement on the subject of fare, absent in FI. Finally, we argue that only FP can undergo passivization; this accounts for a previously unobserved asymmetry in passivizability of causatives of unergative and unaccusative intransitive verbs.

English resultative expressions have been a major focus of research on the syntax-semantics interface. We argue in this article that a family of related constructions is required to account for their distribution. We demonstrate that a number of generalizations follow from the semantics of the constructions we posit: the syntactic argument structure of the sentence is predicted by general principles of argument linking; and the aspectual structure of the sentence is determined by the aspectual structure of the constructional subevent, which is in turn predictable from general principles correlating event structure with change, extension, motion, and paths. Finally, the semantics and syntax of resultatives explain the possibilities for temporal relations between the two subevents. While these generalizations clearly exist, there is also a great deal of idiosyncrasy involved in resultatives. Many idiosyncratic instances and small subclasses of the construction must be learned and stored individually. This account serves to justify aspects of what we share in our overall vision of grammar, what we might call the constructional view. To the extent that our treatment of the resultative can be stated only within the constructional view, it serves as evidence for this view as a whole.

Previous work has shown that toddlers readily encode each noun in the sentence as a distinct argument of the verb. However, languages allow multiple mappings between form and meaning that do not fit this canonical format. Two experiments examined French 28-month-olds' interpretation of right-dislocated sentences (nouni-verb, nouni) where the presence of clear, language-specific cues should block such a canonical mapping. Toddlers (N = 96) interpreted novel verbs embedded in these sentences as transitive, disregarding prosodic cues to dislocation (Experiment 1) but correctly interpreted right-dislocated sentences containing well-known verbs (Experiment 2). These results suggest that toddlers can integrate multiple cues in ideal conditions, but default to canonical surface-to-meaning mapping when extracting structural information about novel verbs in semantically impoverished conditions.

This paper offers new evidence from Stau, Geshiza, and Khroskyabs to address the question of directionality in valency-changing derivations in Sino-Tibetan. Examining Stau, Geshiza, and Khroskyabs causative and anticausative verb stem pairs adds to the evidence that in Proto-Sino-Tibetan, a number of intransitive stems are derived from transitive stems, in some cases as the result of * N ‑ prefixation, and in other cases from voicing alternation independent of * N ‑ prefixation. In addition, the proto-sigmatic prefix (* s -) does not cause devoicing in Stau, Geshiza, and Khroskyabs, but rather often undergoes voicing assimilation, and has more than just a causativization function. Furthermore, by looking at Gyalrong, Minyag, Tangut, Middle Chinese, and Old Chinese we emphasize that there is no synchronic evidence to support devoicing induced by * s ‑, nor is there historical evidence to support the claim that * s ‑ caused devoicing in Proto-Gyalrongic, or even at genetically deeper stages.

This paper introduces a particular construction named the unmarked passivized uneragtive construction (UPUC). The aim of this paper is to explore the underlying structure of UPUC from generative syntax perspective. In this construction, the subject is an Affectee, affected by the following VO sequence. The VO sequence denotes a passive meaning. In the second part, this paper summarizes the unique grammatical properties of UPUC, then points out that the UPUC are a benefit construction and the Affectee has the inalienable possessive relation with the Theme. Then the paper analyzes the derivational process of UPUC.