Actuality bias in verb learning: The case of sublexically modal transfer verbs

The study investigates semantic development of sublexically modal verbs of transfer, throw and send, in English-speaking children. For adults, sublexical modality of these verbs can be seen in the fact that the subevent of transfer of the object to the recipient need not take place in the actual world, e.g. Mary sent/threw a book to John does not entail a successful transfer of the book to John. Yet in two experiments (Experiment 1: 3–4 year-olds, N = 59; Experiment 2: 3–6 year olds, N = 120) young English-speaking children often misinterpreted Mary sent a book to John as entailing successful transfer. We show that such non-adultlike interpretations were present despite the children’s conceptual ability to entertain possible worlds. We propose that children may initially construct verb meanings on the basis of actual events, and later adjust them to include a modal component.

Match, mismatch, and envisioning transfer events

Prior studies suggest that language users perform motoric simulations when construing action sentences and that verbs and constructions each contribute to simulation-based representation (Glenberg & Kaschak 2002; Richardson et al. 2003; Bergen et al. 2007; Bergen & Wheeler 2010). This raises the possibility that motorically grounded verb and construction meanings can interact during sentence understanding. In this experiment, we use the action-sentence compatibility effect methodology to investigate how a verb’s lexical-class membership, constructional context, and constructional bias modulate motor simulation effects. Stimuli represent two classes of transfer verbs and two constructions that encode transfer events, Ditransitive and Oblique Goal (Goldberg 1995). Findings reveal two kinds of verb-construction interactions. First, verbs in their preferred construction generate stronger simulation effects overall than those in their dispreferred construction. Second, verbs that entail change of possession generate strong motor-simulation effects irrespective of constructional context, while those entailing causation of motion exert such effects only when enriched up to change-of-possession verbs in the semantically mismatched Ditransitive context. We conclude that simulation effects are not isolable to either verbs or constructions but instead arise from the interplay of verb and construction meaning.

Semantic/pragmatic factors affecting the salience of transfer verb arguments

Rohde et al. (2006) showed that, for transfer verbs, the salience of the recipient argument is a function of the particular coherence relation posited by participants. Using a priming paradigm with transfer verbs and occupation-denoting NPs in isolated sentences, we find that participants are sensitive to the lexical properties of the transfer verb itself as measured by the relative salience of the associated transfer verb arguments. Alternatively, using a sentence completion paradigm—a more strategic task in which participants are guided by discourse-level features—we find participants are sensitive instead to the coherence relations of the relevant event, replicating Rohde et al. (2006). Our findings support the notion that coherence relations drive the interpretation of multi-sentence discourses while sentences considered in isolation are guided by particular features of the linguistic context.

Semantic and Pragmatic Motivations for Constructional Preferences

A select group of transfer verbs can enter into four different constructions: the ditransitive construction ( He provided John the money), the prepositional-dative construction ( He provided the money to John), a construction with a prepositional theme ( He provided John with the money), and a construction with a recipient realized by a for-phrase ( He provided the money for John). In this article, the authors take a close look at three such verbs: provide, supply, and present. Corpus analysis shows that these three verbs display different structural preferences with respect to the for-, to-, and with-patterns. To explain these preferences, the study investigates pragmatic principles (following Mukherjee on provide) and the role played by semantic factors. An examination of the semantics of the verbs and the lexically motivated constructional semantics of the to, for, and with-patterns shows (a) that the three constructions are not interchangeable and (b) that the preferential differences among the three verbs find an explanation in the compatibility between lexical and constructional semantics. The description is mainly based on data from the British National Corpus.