This chapter summarises research on how children avoid overgeneralizations of verb argument structure, focussing on the transitive-causative construction (e.g. *I’m dancing it [c.f. I’m making it dance]). It then presents some new data that bear on this issue: diary data of these types of… read more
This chapter reports an experimental study in which children aged 4;9–6;1 were taught two novel constructions with meanings of enabling/helping and preventing/stopping with OSV and VOS word order. The aim was to test Tomasello’s (2003) proposal that children form abstract constructions by… read more