When children learn a language, they soon are able to make surprisingly subtledistinctions: donate them a book sounds odd, for example, even though give them a book isperfectly natural. How can this happen, given that children do not confine themselves to thesentence types they hear, and are usually not corrected when they speak ungrammatically? StevenPinker resolves this paradox in a detailed theory of how children acquire argumentstructure.In tackling a learning paradox that has challenged scholars for morethan a decade, Pinker synthesizes a vast literature in linguistics and psycholinguistics andoutlines explicit theories of the mental representation, learning, and development of verb meaningand verb syntax. The new theory that he describes has some surprising implications for the relationbetween language and thought.Pinkers solution provides insight into such key questions as, When dochildren generalize and when do they stick with what they hear? What is the rationale behindlinguistic constraints? How is the syntax of predicates and arguments related to their semantics What is a possible word meaning? Do languages force their speakers to construe the world in certainways? Why does childrens language seem different from that of adults?Learnability and Cognition is included in the series Learning, Development, and ConceptualChange, edited by Lila Gleitman, Susan Carey, Elissa Newport, and Elizabeth Spelke.A Bradford Book In tackling a learning paradox that has challenged scholars for more than a decade, Pinker synthesizes a vast literature in linguistics and psycholinguistics and outlines explicit theories of the mental representation, learning, and development of verb meaning and verb syntax.
