Assignment 1: Verb Learning

Posted Thursday October 1st, due Thursday October 8th.

This written assignment is based on articles by Lila Gleitman and Steven Pinker on how children might exploit connections between verb meanings and verb syntax in order to learn aspects of their native language. You will have read and written about these articles by the time we discuss them in class, so you will be especially well-prepared to participate in the discussion.

1. Summarize what a child can (and cannot) learn about verb meanings using Gleitman's "Syntactic Bootstrapping" approach. Does this approach make it possible to learn the fine details of verb meanings, or only very general properties. Provide examples where appropriate.
2. Is there anything extra that a child could learn using Pinker's "Semantic Boostrapping" approach? Does this approach disagree with Gleitman with respect to what information the learner is able to extract from his/her environment? Provide examples where appropriate.
3. Are these two approaches incompatible with one another, or could they be usefully combined? Justify your answer.

Reading guidelines. Both of the assigned readings on this topic are relevant to this assignment, but you should look in particular at the following sections: Pinker pp.383-388, pp.395-403, Gleitman pp.23 onwards (part II).

Writing guidelines. A good answer will contain carefully presented arguments, together with justification for these arguments in the form of examples/evidence etc. Vague claims are always extremely hard to evaluate, and are scientifically not particularly useful. You are strongly encouraged to use a word processor to write your answer - this makes it much easier to review and edit your answers, which you should always expect to do.