Learning Verbs Without Arguments: The Problem of Raising Verbs

This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g. seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs, these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional properties with raising verbs, but the two verb classes differ in important structural properties. The central problem addressed here is that of how a learner would distinguish raising verbs from control verbs, given their partial overlap in distribution. A series of experiments with English-speaking adults using a fill-in-the-blank questionnaire revealed two main types of cues that led participants to distinguish the two verb classes: inanimate NPs and semantically empty subjects (its raining) yielded the highest proportion of raising verb responses from adults, while animate NPs paired with eventive predicates yielded a high rate of control verb responses. On the basis of these results, suggestions are made as to how one should study the learning of these verbs in children.This research was supported by an NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship at the Institute for Research in Cognitive Science. I owe many, many thanks to Lila and Henry Gleitman, John Trueswell and the whole cast of participants in the Cheese seminar at IRCS during 2000–2002. In addition I would like to thank Ash Asudeh, Robin Clark, Jeffrey Lidz, Elliott Moreton, Julien Musolino, Anna Papafragou, Carson Schutze and an anonymous reviewer for comments and suggestions. I also thank audiences at University of North Carolina, University of Delaware, UCLA, Penn Linguistics Colloquium 26, Chicago Linguistic Society 38 and the CUNY Graduate Center for stimulating discussions. All errors and shortcomings are my own.