Input and Learnability: Direct-Object Omissibility in English

Null objects in child language: Syntax and the lexicon

“…] This result may thus be seen as strengthening the case for a syntactically driven acquisition mechanism as one determinant of the acquisition of argument structure. (Ingham, 1993(Ingham, /1994 However, his results also show a specific form of lexical creativity: children in his study favour DO omission beyond their exposure to it. The children who only heard the transitive presentation gave 19% omission responses, and the group who heard it being omitted 50% of the time produced 64% omissions.…”

“…However, it is unclear how a child acquires and represents optional transitivity in a fully creative system; Ingham (1993Ingham ( /1994. Specifically, in (2), what does the child have to learn to master the intuition that the object of eat is omissible but that the object of the equally transitive verb devour is not?…”

“…While this research has been very productive (Grimshaw, 1990;Pustejovski, 1996, and others), the actual boundaries of arbitrariness remain an empirical issue. Although optional transitivity has some aspectual conditioning (Tenny, 1994;Levin, 2000), object omissibility cannot be reliably predicted on this basis, since verbs of the same aspectual class allow variation in their transitivity patterns, as shown in (4) and (5); Ingham (1993Ingham ( /1994.…”

“…b. Mary packed (her suitcase) in 10 minutes. (Ingham, 1993(Ingham, /1994 Since optionality remains idiosyncratic, it has to be acquired by a conservative learning mechanism. Ingham (1993Ingham ( /1994) examined children's patterns of object omission with transitive verbs.…”

“…(Ingham, 1993(Ingham, /1994 Since optionality remains idiosyncratic, it has to be acquired by a conservative learning mechanism. Ingham (1993Ingham ( /1994) examined children's patterns of object omission with transitive verbs. He noted that while strongly conservative theories of verb learning cannot account for the facts, lexical overgeneralizations only represent a small proportion of the child data.…”