The acquisition of syntactic structure animacy and thematic alignment / Misha Becker.

Includes bibliographies and index.

Cover; Half Title; Series Page; Title Page; Imprints; Contents; List of figures; List of tables; Acknowledgements; 1 Introduction; 2 syntax of displacing and non-displacing predicates; 2.1 Raising-to-subject and subject control; 2.1.1 The structure of raising; 2.1.2 The structure of control; 2.1.3 Raising-to-object and object control: expect vs. persuade; 2.2 Tough-constructions; 2.2.1 Structure of tough-constructions; 2.2.2 Related constructions; 2.2.3 Structure of control adjective constructions; 2.3 Unaccusatives and unergatives; 2.3.1 A semantically-driven syntactic distinction

2.3.2 Formal representations of unaccusativity2.4 Passive; 2.4.1 Structure of passive; 2.4.2 A different displacing predicate; 2.5 The learning problem; 3 Argument hierarchies; 3.1 The Animacy Hierarchy; 3.1.1 Linguistic effects of animacy: morphosyntax and argument structure; 3.1.2 Animacy, agency, degree of control, and teleological capability; 3.2 The Thematic Hierarchy; 3.2.1 A brief history of thematic roles; 3.2.2 Formal accounts of thematic role assignment; 3.3 Animacy and thematic roles in opaque constructions; 3.3.1 Raising constructions across languages

3.3.2 Tough-constructions across languages3.4 Properties of derived subjects; 3.4.1 Argument structure universals, and the ``problem'' of ergativity; 3.5 A learning procedure; 3.6 Summary; 4 Animacy and adult sentence processing; 4.1 Relative clauses; 4.1.1 Reduced relative clauses; 4.1.2 Subject vs. object relative clauses; 4.2 Processing of raising and control; 4.2.1 Sentence completion; 4.2.2 Novel verb learning; 4.3 Psycholinguistic effects of animacy on production of the passive; 4.4 Summary; 5 Animacy and children's language; 5.1 Development of the animacy concept

5.1.1 Featural properties of animates5.1.2 Behavioral properties of animates; 5.1.3 Intentional properties of animates; 5.1.4 Further conceptual change; 5.1.5 Agency; 5.1.6 Summary; 5.2 Children's use of animacy in learning argument structure; 5.2.1 The power and limitations of semantic bootstrapping; 5.2.2 The power and limitations of Syntactic Bootstrapping; 5.3 Children's acquisition of displacing predicates; 5.3.1 Acquisition of raising and control; 5.3.2 Acquisition of tough-constructions; 5.3.3 Acquisition of unaccusatives; 5.3.4 Animacy and the acquisition of the passive; 5.4 Summary

6 Modeling the acquisition of displacing predicates6.1 Displacing predicates in the input to children; 6.2 Computational modeling of language acquisition; 6.2.1 Learning as generalization; 6.2.2 Restricting the hypothesis space; 6.3 Hierarchical Bayesian Models; 6.3.1 A model of learning raising and control; 6.3.2 A model of learning tough-constructions; 6.3.3 A model of learning unaccusatives and unergatives; 6.4 Summary of modeling results; 7 Conclusions and origins; 7.1 Origins of knowledge of the animacy distinction; 7.2 Origins of knowledge of linguistic animacy and displacing predicates

7.3 Further questions

This book explains how children's early ability to distinguish between animate and inanimate nouns helps them acquire complex sentence structure.

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