Learnability and Cognition, new edition: The Acquisition of Argument Structure (Learning, Development, and Conceptual Change)

Excellent reading! Very useful!

A worthy sequel to "Language Learnability and Language Development" in which Steven Pinker closely examines how children learn which syntactic constructions verbs may appear in, when and where they overgeneralize, and how they recover from their errors of overgeneralization. He posits a fairly elaborate decomposition of verb meanings into elements of motion, causation, purpose, and type of object or material involved as the basis of his theory, building on previous work by Gruber and Jackendoff on the "Thematic Relations Hypothesis" that treats much of the syntactically relevant parts of verb meanings as built on the concept of motion, literal or metaphorical.

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本書では、子どもが言語習得を行う過程で生じる「過剰般化」をどのようにして削ぎ落としていくかという問題(ベイカーのパラドクス、あるいは否定証拠の欠如問題)に対して、ピンカーは動詞が有する意味構造に着目し、動詞に内在する意味を基にして、子どもは動詞の統語的な振る舞いを推測できると述べている。本書を読めば、動詞に秘められた無限の可能性に驚かれることであろう。動詞の意味構造や、構文交替現象(give A to B⇔ give B A)に興味がある人にお勧めの一冊である。