The effect of distributional information on the categorization of unaccusativity

Abstract

We investigate how Mandarin-speaking children categorize novel intransitive verbs as unergative and unaccusative using distributional information in language input. Using a Word2vec model, we examined whether distributional cues in sentences influence the categorization of novel verbs. Our results indicated that the distributional representations of novel verbs in some sentence types exhibited closer similarities to real unergatives, and the others closer to real unaccusatives, showing a distinct effect of distributional cues on verb categorization. Subsequently, we examined children’s sensitivity to the distributional information in a few sentence types. The results demonstrated that distributional cues in these sentence types were useful for children to categorize novel verbs, since the categorization linked to verb meanings was reinforced by sentence types in which novel verbs occur. These findings may explain atypical behaviours of some Mandarin formal and double-syllable verbs that previous theoretical frameworks have found challenging to explain.