Syntax and Statistical Learning in the Language Development of the English Dative Alternation

Abstract

This paper examines the language development of dative alternation in English, double object (DO) dative and prepositional object (PO) dative. It has been reported (cf. Gropen et al. (1989)) that children or speakers with insufficient linguistic knowledge tend to make errors in or over-generate dative alternation. Pinker (1989) took a semantics- based approach to the acquisition of argument structure proposing the broad-range rule and the narrow range verb classes. This paper takes an alternative syntax/UG-based approach to the issue at hand, arguing that the functional category Applicative plays an indispensible role in introducing a DO dative, thus attributing the use of the latter to the development of the former. We further argue that the development of the functional category Appl(icative) emerges from statistical learning of verb classes while children experience syntactic distributions of verbs in English.