Acquisition of Verb Categories

The paper was delivered as a commentary upon Michael Brent's presentation "Acquisition of Subcategorization Frames Using Aggregated Evidence from Local Syntactic Cues" to the Conference on Acquisition of the Mental Lexicon, IRCS, University of Pennsylvania, January 1992. It argues in support of using statistical techniques like Brent's to minimize the consequences of errors and misanalyses, but concludes that the case for believing that children acquire subcategorizations and other aspects of syntax on the basis of semantic and contextual cues remains strong.