The semantics of the transitive causative construction: Evidence from a forced-choice pointing study with adults and children

Abstract

AbstractAdults and children aged 3;0–3;6 were presented with ungrammatical NVN uses of intransitive-only verbs (e.g., *Bob laughed Wendy) and asked – by means of a forced-choice pointing task – to select either a causal construction-meaning interpretation (e.g., ‘Bob made Wendy laugh’) or a non-causal sentence-repair interpretation (e.g., ‘Bob laughed at Wendy’). Both age groups chose casual construction-meaning interpretations on at least 82% of trials, regardless of (a) verb frequency and (b) the construction used for grammatical control/filler trials (transitive – e.g., Bob moved Wendy – or intransitive – e.g., Wendy moved). These findings constitute support for cognitive linguistic approaches under which verb argument structure constructions have meanings in and of themselves and – further – suggest that construction meaning is sufficiently powerful as to overrule verb meaning when the two conflict.