Constrained Flexibility in the Extension of Novel Causative Verbs

0. Introduction Whenever we learn a novel word, whatever its grammatical category, what we are learning is a label for a whole category of things in the world. The word dog, for example, refers not to an individual dog, but to the whole set of dog-like things in the world. Likewise, the word jump refers not to a single instance of jumping, but to an entire category of jumping events. A large literature has grown up around the kinds of categories that children assign to novel nouns, asking, for example, whether a novel count noun refers to a particular individual, to a basic level category, or to a superordinate category (e.g. Markman 1993, Waxman 1990). The corresponding questions have not been asked, however, about novel verbs, i.e. what categories of events a novel verb can be extended to include. It is well established that there are systematic regularities in the mapping between verb meaning and verb syntax, such that verbs that refer to similar event types, i.e. verbs that have similar meanings, can occur in similar sentence structures (e.g. Carter 1976, Gruber 1965, Jackendoff 1990, Levin 1993). We know, for example, that only verbs that label a change of state can occur in the so-called causative-inchoative alternation, illustrated by the sentences in (1). Note that the verb bounce can be used both in a transitive frame (1a) and in an unaccusative intransitive frame (1b), but that hit cannot (2). The discrepancy between these two patterns of use is due to the fact that only bounce labels some change of state undergone by the ball; on the contrary, in (2a) it’s Sammy that does the hitting, not the ball.