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<Paper uid="W04-1310">
  <Title>69 On a possible role for pronouns in the acquisition of verbs</Title>
  <Section position="3" start_page="69" end_page="69" type="intro">
    <SectionTitle>
1 Introduction
</SectionTitle>
    <Paragraph position="0"> Pronouns stand for central elements of adult conceptual schemesas Quine pointed out, pronouns are the basic media of reference (Quine, 1980, p. 13). In fact, most syntactic subjects in spontaneous spoken adult discourse are pronouns (Chafe, 1994), and English-speaking mothers often begin with a high-frequency pronoun when speaking to their children, with you and I occurring most frequently (e.g., Valian, 1991). Parents use the inanimate pronoun it far more frequently as the subject of an intransitive sentence than of an transitive one (Cameron-Faulkner et al., 2003, p. 860). As Cameron-Faulkner et al. note, this suggests that intransitive sentences are used more often than transitives for talking about inanimate objects. It also suggests, we would note, that the use of the inanimate pronoun might be a cue for the child as to whether the verb is transitive or intransitive. Similarly, Lieven and Pine (Lieven et al., 1997; Pine and Lieven, 1993) have suggested that pronouns may form the fixed element in lexically-specific frames acquired by early language learnerssoto-speak pronoun islands something like Tomasellos (1992) verb islands.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="1"> Many researchers have suggested that word-word relations in general, and syntactic frames specifically, are particularly important for learning verbs (e.g., Gleitman, 1990; Gleitman and Gillette, 1995). What has not been studied, to our knowledge, is how pronouns specifically may help children learn verbs by virtue of systematic co-occurrences. We have begun to address this issue in two steps. First, we measured the statistical regularities among the uses of pronouns and verbs in a large corpus of parent and child speech. We found strong regularities in the use of pronouns with several broad classes of verbs.</Paragraph>
    <Paragraph position="2"> Second, using the corpus data, we trained a connectionist network to guess which verb belongs in a sentence given only the subject and object, demonstrating that it is possible in principle for a statistical learner to use the regularities in parental speech to deduce information about an unknown verb.</Paragraph>
  </Section>
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