Let's pretend: casting the characters and setting the scene

Studies of the lexicon-syntax relationship in preschool children’s language have suggested that the role played by lexical structure may be weaker than in adult grammar. It has been proposed that verbs’ argument structures can be overridden by a preference for canonical sentence schemas, and by discourse pressure. It has also been claimed that children freely create unadultlike causative (*don’t fall me down) or anticausative forms (*my shorts undid) by overgeneralizing the application of lexical rules. This paper reports two experimental investigations of these issues. In