Probabilistic Constraints in Acquisition

This paper presents a connectionist model of verb argument structure assignment that relies on probabilistic information regarding particular verbs, as well as semantic information shared among several verbs. The model illustrates how co-occurrence relations among different levels of linguistic representation may interact in acquisition by contributing to the discovery of language specific well formedness constraints and coherent semantic subclasses of verbs. Both semantics and observed conditions of use contribute to the formation of semantic subclasses, which in turn determine the set of constructions in which particular verbs appear.