Frequency, Acceptability, and Selection: A case study of clause-embedding [article]

Aaron Steven White, Kyle Rawlins
2020 arXiv   pre-print
We investigate the relationship between the frequency with which verbs are found in particular subcategorization frames and the acceptability of those verbs in those frames, focusing in particular on subordinate clause-taking verbs, such as "think", "want", and "tell". We show that verbs' subcategorization frame frequency distributions are poor predictors of their acceptability in those frames---explaining, at best, less than 1/3 of the total information about acceptability across the
more » ... and, further, that common matrix factorization techniques used to model the acquisition of verbs' acceptability in subcategorization frames fare only marginally better. All data and code are available at http://megaattitude.io.
arXiv:2004.04106v1 fatcat:uavcn6u5zvbabizoudrmoxusga