Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

This paper has three goals: (i) to present a partial description of the intricate semantic selectional restrictions on the noun phrases in what we call here the Causal Have Construction (CHC), (ii) to show that four and five-year old children are sensitive to these selectional restrictions without much exposure to CHCs, and (iii) to discuss some implications of these findings for theories of language and language acquisition. Our interest in this topic derives from the possibilities it opens up for a deeper understanding of the organization of the mental structures that give rise to these semantic selectional facts, an understanding which we believe implicates an intricate and nontrivial interaction between grammatical and conceptual knowledge.