Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

In the domain of Linguistics, the categories of intransitive verbs, namely the unaccusativity, is a long-debated topic. Unaccusativity suggests that intransitive verbs can be divided into unergative and unaccusative verbs, based on their subjects’ similarity to the subjects of transitive verbs or the objects of transitive verbs. Previous research has discussed how the meaning of verbs can decide the unaccusativity of intransitive verbs, but the meanings of verbs alone still cannot predict the unaccusativity of intransitive verbs cross-linguistically. Moreover, while the sentential environment can have an impact on the categories of intransitive verbs, previous studies did not investigate how the environment plays a role in the categories. This paper examines this issue from child language acquisition. I select a few sentential environments in the children’s corpus of Mandarin and conduct a qualitative analysis that suggests that these sentence environments indeed possess the properties of either category. In a child acquisition experiment, I show that when the category of verbal meanings and sentential environments align, the categorization of verbs is the most obvious and efficient. I introduce the concept of ‘compatibility’ to describe this relationship between verb meaning and the sentential environment. These results suggest that speakers can infer the unaccusativity of verbs from a variety of sentence environments in language that may not be directly linked to the concept of unaccusativity, and the concept of ‘compatibility’ in language environment is a crucial factor in the categories/categorization of unaccusativity.