Elizabeth and Jeff on Syntactic Bootstrapping

Encyclopedia entry on syntactic bootstrapping in the acquisition of verb meaning.

New in the 3rd edition of the International Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, "Syntactic Boostrapping" from Elizabeth Swanson and Jeff Lidz, abstracted below. 

In syntactic bootstrapping, children draw on syntactic information to constrain their hypotheses about word meanings. We review evidence for syntactic bootstrapping, focusing primarily on the acquisition of verb meanings. For verbs describing physical actions, children can use the argument structure from event descriptions to zero in on the verb meaning. For attitude verbs, which refer to mental states, the syntactic distribution is informative about their semantics. By making use of systematic syntax-semantics correspondences, syntactic bootstrapping provides a foothold for word learning when cues from the physical world are underinformative.