Acquisition of verb representations:

Generative approaches and constructional approaches differ with respect to the view of how young children acquire verb representation. In this study, on the basis of four children’s longitudinal corpus data of Get across the year between ages of 2 and 3, I show that they acquired different forms of Get in different stages of this period and that they acquired the different forms of Get in a variety of structures gradually and at different rates in a case-by-case fashion. I also demonstrate that the children’s acquisition of the different forms of Get is tightly related to the frequencies of the forms in the mothers’ input. However, I further show that in some cases aside from the frequencies in the mothers’ input other factors such as the complexity of the structure/meaning came into play in their acquisition of the different forms of Get. The data, therefore, overall favor constructional approaches over generative approaches to children’s acquisition of verb representation.