Verb Acquisition in English and Other Languages
- 1 Chengdu Textile College, Chengdu, China
Abstract
Massive researches and experiments are attempting to explore the exact process of verb acquisition of child learners at an early age (1 to 3 years old). Therefore, the “syntactic bootstrapping method” is introduced and explicated in this paper, trying to illuminate whether children used syntax to learn verbs in English. Apart from English, other languages with totally different grammatical structures are also being discussed as well: regarding massive ellipsis of noun arguments (NPs) in Mandarin, researches and experiments on the acquisition of verbs in Mandarin ought to be carried out more in the near future. The purpose of this article is to give a brief introduction of word acquisition, especially verb acquisition with linguistic syntactic information; moreover, some practical hints of verb acquisition are also presented within the paper.
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