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Negative Knowledge from Positive Evidence

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 January 2026

Charles Yang
Charles Yang*
Affiliation:
University of Pennsylvania
*
Department of Linguistics and Computer and Information Science, Institute for Research in Cognitive Science, 619 Williams Hall, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, PA 19081 [charles.yang@ling.upenn.edu]
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Abstract

Why can't we say the asleep cat? There is a class of adjectives in English, all of which start with a schwa (e.g. afraid, alone, asleep, away, etc.), that cannot be used attributively in a prenominal position. A frequently invoked strategy for the acquisition of such negative constraints in language is to use indirect negative evidence. For instance, if the learner consistently observes paraphrases such as the cat that is asleep, then the conspicuous absence of the asleep cat may be a clue for its ungrammaticality (Boyd & Goldberg 2011). This article provides formal and quantitative evidence from child-directed English data to show that such learning strategies are untenable. However, the child can rely on positive data to establish the distributional similarities between this apparently idiosyncratic class of adjectives and locative particles (e.g. here, over, out, etc.) and prepositional phrases. With the use of an independently motivated principle of generalization (Yang 2005), the ungrammaticality of attributive usage can be effectively extended to the adjectives in question.

Keywords

language acquisitionindirect negative evidencedistributional learningcorpus linguisticsexceptionscomputational linguisticsconstructions

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Type
Research Article
Information
Language , Volume 91 , Issue 4 , December 2015 , pp. 938 - 953
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 Linguistic Society of America

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