The structure and acquisition of English dative constructions

We present evidence that children acquire English datives, verb-particle constructions,put-locatives, and causative/perceptual constructions all as a group. Our findings favor a parametric model of acquisition in which the acquired knowledge is not construction-specific; and they favor analyses in which all the constructions belong to a single syntactic class. On the basis of our results, we argue that acquisition of the entire class depends on the acquisition of two parametric properties. One property allows the grammar to generate double object datives, causative/perceptual constructions, put-locatives, and V-NP-Particle constructions. V-Particle-NP constructions and to-datives depend on the combination of the first property with a second property.