Linguistics, University of Kansas. VERB ACQUISITION IN ENGLISH AND JAPANESE*

and adult uses of the verbs ask, tell, look and see. A later study by Deidre Gentner (1978) showed that children often confuse the verbs mix and stir. Melissa Bowerman (1978) reported that her daughters overextended words in unusual ways, including the verbs kick and open. Despite these early observations, most acquisition theorists contend that children are able to construct fairly accurate representations of verb meaning. Pinker (1984:28) asserts, ‘Presumably children encode most reliably the parts of sentences whose words they understand individually, and the whole sentences most of whose words they understand. This is a plausible variant of the assumption that children know the meaning of every word in the input sentences before syntax acquisition begins.... ’ In a later book Pinker adds ‘The simplest possible assumption about how verbs are learned is that verb meanings correspond to concepts given by the child’s perceptual and cognitive mechanisms, and that to acquire them, the child simply has to map a sound uttered in the presence of an exemplar of a concept onto the mental representation of that concept ’ (1989:253). Even Tomasello, who otherwise endorses a larger role for language input than Pinker, asserts that ‘Knowing the object labels and their appropriate referents must surely be a big help in this situation even if the child knows no syntax. This is quite simply because she can see the actual situation and who is doing what to whom (a syntax of action, as it were), which provides soli