Visible verbs: Early verb generalisation from a network theory perspective

By investigating which verbs are generalised early, Sethuraman and Goodman (2004) identified
five key properties from the literature: verbs that are highly frequent and semantically ‘light’,
verbs that co-occur with pronouns, verbs that appear consistently in a particular construction and
verbs that occur in many diverse constructions. The first factor, frequency, confounds the other
four factors. An obvious question is why these particular verbs are generalised early, particularly
as the last two factors of syntactic consistency and diversity seem contradictory, at first glance.

However, these factors fall out effortlessly when early child speech is represented as a word co-
occurrence network (Sachs 1983; MacWhinney 2000). The resulting typology of the network is
characteristic of a hubterranean ‘small world’ network, formed by optimising the type frequency
of a word and the cohesion between word co-occurrences i.e. the transitional probability of a
word pair. The fundamental properties of this type of network are the truncated power law
distributions of token frequency (Ferrer i Cancho and Solé 2001a), type frequency (Ferrer i
Cancho and Solé 2001b; Steele submitted) and the link length between nodes in the network,
which in this model relates to the transitional probability of a word pair co-occurring adjacently
within a sentence (Mathias and Gopal 2001; Kasturirangan 1999; Steele submitted).

Interestingly, the most ‘visible’ words in the network are hub words. Hub words possess two key
characteristics: they are highly frequent and have a high type frequency (Ferrer i Cancho and
Solé 2001b). This observation correlates with the first two factors of early verb generalisation,
since semantically light verbs have a high type frequency. Pronouns may also be identified by
their high token and type frequency. Thus, verbs that are hubs or linked to hubs are generalised
early since they are easier to recognise within the network (see Boyd and Goldberg forthcoming:
22).

The two final factors of syntactic consistency and diversity relate to the two constraints operating
on the word co-occurrence network. Extending these constraints to the verb-construction sub-part
network, syntactic consistency is a product of maximizing cohesion between a verb and the
construction in which it appears. In the same way that attention to transitional probabilities aids
the segmentation of an artificial language, in that frequently co-occurring elements are more
easily identifiable as a chunk (see Gómez 2002, 2006), verbs that occur highly frequently in a
given construction are more easily identified. Furthermore, in this verb-construction sub-part
network, verbs that are found in many diverse constructions have a high type frequency. As a
consequence of this characteristic, syntactically diverse verbs are more easily located within the
network and, as such, are generalised early.

In sum, the five factors associated with early verb generalisation relate to the characteristics and
constraints on the formation of a hubterranean small world network e.g. the word co-occurrence
network and the verb-construction sub-part network. Therefore, general network principles are
implicated in early verb generalisation.

References
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Steele, J.L. (submitted). A hubterranean view of syntax: An analysis of linguistic form through
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