Learning transitivity schemas: The role of the number of nominals and word order

Abstract

The ability to understand and produce basic transitivity constructions serves as the foundation for human grammatical skills. While every clause or sentence in any given language follows a transitivity pattern, there is significant cross-linguistic variation in the specific formal elements used. Certain languages primarily rely on distributed cues, such as the number and ordering of noun phrases, while others prefer local devices like causative morphology or case markers. Extensive research has been conducted on the role played by the number and position of argument noun phrases in comprehending simple transitive sentences. This article offers a comprehensive review of the available evidence, covering typically-developing and monolingual populations, various languages, and different theoretical approaches. It also highlights gaps in the existing literature and provides suggestions for future investigations.

Keywords

• transitivity
• distributed cues
• word order
• noun phrases
• syntactic bootstrapping
• language development