Proceedings of the Annual Meeting of the Cognitive Science Society

Intransitive verbs in human language can be subcategorized into at least two linguistic categories, unaccusative and unergative verbs. The categorization of these verbs has been a subject of debate, with Projectional approaches emphasizing the role of verb semantics and Constructional approaches highlighting the importance of the sentence context. We utilize a word2vec model to capture the environmental influence on verb semantics, providing evidence that supports both approaches. Our results demonstrate that the categorization of Unaccusativity for new verbs can be influenced by the sentence context in which they appear, and the frequency of verbs in specific contexts also plays a significant role. Additionally, through a child language acquisition experiment, we show that the sentence environment has a significant impact on the categorization of Unaccusativity when the semantics of new verbs are provided. These findings suggest that both approaches have merit, highlighting the psychological universality of Unaccusativity across languages.