Frequency, acceptability, and selection: A case study of clause-embedding

Abstract

We investigate the relationship between the frequency with which verbs are found in-particular subcategorization frames and the acceptability of those verbs in those frames, focusing in -particular on subordinate clause-taking verbs, such as think, want, and tell. We show that verbs' subcategorization frame frequency distributions are poor predictors of their acceptability in those frames-explaining, at best, less than 1/3 of the total information about acceptability across the lexicon-and, further, that common matrix factorization techniques used to model the acquisition of verbs' acceptability in subcategorization frames fare only marginally better.