A hypothesized learning procedure involving the use by children of the syntactic frames in which a novel verb appears (i.e., the number of associated noun phrases and their syntactic arrangements) to narrow in on the kind of meaning it is likely to express. Thus, the child would infer that a novel verb, say, a ‘gorp’, has a different kind of meaning if it appears in ‘Mary gorped the book on the table’ (= put? threw?) than if it appears in ‘Mary gorped that the book is on the table’ (= thought? saw?).
See Performance (linguistics), Reading comprehension, Semantic bootstrapping