English Explanatory Dictionary

Baker's paradox

English dictionary entry

Meanings

name
  1. The apparent paradox that children learning English encounter many sentences amenable to dative shift (e.g. "give the book to me" → "give me the book") but apparently have no way to learn that this is not possible with certain verbs (e.g. "*donate me the book" is unacceptable), and yet rarely make this kind of error.

Word forms

Baker's paradox

Etymology

Named after the linguist C. L. Baker.

This entry uses open data from Wiktionary (CC BY-SA/GFDL). Word forms are used for search and are not indexed as separate pages.
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