Manipulating language models' training data to study syntactic constraint learning: the case of English passivization

Understand

Grammatical rules in natural languages are often characterized by exceptions.

• How do language learners learn these exceptions to otherwise general patterns? Here, we study this question through the case study of English passivization.
• While passivization is in general quite productive, there are cases where it cannot apply (cf.
• the following sentence is ungrammatical: *One hour was lasted by the meeting).