  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. All data
and code are available at http://megaattitude.io.
