Removal verbs and locative alternations in Spanish

Theta-Head Binding in German Locative Alternations

Melodic alternations in Spanish

This article describes how the tonal elements of two common Spanish intonation contours –the falling statement and the low-rising-falling request– align with the segmental string in broad-focus utterances differing in number of prosodic words. Using an imitation-and-completion task, we show that (i) the last stressed syllable of the utterance, traditionally viewed as carrying the ‘nuclear’ acce...

Syntax and semantics in the acquisition of locative verbs.

Children between the ages of three and seven occasionally make errors with locative verbs like pour and fill, such as *I filled water into the glass and *I poured the glass with water (Bowerman, 1982). To account for this pattern of errors, and for how they are eventually unlearned, we propose that children use a universal linking rule called object affectedness: the direct object corresponds t...

Cross-linguistic Differences in Children’s Syntax for Locative Verbs

Learning a verb’s meaning and its associated syntactic structures pose a number of difficult problems for a learner. However, it is widely assumed that there are consistent correspondences between verb meanings and verb syntax, and that knowledge of these correspondences may provide important help to the learner (Gleitman 1990; Grimshaw 1981; Landau & Gleitman 1985; Pinker 1989; Gropen et al. 1...

The Polymorphism of Verbs Exhibiting Middle Transitive Alternations in English

1 Current approaches Over the last fteen years, following Perlmutter and Postal's work (1983), there has been constant interest in the problem raised by transitivity alternations. In their work Perlmutter and Postal argued that the single argument of intransitive verbs may either be generated as an object of the verb (unaccusative verbs) or as a subject (unergative verbs) (cf. Bassac, 1997). A ...