Serial Verbs in Finnish

Intonation of Finnish Verbs

A production experiment investigated the tonal shape of Finnish finite verbs in transitive sentences without narrow focus. Traditional descriptions of Finnish stating that nonfocused finite verbs do not receive accents were only partly supported. Verbs were found to have a consistently smaller pitch range than words in other word classes, but their pitch contours were neither flat nor explainab...

Serial Verbs and Serial Motion

1 How many events? A key observation about serial verb constructions (SVCs) is that they express a single, perhaps complex, event rather than a series of distinct events a single serial verb complex describes what is conceptualized as a single event: this is repeatedly reported to be a clear intuition of native speakers, and can be demonstrated through semantic analysis. It follows that a seria...

The Syntax-pragmatics Interface and Finnish Ditransitive Verbs

This paper presents an analysis of the ditransitive constructions in Finnish, a language with flexible word order. I argue that the base-generated order of Finnish ditransitive structures, which permit both direct object-indirect object (DO-IO) order and IO-DO order, is in fact DO-IO. According to my analysis, IO-DO order is generated by discourse-driven scrambling of the IO. These claims are s...

Linking Semantics and Syntax in Mandarin Serial Verbs

Data analysis of conceptual similarities of Finnish verbs

The study of the conceptual representations that underlie the use of language is a problem motivated from both a cognitive research point of view and that of construing language models for various language processing tasks. In this work, we organized 600 Finnish verbs using the SOM algorithm. Three experiments were conducted using di erent features to encode the verbs: morphosyntactic propertie...