The argument expression of change-of-state verbs and pseudo-transitive verbs

Verbs Aspect and Argument Structure

Representing Verbs as Argument Concepts

Verbs play an important role in the understanding of natural language text. This paper studies the problem of abstracting the subject and object arguments of a verb into a set of noun concepts, known as the “argument concepts”. This set of concepts, whose size is parameterized, represents the finegrained semantics of a verb. For example, the object of “enjoy” can be abstracted into time, hobby ...

Psychological Aspects of Transitive Verbs I

It has previously been shown that transitive verbs are more difficult to recall than intransitive. Experiment I replicated this finding. Experiment II examined the associations to, and response latencies of, transitive and intransitive verbs. Latencies of responses did not differ, but the form class of responses was significantly different. Transitive verbs elicited more noun responses. It is s...

Nominal Verbs and Transitive Nouns: Vindicating Lexicalism*

The earliest generative work derived all nominalizations syntactically (Chomsky 1955-6, Lees 1960). Chomsky (1970) then argued that only -ing gerunds are derived syntactically, while all other types of event nominals, such as refutation, acceptance, refusal, are derived morphologically in the lexicon from bases that are unspecified between nouns and verbs. The suffix -ing was shown to serve bot...

Estonian Transitive Verbs and Object Case

This article discusses the nature of Estonian aspect and case, proposing an analysis of Estonian verbal aspect, aspectual case, and clausal aspect. The focus is on the interaction of transitive telic verbs (write, win) and aspectual case at the level of the functional structure. The main discussion concerns the relationships between aspect and the object case alternation. The data set comprises...