Young children’s use of unaccusative intransitives in novel verb experiments

The Distinction Between Unaccusative and Unergative Verbs in Turkish: An Offline and an Eye Tracking Study of Split Intransitivity

The Unaccusativity Hypothesis (UH) holds that intransitive verbs are divided into two broad classes, namely unaccusatives and unergatives. While there is evidence that the UH holds cross-linguistically, it is known that languages do not divide the intransitives into two uniform groups. We investigate the unaccusative-unergative distinction in Turkish by an offline grammaticality judgment task u...

Unaccusative and Unergative Verb Acquisition: Effects of Implicit, Explicit, and Mixed Oral Corrective Feedback

The use of the reflexive marker in Lusaamia

The present study examines the uses of the reflexive marker in Lusaamia, a Bantu language of Kenya. In addition to being a true reflexive, the reflexive verbal prefix is also used in indirect reflexive constructions, as a middle voice / stative marker, and also to indicate when an action is being done for no particular purpose (when used in conjunction with a causative marker). I show that unac...

English Resultatives Revisited

This paper focusses on the English adjectival resultative construction, as exempliied in examples (1)-(4). (1) John hammered the metal at. (2) The river froze solid. (3) The dog barked itself hoarse. (4) The dog barked the neighbours awake. Result predication occurs with both transitive and intransitive verbs. In the transitive case, the result state is predicated of the object (1). For intrans...

Children’s use of argument structure, meta-knowledge of the lexicon, and extra-linguistic contextual cues in inferring meanings of novel verbs

Verbs are the centerpiece of the sentence, and understanding of verb meanings is essential for language acquisition. Yet verb learning is said to be more challenging than noun learning for young children for several reasons. First, while nouns tend to denote concrete objects, which are perceptually stable over time, verbs tend to refer to action events, which are temporally ephemeral, and the b...