Improved automatic text understanding requires detailed linguistic information about the words that comprise the text. Particularly crucial is the knowledge about predicates, typically verbs, which communicate both the event being expressed and how participants are related to the event. Although the field of natural language processing (NLP) has yet to develop a clear consensus on guidelines fo...

Presupposition relations between verbs are not very well covered in existing lexical semantic resources. We propose a weakly supervised algorithm for learning presupposition relations between verbs that distinguishes five semantic relations: presupposition, entailment, temporal inclusion, antonymy and other/no relation. We start with a number of seed verb pairs selected manually for each semant...

Abstract Task-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. The present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. To this purpose, an Oxford Placement Test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. The selecte...

Poverty of the stimulus (POS) studies, as noted by Hawkins (2001), contribute to the development and understanding of the SLA process. So as to establish the operation of UG in L2 acquisition, White (2003) offers two conditions to be met. First, the construction investigated should be underrepresented by the L2 input and secondly, the syntactic property should not be derived from the L1. The pr...

Natural language can be easily understood by everyone irrespective of their differences in age or region or qualification. The existence of a conceptual base that underlies all natural languages is an accepted claim as pointed out by Schank in his Conceptual Dependency (CD) theory. Inspired by the CD theory and theories in Indian grammatical tradition, we propose a new set of meaning primitives...

In this paper we give an account of the representation of Danish verbs in the semantic lexicon model, SIMPLE. Danish is a satellite-framed language where prepositions and adverbial particles express what in many other languages form part of the meaning of the verb stem. This aspect of Danish – as well as of the other Scandinavian languages challenges the borderlines of a universal, strictly mod...

Athapaskan languages comprise one of the largest, most geographically distributed, and most culturally diverse families in North America. Nevertheless, each daughter language features a set of classificatory verb stems which, semantically, focus less on signaling a relational predication than on some physical attribute of a prominent relational participant. Consequently, most consumption expres...

The present paper focuses on the Mandarin Intransitive keflexive Verbs. These verbs, such as zi-sha 'to commit suicide', and zi fen 'to burn oneself, are formed with a reflexive morpheme zi-'self' and a root verb. Take the verb zi-sha 'to commit suicide' for example, the reflexive morpheme contributes the reflexive meaning and the root verb sha 'to kill' contributes the meaning`to kill'; hence,...

The work presented in this paper explores a supervised method for learning a probabilistic model of a lexicon of VerbNet classes. We intend for the probabilistic model to provide a probability distribution of verb-class associations, over known and unknown verbs, including polysemous words. In our approach, training instances are obtained from an existing lexicon and/or from an annotated corpus...