Early in acquisition children overgeneralize verbs to ungrammatical structures. The retreat from overgeneralization is linked to the acquisition of verb classes, the semantics of which constrain the structures in which a verb can appear (e.g., Pinker 1989; Ambridge, Pine & Rowland, 2012). How children learn these classes remains unclear. Some argue that distributional regularities in linguistic...

We investigate the English verbs climb and cut, cited as counterexamples to manner/result complementarity: the proposal that verbs lexicalize either manner or result meaning components, but not both. Once their lexicalized meaning is identified and distinguished from contextually determined elements of meaning, cut and climb conform to manner/result complementarity. We show that cut is basicall...

Delaying the appearance of a verb in a noun-verb dependency tends to increase processing difficulty at the verb; one explanation for this locality effect is decay and/or interference of the noun in working memory. Surprisal, an expectation-based account, predicts that delaying the appearance of a verb either renders it no more predictable or more predictable, leading respectively to a predictio...

The following properties characterize the contrastive verb focus construction in Vata. Morphology: the clause contains two copies of the verb. The verb in initial position carries special morphology associated with the construction (realized in Vata as a ‘construction’ tone). The verb in the clause looks and acts like any regular V. Order: The contrastively focused verb occurs in clause initial...

We investigated the processing of violations of the verb position in Dutch, in a group of healthy subjects, by measuring event-related potentials (ERPs) through electroencephalography (EEG). In Dutch, the base position of the verb is clause final, but in matrix clauses, the finite verb is in second position, a construction known as Verb Second. In embedded clauses, the finite verb remains in it...

one of the main dichotomies in syntactic analyses deals with the distinction between lexical and functional categories. functional categories gain in stature as the generative grammar moves ahead. they come into play in explaining the derivation stages of phrases and sentences. the present study critically evaluates different approaches to the role and function of one of these functional catego...

Abstract This paper investigates the production of Persian–English bilingual compound verbs (BCVs) type [VERB+VERB]. In this code-switched structure, a lexical verb from donor language English is combined with light native Persian. We tested hypothesis that in BCVs occupy nominal slots monolingual Persian complex predicates [NOMINAL+VERB]. Two methodologies were used. A conversational-corpus an...

Nominalizations in German Support Verb Constructions Angelika Storrer TU Dortmund ___________________________________________________________________________ Support verb constructions (SVC), such as to take a risk or to set into motion, are composed of a support verb (SV, e.g. take, set) and a predicative noun (PredN, e.g. risk, motion), which is – in most cases – a nominalization of a verb or...