People associate certain behaviors with certain social groups. These stereotypical beliefs consist of both accurate and inaccurate associations. Using large-scale, data-driven methods with social media as a context, we isolate stereotypes by using verbal expression. Across four social categories—gender, age, education level, and political orientation—we identify words and phrases that lead peop...

I propose an analysis of verb phrases called Ground Promotion constructions (cf. McIntyre (2007)) or involving ’unpredicated particles’ (cf. Levin and Sells (2009)) at the syntaxsemantics interface. The interface framework combines principles of Minimalist Syntax and Distributed Morphology with Discourse Representation Theory. The analysis follows the hypothesis of a parallelism between the ver...

The present article argues that the idea of morphology-driven syntax carries over to first-language acquisition. Morphology encodes properties of functional categories, i.e. particular features and feature values that must be set according to the target (adult) language during the acquisition process. In agreement with previous findings concerning the acquisition of functional categories in the...

Portuguese dictionaries lack information about the kind of phrases or clauses a verb goes with. In this paper we describe how this information can be computationally learned from an automatically tagged corpus with almost 10,000,000 words. Loglinear modeling for categorical data will be used to analyze and automatically identify the subcatego-rization dependencies. Loglinear models were also us...

We discuss the characteristics and behaviour of two parallel classes of verbs in two Romance languages, French and Portuguese. Examples of these verbs are Port. abater [gado] and Fr. abattre [bétail], both meaning ‘slaughter [cattle]’. Such collocations are intermediate cases between verbal idioms and largely free verb phrases. Precise knowledge of these verbs would aid recognition of verb sens...

Although aphasia is often characterized as a selective impairment in language function, left hemisphere lesions may cause impairments in semantic processing of auditory information, not only in verbal but also in nonverbal domains. We assessed the 'online' relationship between verbal and nonverbal auditory processing by examining the ability of 30 left hemisphere-damaged aphasic patients to mat...

This study investigated the effectiveness of using antecedent persuasive stimulation and response-contingent praise, within a small discussion group context, to modify the rate of verbal participation of Ss in an independent, classroom situation. Ss were 96 male college students who were divided into 12 treatment subgroups and 4 control subgroups of 6 Ss each. 3 treatment conditions were employ...

People often encounter difficulties in building shared understanding during everyday conversation. The most common symptom of these are self-repairs, when a speaker restarts, edits or amends their utterances mid-turn. Previous work has focused on the verbal signals self-repair, i.e. speech disfluences (filled pauses, truncated words and phrases, word substitutions reformulations), computational...