Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non-prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis investigating German children using a forced-choice p...

this study aims to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in the introduction section of applied linguistics research articles published in iranian and international journals. a corpus of 20 research article introductions (10 from each journal) was used. the corpus was analysed for the syntactic features (tense, aspect and voice) and semantic meaning of verbs. the finding...

We introduce a project to enhance a valency lexicon of Czech verbs with semantic roles. For this purpose, we make use of FrameNet. At the present stage, frame elements from FrameNet have been mapped to valency complementations of verbs of communication and verbs of exchange. The feasibility of this task has been proven by the achieved inter-annotator agreement – 95.6% for the verbs of communica...

Motion verbs in languages convey the meanings of spatiotemporal change. Ontologies that deal with spatial actions can benefit from the study of such verbs and their usage. This paper explores semantic components of motion related verbs and verb complexes. Such semantics components assume certain spatial primitives and intuitions which need to be considered in the context of ontologies derived f...

Agrammatic aphasics do not exhibit a normal pattern of verb production; their spontaneous speech is said to lack verbs, and the verbs that are produced lack inflection. The current article focuses on the lexical, morphological, and syntactic aspects of verbs in spontaneous speech of a group of Dutch agrammatic speakers. Dutch is a so-called verb-second language in which the finite verb in the m...

This paper discusses the semantics of bare existentials, i.e. existentials in which nothing follows the post copular NP (e.g. There are four sections). While it has sometimes been recognized that the interpretation of such sentences depends in some way on context, the exact nature of the context dependence involved has not been properly understood. It is shown that the meaning of bare existenti...

Many of the verbs that young children learn early have been characterized as 'light.' However, there is no agreed upon definition of 'lightness' and no useable metric that could be applied to a wide array of verbs. This article provides evidence for one metric by which the 'lightness' of early-learned verbs might be measured: the number of objects with which they are associated (in adult judgme...

A Google Scholar search for "interrogative verbs" brings up mostly references to verbs of asking, verbs with interrogative affixes, or verbs used in questions. A number of languages, however, have special verbs that include a semantic wh element in addition to their more typical question words. Verbs like this have not been extensively described, although Hagège (2003, 2008) suggests they are m...

Japanese aspectual verbs have previously been analyzed as control and raising verbs, with their different syntactic behaviors derived from the control/raising distinction. This paper argues against the control/raising analysis of Japanese aspectual verbs, showing that the standard diagnostics do not support the presumed control/raising distinction among Japanese aspectual verbs. As an alternati...

Such verbs contain two or more prefixes and the imperfective suffix. In a given context they behave as either unambiguous perfective or unambiguous imperfective verbs, so their grammatical status is fully resolved. Now, this behavior fails to be revealed by the standard diagnostic tests used to determine the perfective or imperfective status of Russian verbs (see Section 3): under those tests, ...