Verb-Second and Backformations and Scalar Prefix Verbs in German: The Interaction between Morphology, Syntax and Phonology Andrew McIntyre ([email protected]; www.uni-leipzig.de/~angling/mcintyre) 1. Introduction This study discusses the theoretical consequences of the following phenomena: Defective backformations: some backformed verbs in German resist verb-second (judgements vary fro...

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, ...

This paper aims at a lexical description of frequent uses of frequent lexical verbs in Swedish on the background of Czech, with some implications for the lexical description of such verb uses verbs in general. It results in a draft of a production lexicon of Swedish frequent verbs for advanced Czech learners of Swedish, with focus on their uses as light verbs. The introductory sections (1 and 2...