When does morphological decomposition occur in visual word recognition? An increasing body of evidence suggests the presence of early morphological processing. The present work investigates this issue via an orthographic similarity manipulation. Three masked priming lexical decision experiments were conducted to examine the transposed-letter similarity effect (e.g., jugde facilitates JUDGE more...

1.1 General introduction One of the most challenging areas for infants acquiring English as their native language are multi-word verbs: There many different kinds of such verbs – e.g., prepositional verbs, phrasal verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations, in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik’s (1985) terminology – and they come with different kinds of semantics and sy...

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...

The chapter on the ravī (the last ‘letter’ of rhyme), from work al-Muʿğam fī maʿāyīr ašʿār al-ʿağam by Šams-i Qays (13th century), is deemed earliest and more prestigious extant text describing rules concerning rhyme ( qāfiya ) in Persian verses. It focuses identification pivotal rhyming letter ), that segment word, around which a poem built. In discussing this topic, touches linguistic issues ...

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 discovers the phenomenon that in Mandarin Chinese when plurals are under focus of zhiyou ‘only’ or lian ‘even’, a distributive reading is derived by default. It is argued that this type of distributivity is not syntax marked, but is discourse-oriented, which shows linguistic effects of economic structuring sets of focus-introduced alternatives (Rooth, 1985, 1992). The proposal succes...

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...

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...