The present research documents the American English usage frequencies for 136 verbs that occur with noun phrase and tensed sentence complements (e.g., accepted, noun phrase complement: The student knew the answer yesterday, tensed sentence complement: The student knew the answer was correct). This class of verbs has been the focus of numerous empirical studies investigating how syntactic ambigu...

Three experiments explored preschoolers' and adults' understanding of the distinctive semantic functions of adjectives (i.e., to name properties) and count nouns (i.e., to name object kinds). In Experiment 1, we modeled a familiar adjective (e.g., "blue") syntactically as either an adjective (e.g., "This is a blue one") or a count noun (e.g., "This is a blue") and applied it to a target object ...

This paper revives old descriptive data on Awa, a Papuan language of the Kainantu group. The tonal system was described in detail by Loving (1973), where he reports a series of toneless noun suffixes, falling into six classes depending on their tonal alternations when combined with a noun root. This paper demonstrates that the suffixes are best understood as carrying lexical tone; the alternati...

The effects of a memory load on syntactic processing by younger and older adults were examined. Participants were asked to remember a noun phrase (NP) memory load while they read sentences varying in syntactic complexity. Two types of NPs were used as memory loads: proper names or definite descriptions referring to occupations or roles. The NPs used in the sentence and memory load either matche...

This technical report introduces three sets of annotation guidelines for the analysis of compounds in Afrikaans and Dutch. The first protocol serves the annotation of compound boundaries when creating a dataset to use for compound segmentation. The second and third protocol serve the semantic annotation of the relation between the constituents of compounds. Where the second protocol only focuse...

This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional properties with raising verbs, but the two verb clas...