Given the restrictions on the subjects and objects that any given verb may take, it seems likely that children might learn verbs partly by exploiting statistical regularities in cooccurrences between verbs and noun phrases. Pronouns are the most common NPs in the speech that children hear. We demonstrate that pronouns systematically partition several important classes of verbs, and that a simpl...

We investigate how Tamil- and Dutch-speaking adults and four- to five-year-old children use caused posture verbs ('lay/stand a bottle on a table') to label placement events in which objects are oriented vertically or horizontally. Tamil caused posture verbs consist of morphemes that individually label the causal and result subevents (nikka veyyii 'make stand'; paDka veyyii 'make lie'), occurrin...

On some accounts, word-meanings are organized in the human-brain according to their sensory-motor attributes. We tested an alternative hypothesis: word-meanings are neuroanatomically dissociable along abstract conceptual dimensions (entities vs. events). We measured brain activity in the left middle temporal gyrus (lMTG), a brain region that has previously been shown to respond more to verbs th...

Mendriq is a moribund language spoken by Orang Asli in Kuala Lah, Kelantan, Malaysia. This language is spoken by only 245 people in three villages, namely Kampung Kuala Lah, Kampung Baru and Kampung Kuala Stail. This paper analyzes transitive and intransitive verb phrases in Mendriq. The primary data of Mendriq language were obtained through fieldwork funded by a research grant (UKM-GUP-PLW-08-...

This paper suggests a method for detecting cross-lingual semantic similarity using parallel PropBanks. We begin by improving word alignments for verb predicates generated by GIZA++ by using information available in parallel PropBanks. We applied the Kuhn-Munkres method to measure predicateargument matching and improved verb predicate alignments by an F-score of 12.6%. Using the enhanced word al...

This paper shows that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e. the verbs meaning ‘kill’ in English, Chinese and Thai. Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dea...

The present study investigated the neural correlates of the processing of abstract (low imageability) verbs. An extensive body of literature has investigated concrete versus abstract nouns but little is known about how abstract verbs are processed. Spanish abstract verbs including emotion verbs (e.g., amar, "to love"; molestar, "to annoy") were compared to concrete verbs (e.g., llevar, "to carr...

This paper makes a study of the derivation non-canonical object construction in Mandarin Chinese. In light transitivity verbs, two cases NOC are discussed: a) with transitive verbs and b) unergative verbs. Based on theory phase extension, mixture direct properties PP can be explained that is licensed by both preposition verb.

Implicative verbs (e.g. manage) entail their complement clauses, while non-implicative verbs (e.g. want) do not. For example, while managing to solve the problem entails solving the problem, no such inference follows from wanting to solve the problem. Differentiating between implicative and non-implicative verbs is therefore an essential component of natural language understanding, relevant to ...

Italiano. Si è analizzata la selezione dell’ausiliare da parte dei verbi intransitivi, all’interno di un gruppo di neologismi italiani. I verbi studiati sono stati tratti da elenchi di neologismi disponibili online. Si è quindi verificata la loro presenza e il loro comportamento sul corpus itTenTen. Tali verbi hanno dimostrato una evidente preferenza per l’ausiliare avere. English. We analyzed ...