This study examined the relationship between verb retrieval and verb-argument-structure properties in seven agrammatic aphasic patients using tasks requiring access to the verb's lexicon for both comprehension- and productionlike processes. Results showed intact comprehension of both nouns and verbs and noun naming, but impaired naming of verbs. Subjects also demonstrated near-normal performanc...

In this paper, we deal with Czech reflexive verbs from the lexicographic point of view. We show that the Czech reflexive morphemes se and si constitute different linguistic meanings: either they are formal means of the word formation process of the so called reflexivization, or they are associated with the syntactic phenomena of reflexivity, reciprocity, and diatheses. All of these processes ar...

In acquiring language, children must learn to appropriately place the different participants of an event (e.g., causal agent, affected entity) into the correct syntactic positions (e.g., subject, object) so that listeners will know who did what to whom. While many of these mappings can be characterized by broad generalizations, both within and across languages (e.g., semantic agents tend to be ...

This paper addresses Spanish adjectival passives with estar showing a progressive reading. In the previous literature, it has been acknowledged that participles of verbs encoding non-dynamic events, such as vigilar ‘guard’, give rise to reading when embedded in passives. Yet, we have identified another group verbs, those type perseguir ‘chase’, which denote dynamic atelic events (i.e., activiti...

Neuropsychological and neuroimaging studies of English and other Western languages suggest that basic lexical categories such as nouns and verbs are represented in different brain circuits. By contrast, research from Chinese indicates overlapping brain regions for nouns and verbs. How does a bilingual brain support the representation and organization of nouns and verbs from typologically distin...

This paper addresses some problems about the semantics of two groups of transitive verbs that are intensional in certain ways. One group is that of creation verbs, such as ‘assemble’, ‘bake’, ‘build’, and ‘manufacture’. The other is that of depiction verbs, such as ‘draw’, ‘sketch’, ‘caricature’, ‘sculpt’, ‘write (about)’, ‘imagine’, and ‘fantasize’. Depiction verbs, and creation verbs in the p...

What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easie...

Childers and Tomasello (2001) found that training 2 1/2-year-olds on the English transitive construction greatly improves their performance on a post-test in which they must use novel verbs in that construction. In the current study, we replicated Childers and Tomasello's finding, but using a much lower frequency of transitive verbs and models in training. We also used novel verbs that were of ...

This paper discusses the behaviour of German particle verbs formed by two-way prepositions in combination with pleonastic PPs including the verb particle as a preposition. These particle verbs have a characteristic feature: some of them license directional prepositional phrases in the accusative, some only allow for locative PPs in the dative, and some particle verbs can occur with PPs in the a...

Lexically based learning and semantic analogy may both play a role in the learning of grammar. To investigate this, 5-year-old German children were trained on a miniature language (nominally English) involving two grammatical constructions, each of which was associated with a different semantic verb class. Training was followed by elicited production and grammaticality judgement tests with ‘tra...