This paper examines issues related to transitivity in Chinese, looking in particular at verb use in non-referential contexts. Four variants of non-referential verb use involving generic bare nouns and postverbal manner adverbs are analyzed. It is suggested that in these cases of non-referential verb use, the verb is first merged with an adverbial complement, and then copied to yield the verb co...

Support-verb constructions (i.e., multiword expressions combining a semantically light verb with a predicative noun) are problematic for standard statistical machine translation systems, because SMT systems cannot distinguish between literal and idiomatic uses of the verb. We work on the German to English translation direction, for which the identification of support-verb constructions is chall...

This article investigates differences between Scottish Standard English (SSE) and Southern British (SBSE) in the semantic domain of strong obligation. Focusing on modal verbs must , have to need (have) got we use new corpus material from nineteen written spoken genres component International Corpus (ICE-SCO) corresponding texts ICE-GB. Data are analysed using a mixed-effect multinomial regressi...

Abstract The Tangut language is of particular importance to the field Sino­Tibetan Studies, notably because its morphological conservatism, which unexpectedly correlated with a simplification syllable structure, consequence process Miyake (2012) called “compression”. Such conservatism evident in qualities reconstructed, sometimes reflect proto­ Tangut’s ancient derivational processes. Verbs als...

This paper investigates the impact of modality markers on the conditional interpretation of the German preposition ohne (‘without’). It tackles the question whether it is the preposition itself that possesses a conditional sense or whether it may be due to a modal context that the interpretation arises. The paper presents an annotation study for modality factors (e.g. mood, modal auxiliary verb...

Theoretical accounts of the processing of inflectional morphology make implicit, untested assumptions about the activation of verb semantics from inflected verbs. This research used semantic priming to investigate the extent to which regular and irregular past tense forms activate verb semantics, in comparison to the verb stem. The results show that past tense forms activate verb semantics to t...

In this paper, a German verb resource for verb-centered sentiment inference is introduced and evaluated. Our model specifies verb polarity frames that capture the polarity effects on the fillers of the verb’s arguments given a sentence with that verb frame. Verb signatures and selectional restrictions are also part of the model. An algorithm to apply the verb resource to treebank sentences and ...