Two experiments sought to extend the demonstration of English-learning infants' abilities to segment nouns from fluent speech to a new lexical class: verbs. Moreover, we explored whether two factors previously shown to influence noun segmentation, stress pattern (strong-weak or weak-strong) and type of initial phoneme (consonant or vowel), also influence verb segmentation. Our results establish...

This usage-based study tests the explanatory power of an iconically motivated theory of lexical class. The principle that basic level gram matical categories are motivated by our direct perceptual experience is an integral part of Cognitive Grammar (Langacker 1987, Talmy 2000). However, recent research on English, Dutch, and German (Glynn 2006, 2007) has revealed mixed results in the applicatio...

Connor et al. (2008) mention “specifying textual requirements of genres” (p.12) as one of the reasons which have motivated researchers in the analysis of writing. Members of each genre should be able to produce and retrieve these textual requirements appropriately to be considered communicatively proficient. One of the textual requirements of genres is regularities of specific forms and content...

Objectives: Lexical access is the process by which the basic conceptual, syntactical and morpho-phonological information of words are activated. Most studies of lexical access have focused on picture naming. There is hardly any previous research on other parameters of lexical access such as verbal fluency and analysis of connected speech in Persian normal participants. This study investigates t...

Many English noun pairs suggest an almost limitless array of semantic interpretation. A fruit bowl might be described as a bowl for fruit, a bowl that contains fruit, a bowl for holding fruit, or even (perhaps in a modern sculpture class), a bowl made out of fruit. These interpretations vary in syntax, semantic denotation, plausibility, and level of semantic detail. For example, a headache pill...

In this paper we present acoustical as well as lexical features for classification purposes of perceived prominence in read aloud Dutch sentences. Via a perception experiment with 10 naive listeners we derived prominence labels at the word level for 500 sentences. Part of these sentences are used for lexical/syntactical analyses. It turns out that most of the function words are never perceived ...

In this study we investigate the merits of fast approximate string matching to address challenges relating to spelling variants and to utilise large-scale lexical resources for semantic class disambiguation. We integrate string matching results into machine learning-based disambiguation through the use of a novel set of features that represent the distance of a given textual span to the closest...

In this chapter, we discuss the distribution and lexical properties of common varieties of negative polarity items (NPIs) and positive polarity items (PPIs). We establish first that NPIs can be licensed in negative, downward entailing, and nonveridical environments. Then we examine if the scalarity approach (originating in Kadmon and Landman 1993) can handle the attested NPI distribution and em...

This paper analyzes lexical aspect as the privative features [+dynamic], [+durative] and [+telic], rather than as equipollent features. Aspectual interpretation may therefore be described as monotonic composition of verbs with other constituents: marked verb features may not be changed, whereas unmarked features may become marked by other constituents. This model also predicts the variety of in...