The term “complex predicate” in syntactic theory is still semantically transparent; it can refer to any predicate that a particular researcher finds difficult—whether due to semantic complexity, syntactic complexity, morphological complexity, or whatever. For purposes of this work, I use the term to mean a single “inflectional domain” which contains two or more distinct morphemes, each of which...

It is generally agreed that periphrastic causatives and perception verbs with infinitival complements fall into two basic construction types in Romance languages (Abeillé et al. 1997, 1998, Miller and Lowry 2003). The first is the double complement construction (1), where the causative/perception verb selects for both an NP controller (accusative) and an infinitival VP complement, as shown in t...

Introduction: We examine event-related potential (ERP) responses during comprehension of the Causative construction. Event-related potentials are brain-responses that are directly-correlated to cognitive or sensory event. Both the P600 and N400 are ERPs that respectively correlate to syntactic and semantic anomalies when participants are processing presented sentences. A construction is a mappi...

The purpose of this article is to illustrate the differences between psychophysical (e.g. heikottaa, ‘feel weak’) and physical (e.g. janottaa, ‘be thirsty’) causative emotion verbs in Finnish by studying the factors that determine the temporal structure of the causative emotion verb + infinitive 1 -construction. The focus, in other words, is whether the situation expressed by the infinitive 1 v...

We present a discussion of the laten-perception-causative construction in Dutch, formed by combining laten ‘let’ and a non-volitional perception/cognition verb like zien ‘see’. On the basis of partly novel argument alternation and binding data, we show that these causatives cannot be captured by a standard raising analysis. This sets these data apart from other uses of causative laten. The late...

Aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases are central enzymes in protein translation, providing the charged tRNAs needed for appropriate construction of peptide chains. These enzymes have long been pursued as drug targets in bacteria and fungi, but the past decade has seen considerable research on aminoacyl-tRNA synthetases in eukaryotic parasites. Existing inhibitors of bacterial tRNA synthetases have been a...

Abstract Over the last 300 years, into -causative ( he talked his father giving him money ) increased in frequency and lexical diversity. Changes of this kind are often taken as evidence functional expansion. From a Construction Grammar (CxG) perspective, paper argues that what appears to be loss restrictions on verbal slot results from changes argument mapping links. As construction provides r...