Sentences like these are special insofar as their utterance in appropriate circumstances amounts to performing the action identified by the finite verb. The typical formal properties of such sentences in English include first person subjects, second person indirect objects, a present tense non-progressive active form of a speech act verb and the deictic adverb hereby, but performative sentences...

This paper explores the nature of thematic information made available when a verb is accessed during sentence comprehension. Following Shapiro, Zurif, and Grimshaw (1987), a cross-modal lexical decision (interference) task was employed to examine whether either the number of argument structures or the number of participant (thematic) roles inherent in a verb cause an increase in processing load...

In recent work it has been demonstrated by various scholars that the use of modal verbs has changed in past decades (Krug 2000, Leech 2003, Smith 2003, and especially Leech et al. 2009). In earlier work Close and Aarts (2010) and Aarts, Close and Wallis (forthcoming) looked at the changing use of the modal and semimodal auxiliaries in spoken English. While the results of these investigations ar...

Verb modality presents a major processing obstacle in any NLP application, and can be overcome either by exhaustively listing all possible modal variants of any given verb, or by deriving any modality-based valency alterations in situ. Given the combinatorial complexity of any exhaustive listing attempt, we adopt this second methodology in proposing a modular set of valency frame transformation...

We propose an extension of Stabler’s version of clitics treatment for a wider coverage of the french language. For this, we present the lexical entries needed in the lexicon. Then, we show the recognition of complex syntactic phenomenae as (left and right) dislocation, clitic climbing over modal and extraction from determiner phrase. The aim of this presentation is the syntaxsemantic interface ...

The verb has traditionally been characterized as the central element in a sentence. Nevertheless, the exact role of the verb during the actual ongoing comprehension of a sentence as it unfolds in time remains largely unknown. This paper reports the results of two Cross-Modal Lexical Priming (CMLP) experiments detailing the pattern of verb priming during on-line processing of Dutch sentences. Re...

In recent years many scientific journals noticed an increasing number of submissions of plagiarized papers. The Editor-in-Chief of an important international journal, that receives very many submissions every year, recently privately wrote us “I had to reject on such basis over a dozen of submissions just this year”. The smaller size of our journal limits the number of such situations, but does...

mood is, in general, a meaning concept that indicates the speaker’s point of view about a proposition. there are different modal elements in each language to embody a mood; in other words, different languages have variety of methods to express modal concepts. using verbal moods is one of these methods. verbal mood represents the morphology of a verb and can hence be considered as a grammatical ...

This paper presents an analysis of sentences with the postverbal modal element DAK in Cantonese and Hakka. We argue that DAK is a verb, though in Cantonese and Hakka it is partly defective. It acquires different meanings depending on the position it occupies, which is either the position for modal verbs in the matrix clause or a modal position in the result denoting small clause. The analysis, ...