Abstract Middle English had a rich inventory of verbs that could be used as causatives in periphrastic (or analytic) constructions. Interestingly, we see two like do and make , which share several similarities their basic meaning, are both causative verbs. The present paper explores the relationship uses with an infinitive complement period. By means Multiple Correspondence Analysis (MCA), it w...

The study of light verbs and complex predicates is frought with dangers and misunderstandings that go beyond the merely terminological. This paper attempts to pic through the terminological, theoretical and empirical jungle in order to arrive at a novel understanding of the role of light verbs crosslinguistically. In particular, this paper addresses how light verbs and complex predicates can be...

Learning the English past tense is characterized by a U-shaped learning function for the irregular verbs. Existing cognitive models often rely on a sudden increase in vocabulary, a high tokenfrequency of regular verbs, and complicated schemes of feedback in order to model this phenomenon. All these assumptions are at odds with empirical data. In this paper a hybrid ACT-R model is presented that...

The expression of motion verbs differs between languages. The path of motion, such as crossing or entering, is more prominently featured in path-based languages such as Spanish than in manner-based languages such as English. Here, we revisit the data from a study on manner and path biases in verb lexicalization (Havasi & Snedeker, 2004), and create a hierarchical Baysian computational model to ...

This paper deals with the comprehensive lexicon of Czech verbs named VerbaLex. It contains complex valency verb frames (CVFs) including both surface and deep valencies. The most notable features of CVFs include two-level semantic labels with linkage to the Princeton and EuroWordNet Top Ontology hierarchy and the corresponding surface verb frame patterns capturing the morphological cases that ar...

This paper tackles the issue of verbs in specialised corpora in the view of term extraction. Corpus-based manual descriptions to be used in various applications have highlighted the “deviant” uses of verbs in specialised corpora compared with general uses as well as the need for verb extraction. However, very few attention has been given to verbs both in the terminology theory and automatic ter...

Recent models in distributional semantics consider derivational patterns (e.g., use → use + f ul ) as the result of a compositional process, where base term and affix are combined. We exploit such models for German particle verbs (PVs), and focus on the task of learning a mapping function between base verbs and particle verbs. Our models apply particle-verb motivated training-space restrictions...

Previous studies have shown that text genres can be computationally distinguished by sophisticated computational and statistical methods. The current study adds to the previous body of work by incorporating phrasal verbs as a text genre identifier. Results indicate that phrasal verbs significantly distinguish between both the spoken/written and formal/informal dimensions, with considerably less...

Long-distance semantic dependencies are crucial for lexical choice in statistical machine translation. In this paper, we study semantic dependencies between verbs and their arguments by modeling selectional preferences in the context of machine translation. We incorporate preferences that verbs impose on subjects and objects into translation. In addition, bilingual selectional preferences betwe...

The current study used a forced choice pointing paradigm to examine whether English children aged 2;1 can use abstract knowledge of the relationship between word order position and semantic roles to make an active behavioural decision when interpreting active transitive sentences with novel verbs, when the actions are identical in the target and foil video clips. The children pointed significan...