This paper promotes the hypothesis that central grammatical categories must be analysed as pragmatic rather than semantic entities, in order to explain their seemingly redundant typological distribution. A case is made of the relatively complex English past tense system versus the single Russian past tense, and it is shown how the distinctions within the former system can be analysed in terms o...

The isiZulu verb is known for its morphological complexity, which is a subject for on-going linguistics research, as well as for prospects of computational use, such as controlled natural language interfaces, machine translation, and spellcheckers. To this end, we seek to answer the question as to what the precise grammar rules for the isiZulu complex verb are (and, by extension, the Bantu verb...

Discourses are linguistic structures above sentence level. Discourse is nothing but a coherent sequence of sentences. Discourse analysis is concerned with coherent processing of text segments larger than the sentence and this requires something more than just the interpretation of the individual sentences. A phenomenon that operates at discourse level includes cohesion. Text is cohesive if its ...

ERP (Event Related Potential) measurement using the violation paradigm of Japanese verb conjugation was conducted in order to investigate the mental and neural mechanisms involved in the processing of different conjugation patterns. A LAN-like component followed by a P600 was elicited for the anomaly of using a tense-bearing form with the negative ending, while only P600 was observed for the an...

This research proposes and evaluates a linguistically motivated approach to extracting temporal structure from text. Pairs of events in a verb-clause construction were considered, where the first event is a verb and the second event is the head of a clausal argument to that verb. All pairs of events in the TimeBank that participated in verbclause constructions were selected and annotated with t...

Early in acquisition children overgeneralize verbs to ungrammatical structures. The retreat from overgeneralization is linked to the acquisition of verb classes, the semantics of which constrain the structures in which a verb can appear (e.g., Pinker 1989; Ambridge, Pine & Rowland, 2012). How children learn these classes remains unclear. Some argue that distributional regularities in linguistic...

The increasing production of electronic (digital) texts (either on the Web or in other electronically available forms, such as digital libraries or archives) demands appropriate computer tools that can help human users in text manipulation and, additionally, in performing automatic processing of language resources. In the first place, a natural language processing (NLP) system needs to implemen...

Weblogs are a source of human activity knowledge comprising valuable information such as facts, opinions and personal experiences. In this paper, we propose a method for mining personal experiences from a large set of weblogs. We define experience as knowledge embedded in a collection of activities or events which an individual or group has actually undergone. Based on an observation that exper...

To explain processing differences between regular (e.g., start/started) and irregular (e.g., think/thought) word formation linguistic models posit either a single mechanism handling both morphological clusters or separate mechanisms for regular and irregular words. The purpose of the present study is to investigate how these processing differences map onto brain processes by assessing electroph...

Neuropsychological dissociations between regular and irregular past tense verb processing have been explained in two ways: (a) separate mechanisms of a rule-governed process for regular verbs and a lexical-associative process for irregular verbs; (b) a single system drawing on phonological and semantic knowledge. The latter account invokes phonological impairment as the basis of poorer performa...