This paper shows that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e. the verbs meaning ‘kill’ in English, Chinese and Thai. Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dea...

Early vocabularies in most languages tend to contain more nouns than verbs. Yet, the strength of this noun bias has been observed to vary across languages and cultures. Two main hypotheses have aimed at explaining such variations; either that the relative importance of nouns vs. verbs is languagespecific, or that socio-cultural influences shape early vocabulary structures. The present study com...

Vocabulary is one of the essential components of language and learning phrasal verbs as part of vocabulary is quite challenging for foreign language learners. The present study aimed at investigating the effects of visual and auditory input enhancement on learning non-congruent phrasal verbs. The participants of the study were 90 intermediate English language learners who were divided into two ...

Despite the high productivity in English of denominal verb formation by conversion, a constraint on possible interpretations is identified: intransitive denominal conversion verbs are infelicitous where the source nominal is intended to be an incremental theme (#apple ‘eat apple’), a patient (#shirt ‘wear shirt’), or the holder of a result state (#window ‘open window’). This little-studied cons...

This paper proposes a system of 97 verbal semantic attributes for Japanese verbs which considers both dynamic characteristics and the relationship of verbs to cases. These attribute values are used to disambiguate the meanings of all Japanese and English pattern pairs in a Japanese to English transfer pattern dictionary consisting of 15,000 pairs of Japanese valence patterns and equivalent Engl...

To what extent do Modern Greek, Polish, Swedish and American English similarly lexicalize action concepts, and how similar are the semantic associations between verbs denoting natural actions? Previous results indicate cross-linguistic stability between American English, Swedish, and Polish in verbs denoting basic human body movement, mouth movements, and sound production. The research reported...

The present study examined the composition of the early productive vocabulary of eight Korean- and eight English-learning children and the morpho-syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic characteristics of their caregivers' input in order to determine parallels between caregiver input and early lexical development. Vocabulary acquisition was followed using maternal diary and checklists for the Korean...

This article proposes a new approach to verb classification based on Semantic Types selected in corpus-based verb patterns. This work !"#$%& '(& )#(*%+%& ,-.'"/& '0& 1'"2%& #(!& 3xploitations (Hanks 2013) and applies Corpus Pattern Analysis to a subset of verbs from Lev4(+%&56'4%'(+&78#%%9&4(78:!4(;&<."=%&%:7-&#%& hang and stab. These patterns are taken from the Pattern Dictionary of English Ve...