This paper examines topic and focus effects on word order in English particle verb constructions. Several authors have reported that speakers often prefer the Verb-Particle-Object (VPO) order when the object has new information focus, and the Verb-Object-Particle (VOP) order when the object is discourse-given (Bolinger 1971, Svenonius 1996a, Kayne 1998, Dehé 2002). We illustrate this effect in ...

Spoken language comprehension involves the use of different sources of linguistic information such as prosodic, syntactic, lexical, and semantic information. The question, however, of ''when'' and ''how'' these sources of information are exploited by the language processing system still remains unanswered. In the present study, we used event-related brain potentials (ERPs) to investigate the in...

This paper provides a corpus-based study on German particle verbs. We hypothesize that there are regular mechanisms in meaning shifts of a base verb in combination with a particle that do not only apply to the individual verb, but across a semantically coherent set of verbs. For example, the syntactically similar base verbs brummen ‘hum’ and donnern ‘rumble’ both describe an irritating, displea...

This paper proposes a series of techniques for extracting English verb–particle constructions from raw text corpora. We initially propose three basic methods, based on tagger output, chunker output and a chunk grammar, respectively, with the chunk grammar method optionally combining with an attachment resolution module to determine the syntactic structure of verb–preposition pairs in ambiguous ...

This paper describes a distributional approach to the semantics of verb-particle constructions (e.g. put up, make off ). We report first on a framework for implementing and evaluating such models. We then go on to report on the implementation of some techniques for using statistical models acquired from corpus data to infer the meaning of verb-particle constructions.

German particle verbs have been a source of confusion and disagreement in both syntax and semantics. This is shown by the considerable variety of approaches to particle verb constructions (see Dehé et al. 2002 for an overview). The major challenges are the argument structure of particle verbs and the role that particles play in determining them, especially in those cases where the argument stru...

This book is about those Germanic verbal constructions variously referred ...

In this paper, we investigate the behavior of verb-particle constructions in English questions. We present a small dataset that contains questions and verb-particle construction candidates. We demonstrate that there are significant differences in the distribution of WH-words, verbs and prepositions/particles in sentences that contain VPCs and sentences that contain only verb + prepositional phr...