In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency determines the early acquisition of particular lexi...

The presentation summarizes the results of a recent (2002) corpus-based study on the syntactic argument structure of German separable verbs, in particular the question of its predictability from the argument structure of their bases. The study shows that the argument structure effects of verb formation with separable preverbs are astonishingly regular, even if the meaning of the resulting compl...

In this work we address the question why different German particle verbs tend to occur with different frequency proportions in syntactically separated vs. non-separated forms. The problem has been studied from a theoretical point of view and the syntactic conditions that determine particle verb realization in separated and nonseparated paradigms are quite clear. But, to the best of our knowledg...

Modal verbs in English are challenging to learn by speakers of other languages. The purpose of thiswas to shed light on the use of gesture in learning English modal verbs by Persian-speaking children.To achieve this, 60 elementary Iranian learners, studying at some institutes in Karaj took part in thisstudy. The participants were randomly put into one experimental group and one control group. T...

Athapaskan languages comprise one of the largest, most geographically distributed, and most culturally diverse families in North America. Nevertheless, each daughter language features a set of classificatory verb stems which, semantically, focus less on signaling a relational predication than on some physical attribute of a prominent relational participant. Consequently, most consumption expres...

study, taking truly independent ratings to see which verbs participants considered to be denominal or deverbal (i.e. exocentric or not). The results of this new experiment were clear. The semantic similarity (or otherwise) of verbs-incontext to ordinary irregular usage predicted the acceptability of past-tense forms. Whether or not verbs were perceived to be exocentric was irrelevant to this. I...

This dissertation study examined a broad question of whether computer-based grammar tutorials are effective and welcome tools to review grammar for language learners by investigating effects of three different modes of such tutorials on learners’ knowledge and satisfaction. For this study, I developed experimental tutorials in three different modes (a static text with a voice-over narration, an...

This paper presents recent work on a new method to automatically extract finegrained duration information for common verbs using a large corpus of Twitter tweets. Regular expressions were used to extract verbs and durations from each tweet in a corpus of more than 14 million tweets with 90.38% precision covering 486 verb lemmas. Descriptive statistics for each verb lemma were found as well as t...