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...

As these authors observe, the sentences in (1) and (2) are similar in both form and meaning. The truncated clefts in (1) look like the clefts in (2) minus the cleft clause, and in the right contexts, each of the sentences in (1) can be used with the meaning of the corresponding sentence in (2). Following a question like Who went to Hamburg?, (1b) can be used to convey what (2b) conveys, and fol...

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...

This paper takes as its point of departure the hypothesis that surface structures directly receive a model theoretic interpretation, without being mapped into (or derived from) a mediating level such as deep structure or LF. In particular, I am concerned with those cases centering around binding which are often thought to necessitate some kind of abstract level. Note that the standard view of b...

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 study is motivated by the stylized fact that the asymmetry in dependence usually exists in returns of financial data series. Owing to political and monetary reasons, this phenomenon may be present in daily changes of exchange rates. In this paper, we study the relationships between five currencies in Asia around the period of Asian Financial Crisis in 1997, including the Singapore Dollar, ...

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...

How children acquire knowledge of verb inflection is a long-standing question in language acquisition research. In the present study, we test the predictions of some current constructivist and generativist accounts of the development of verb inflection by focusing on data from two Spanish-speaking children between the ages of 2;0 and 2;6. The constructivist claim that children's early knowledge...

Verb subcategorization frequencies (verb biases) have been widely studied in psycholinguistics and play an important role in human sentence processing. Yet available resources on subcategorization frequencies suffer from limited coverage, limited ecological validity, and divergent coding criteria. Prior estimates of verb transitivity, for example, vary widely with corpus size, coverage, and cod...

Fluent speakers' representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These "selectional restrictions" of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recru...