What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easie...

The current study aims at exploring the role of causativization as one of the causes stated in the literature for overpassivization of English unaccusatives in an Iranian context.The study was conducted using three data collection procedures, an Oxford Placement Test, a Grammaticality Judgment Task, and a Production Task. The results revealed that causativization errors with non-alternating una...

What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easie...

Traditionally, the term serial verb construction refers to a sequence of verbs or verb phrases in a sentence in which there is no intervening conjunction. The English expression go eat, for example, might be considered as a kind of serial verb construction since there is no infinitive or other morphosyntactic marker present to indicate a coordinating or subordinating relationship between the tw...

The central claim of this thesis is that the combinatorial properties of words are determined by their lexical structures. I argue that the lexicalist position follows from the Word Grammar (WG) analytical framework. This framework, developed by Hudson (1984, 1990, 1994, 2003), is the one that I adopt in the linguistic descriptions in the thesis, and the further development of the framework is ...

We present a pilot analysis of a new linguistic resource, VPS-GradeUp (available at http://hdl.handle.net/11234/1-1585). The resource contains 11,400 graded human decisions on usage patterns of 29 English lexical verbs, randomly selected from the Pattern Dictionary of English Verbs (Hanks, 200

This paper aims at investigating the acquisition of English modality among Arab learners of English as a foreign language. Specifically, the study limits itself to the perception of modal verbs as a means of expressing modality. The productive use of modal verbs were analyzed by examining written texts made by 26 fourth-year students majoring in Applied English at the University of Jordan. More...

this project investigates the relationship between lexical semantics and causative morphology in the acquisition of causative/inchoative-related verbs in english as a foreign language by iranian speakers. results of translation and picture judgment task show although l2 learners have largely acquired the correct lexico-syntactic classification of verbs in english, they were constrained by the m...

The traditional account of the acquisition of English verb morphology supposes that a dual architecture underlies the transition from early rote-learning processes (in which past tense forms of verbs are correctly produced) to the systematic treatment of verbs (in which irregular verbs are prone to error). A connectionist account supposes that this transition can occur in a single mechanism (in...

The aim of this paper is to show the alternation pattern of verbs in Hindi. The work is guided by Beth Levin’s work on English verb classes and alternations where English verbs are classified semantically according to their argument structure [1]. There is a strong belief that the semantic nature of verbs is largely dependent on its argument structure. The nature of the Hindi verbs shows that a...