Abstract Task-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. The present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. To this purpose, an Oxford Placement Test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. The selecte...

The set of English modal verbs is widely recognised to communicate two broad clusters of meanings: epistemic and root modal meanings. A number of researchers have claimed that root meanings are acquired earlier than epistemic ones; this claim has subsequently been employed in the linguistics literature as an argument for the position that English modal verbs are polysemous (Sweetser 1990). In t...

English unaccusative verbs pose great difficulties to second language learners. The distinction between non-alternating and alternating unaccusative verbs makes the learning task even more difficult. This study conducts a contrastive study of how Chinese learners acquire these two types of verbs in terms of acquisition sequence, acquisition problem and developmental patterns. It finds that non-...

Young English learners typically have vocabularies dominated by nouns, while their Mandarin learning counterparts have relatively more verbs. Novice language learners must initially learn words from the situational contexts in which they appear, since they have limited access to syntactic or semantic context. These studies explore whether differences in these situational contexts could account ...

Early vocabularies typically contain more nouns than verbs. Yet, the strength of this noun-bias varies across languages and cultures. Two main theories have aimed at explaining such variations; either that relative importance vs. verbs is specific to language itself, or extra-linguistic factors shape early vocabulary structures. To address debate, present study compares distribution within same...

Akhtar [Akhtar, N. (1999). Acquiring basic word order: Evidence for data-driven learning of syntactic structure. Journal of Child Language, 26, 339–356] taught children novel verbs in ungrammatical word orders. Her results suggested that the acquisition of canonical word order is a gradual, data-driven process. The current study adapted this methodology, using English verbs of different frequen...

A method of anaphoral resolution of zero pronouns in Japanese language texts using the verbal semantic attributes is suggested. This method focuses attention on the semantic attributes of verbs and examines the context from the relationship between the semantic attributes of verbs governing zero pronouns and the semantic attributes of verbs governing their referents. The semantic attributes of ...

The present study investigated Japanese lexical and syntactic compound verbs (V1þV2) using Shannon’s concept of entropy and redundancy calculated using corpora from the Mainichi Newspaper and a collection of selected novels. Comparing combinations of a V2 verb with various V1 verbs, syntactic compounds were higher in entropy than lexical ones while neither differed in redundancy. This result su...

The article is an attempt at prototypical analysis of English verbs true information by creating situations and identifying propositions from the definitions verbs. In our study, a situation understood as cognitive model typical based on word definition. During definitional verbs, presuppositions were also distinguished. examined 22 information.

Action verbs are one of the frequently occurring linguistic elements in any given natural language as the speakers use them during every linguistic intercourse. However, each language expresses action verbs in its own inherently unique manner by categorization. One verb can refer to several interpretations of actions and one action can be expressed by more than one verb. The inter-language and ...