Recent research has shown that when people combine verbal probabilistic forecasts from two sources, they are not simply averaged but can reinforce each other; so advisors both said an event was “rather likely,” some listeners concluded the “quite likely”. Conversely, unlikely,” it unlikely.” The present studies demonstrate direction of this effect is evoked by high versus low probabilities, dir...

The English -ing form, also called (verbal) gerund, is often believed to display a mixture of verbal and nominal properties, thus posing problems for any theory of grammar. I will argue that this is actually not the case for every construction involving the -ing form, but only for two distinct subclasses, -ing forms after genitive subjects and after determiners like no or any. In the other case...

Automatically detecting verbal irony (roughly, sarcasm) in online content is important for many practical applications (e.g., sentiment detection), but it is difficult. Previous approaches have relied predominantly on signal gleaned from word counts and grammatical cues. But such approaches fail to exploit the context in which comments are embedded. We thus propose a novel strategy for verbal i...

This research focuses on what determines speakers' choice of positive and negative probability phrases (e.g., "a chance" vs. "not certain") in a legal context. We argue that choice of phrase to describe an event's probability of occurrence can be determined by the contrast between its current p value and an earlier p value, and not by that current value alone. Three experiments were conducted d...

Switch-reference has recently been argued to be the result of clausal functional heads entering into Agree with two nearby noun phrases, creating pointers those phrases but not actually copying their morphosyntactic features. Instead, semantic component interprets as referential dependency holding between pointed-to phrases. This article applies this analysis reflexive voice constructions in wh...

In this paper, we will work on some problematic verbal phrases in order to shed light on the manner in which "the co-specification device" takes into account different sources of information (syntactic, lexical and other sources) to generate a composite meaning. To describe the particular aspects of such a device, we will make use of perspective notions concerning the internal organization of a...

This paper aims at a cross-lingual analysis of coreference to abstract entities in Czech and German, two languages that are typologically not very close, since they belong to two different language groups – Slavic and Germanic. We will specifically focus on coreference chains to abstract entities, i.e. verbal phrases, clauses, sentences or even longer text passages. To our knowledge, this type ...

The term fixed expression refers to a formally quite heterogeneous group of expressions, such as adjective-noun collocations (e.g. heavy smoker), prepositional expressions (e.g. in spite of), verbal expressions (e.g. break the ice), dual expressions (e.g. black and white), foreign phrases (e.g. per capita), etc. The properties that unite them are that they consist of more than one word and are ...

The expression of modal notions cuts across morphosyntactic categories. Moving beyond the verbal domain, we find, across languages, types of indefinite noun phrases that convey modal meanings (Haspelmath 1997). For instance, the so-called epistemic indefinites (EIs), like Spanish algún or German irgendein, convey speaker’s ignorance. To illustrate, the Spanish sentence in (1) implicates that th...