INTRODUCTION Neuroimaging and lesion studies indicate a left hemisphere network for verb and verb argument structure processing, involving both frontal and temporoparietal brain regions. Although their verb comprehension is generally unimpaired, it is well known that individuals with agrammatic aphasia often present with verb production deficits, characterized by an argument structure complexit...

We present here a global view of the syntactic shapes of the elementary sentences of French. This paper constitutes a synthesis of the numerous observations made on a set of about 12,000 verbs studied in the framework of lexicon-grammar (M. Gross 1975; J.-P. Boons, A. Guillet, C. Leclère 1976; G. Gross 1989; A. Guillet, C. Leclère 1992). The point of view is strictly formal, according to the no...

The relationship between a verb and the syntactic frames in which it can appear has been closely studied by psychologists and linguists. Research suggests that the semantics of a verb and its arguments determine the verb’s syntactic frames, but various theories (Levin & Hovav, 2005) disagree on the nature and complexity of these relationships, in part because most investigations have focused on...

In Pollard and Sag (1987) and Pollard and Sag (1994:Ch. 1–8), the subcategorized arguments of a head are stored on a single ordered list, the subcat list. However, Borsley (1989) argues that there are various deficiencies in this approach, and suggests that the unified list should be split into separate lists for subjects, complements, and specifiers. This proposal has been widely adopted in wh...

We evaluate probabilistic models of verb argument structure trained on a corpus of verbs and their syntactic arguments. Models designed to represent patterns of verb alternation behavior are compared with generic clustering models in terms of the perplexity assigned to held-out test data. While the specialized models of alternation do not perform as well, closer examination reveals alternation ...

It has been claimed that syntactic structures and the argument types (e.g. theme, oblique) can determine the domain of focus: focus on a particular type of internal argument may project its focus domain to a larger syntactic constituent than the focused item. It is also known that focus often has prosodic reflections through the manipulations of prosodic phrasing, prominence relation of words, ...