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...

This paper deals with an aspectual classification of Korean and Japanese verbs based on Vendler (1967). Both of Korean and Japanese verbs are classified into 12 distinctive aspectual categories by their restrictions on time adverbials, progressive tenses and logical entailments. A well-established aspectual verb classes provide us not only with a better understanding of both languages, but also...

The goal of this paper is to propose a classification of the syntactic alternations admitted by the most frequent Italian verbs. The data-driven two-steps procedure exploited and the structure of the identified classes of alternations are presented in depth and discussed. Even if this classification has been developed with a practical application in mind, namely the semi-automatic building of a...

Previous studies of the lexical aspect of verbs following Vendler (1967) cannot account for verbs of degree achievements (Dowty 1979, Hay et al. 1999, among others). Building on recent studies on “scale structure” (Hay et al. 1999, Rappaport Hovav & Levin 2010, among others). We introduce a new aspectual feature [±scale] into the traditional Vendler system in order to more comprehensively accou...

In contrast to typical semantic relations between verbs, such as antonymy, synonymy or hyponymy, presupposition is a lexical relation that is not very well covered in existing lexical resources. It is also understudied in the field of corpus-based methods of learning semantic relations. But presupposition is very important for the quality of automatic semantic and discourse analysis tasks. In t...

This study aims to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in the introduction section of Applied Linguistics research articles published in Iranian and international journals. A corpus of 20 research article introductions (10 from each journal) was used. The corpus was analysed for the syntactic features (tense, aspect and voice) and semantic meaning of verbs. The finding...

In this paper we present an approach to term classification based on verb complementation patterns. The complementation patterns have been automatically learnt by combining information found in a corpus and an ontology, both belonging to the biomedical domain. The learning process is unsupervised and has been implemented as an iterative reasoning procedure based on a partial order relation indu...

In many areas of language acquisition, researchers have suggested that semantic generality plays an important role in determining the order of acquisition of particular lexical forms. However, generality is typically confounded with the effects of input frequency and it is therefore unclear to what extent semantic generality or input frequency determines the early acquisition of particular lexi...