In this paper we present a profile of verb usage across ages in child-produced sentences in English and Portuguese. We examine in particular lexical and syntactic characteristics of verbs and find common trends in these languages as children’s ages increase, such as the prominence of general and polysemic verbs, as well as divergences such as the proportion of subject dropping. We also find a c...

English academic writing has some specific characteristics that have been broadly defined by researchers. Nevertheless, English is undergoing constant modification as a result of being used as a lingua franca by international speakers. In this paper, my main objective is to determine whether language variation may be identified in cross-cultural communication when modal verbs of ability and pos...

We address the problem of identifying multiword expressions in a language, focusing on English phrasal verbs. Our polyglot ranking approach integrates frequency statistics from translated corpora in 50 different languages. Our experimental evaluation demonstrates that combining statistical evidence from many parallel corpora using a novel ranking-oriented boosting algorithm produces a comprehen...

We propose the use of multilingual corpora in the automatic classi cation of verbs. We extend the work of (Merlo and Stevenson, 2001), in which statistics over simple syntactic features extracted from textual corpora were used to train an automatic classi er for three lexical semantic classes of English verbs. We hypothesize that some lexical semantic features that are di cult to detect super c...

The study of modal auxiliary verbs has been done by comparing modal auxiliary verbs in English with the ones in Chinese qualitatively and quantitatively. The modals in English and in Chinese are statistically analyzed through their forms and meanings. The data consists of 50 pieces of Chinese prose with their 50 English translation versions called corpus A and 50 pieces of English prose with th...

We demonstrate the beneets of a multilingual approach to automatic lexical semantic verb classiication based on statistical analysis of corpora in multiple languages. Our research incorporates two interrelated threads. In one, we exploit the similarities in the crosslinguis-tic classiication of verbs, to extend work on English verb classiication to a new language (Italian), and to new classes w...

Lexical classifications have proved useful in supporting various natural language processing (NLP) tasks. The largest verb classification for English is Levin’s (1993) work which defined groupings of verbs based on syntactic and semantic properties. VerbNet (Kipper et al., 2000; Kipper-Schuler, 2005) – the largest computational verb lexicon currently available for English – provides detailed sy...

We demonstrate the beneets of a multilingual approach to automatic lexical semantic verb classiication based on statistical analysis of corpora in multiple languages. Our research incorporates two interrelated threads. In one, we exploit the similarities in the crosslinguis-tic classiication of verbs, to extend work on English verb classiication to a new language (Italian), and to new classes w...

To what extent are the processing patterns for nouns and verbs universal across languages? Under conditions of semantic strain, English speakers tend to adapt the meaning of the verb to fit the noun in the sentence. We asked Japanese and English speakers to paraphrase simple sentences of the form “The noun verbed,” varying in semantic strain (e.g., “The blender talked”). We then assessed the de...