This paper addresses the problem of learning the class of raising verbs (e.g seem). These verbs are potentially problematic for learners in that unlike typical main verbs these verbs do not stand in a semantic relation with any Noun Phrase (NP) arguments. Moreover, a second class of verbs, known as control verbs, shares certain distributional properties with raising verbs, but the two verb clas...

Verbs like begin and enjoy have been assumed to select for events and would coerce an entity-denoting complement to an event in semantic representation; such type-shifting operation engenders additional processing cost. However, recent studies show that this effect is observable only for aspectual verbs (e.g. begin), but not psychological verbs (e.g. enjoy), suggesting the set of “coercion verb...

Russian language acquisition requires deep and intensive studying of the concept of verbs of motion. There is a strong opinion that verbs of motion are one of the hardest concepts in the Russian language. However, it is an important issue, as motion verbs are among the most used in any language and nowadays there are hundreds of expressions with these verbs which can be heard quite frequently i...

this study deals with teaching the verbal meaning networks in second/foreign language, and evaluates the effects of this kind of teaching on the learning process of foreign persian language learners. for this purpose, a pretest was carried out among 50 foreign language learners, from which 30 individuals were selected for this research based on their scores. the subjects were divided into two g...

This paper discusses verb information items in the grammatical knowledge dictionary of Tibetan language. The verb information items include morphology, word-formation and syntax, in which the core is the verb classification with syntactic and semantic features. So the influences on clause structures of 12 types of verbs have been discussed. Also the paper designs an information table to compile...

The acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (Atay, 2010; Can, 2009; Chay, 2006, & Kras, 2007, among others). In the present study, ‘Predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. There are three English verb-types which seem to be more problematic for Persian EFL learners: (a)...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...