Deconstructing OUT-prefixation

Verbal nouns in Insular Celtic languages have long been a subject of interest because they are capable of exhibiting both nominal and verbal properties, posing a persistent challenge when it comes to determining their precise categorization. This study therefore seeks to examine the intersective gradience of verbal nouns in Scottish Gaelic from a functional-typological and multidimensional perspective, providing an insight into the interaction between their morphosyntactic, semantic, and pragmatic properties and their lexical categorization, and, consequently, encouraging a broader discussion on linguistic gradience. This hybrid category plays a central role in the clause structure of Scottish Gaelic, as it appears in a wide range of distinct grammatical constructions. Drawing on a range of diagnostic tests revealing the morphosyntactic and semantic properties of verbal nouns across various contexts (e.g., etymology, morphological structure, inflection, case marking, TAM features, syntactic function, types of modification, form and position of objects, distributional patterns, cleft constructions, argument structure, subcategorization, etc.), this line of research identifies two key environments, depending on whether the construction features a verbal noun functioning either as a verb or a noun. This distinction aims to illustrate the way in which these contexts condition the gradience of verbal nouns. By doing so, it provides strong evidence for their function along a continuum ranging from fully verbal to fully nominal depending on their syntactic context and semantic and pragmatic interpretation. In conclusion, the findings of this study suggest that the use of verbal nouns blurs the line between two lexical categories, often displaying mixed properties that challenge a rigid categorization.

The article deals with how English deverbal nouns with the suffix -ing have been imported into Italian. The focus is on the semantic characteristics of these borrowed nouns in Italian and, in particular, on the question of whether they have been borrowed not as simple sign-concept pairings but with argument and event structure. In previous research, it has been claimed that argument and event structure need to be licensed by some overt functional element. Hence, borrowed deverbal nouns should have argument structure and event structure only if they have an overt affix, in other words, only if the forms are not borrowed holistically as unsegmented words but retain internal morphological structure, implying that morphological borrowing of the affix has occurred. When a foreign affix combines with native bases of the recipient language, this is often considered an important criterion for morphological borrowing, which is clearly not the case for the suffix -ing in Italian. Here, it will be shown that contrary to expectation, numerous occurrences with argument and event structure may be found in a large Italian web corpus for a sample of English deverbal nouns ending in -ing, borrowed into (certain registers) of Italian.

The morphosyntactic, semantic, and phonological properties of Warlpiri verbs have been investigated by a number of scholars including Hale (1982, 1983), Hale, Laughren, and Simpson (1995), Harvey and Baker (2005), Laughren (1988, 1992), Legate (2002, 2003, 2008), Levin (1983), Nash (1982, 1986), Reimer (2002, 2003, 2008), and Simpson (1991, 2002). This study will focus on that part of the verbal complex which I will refer to as the ‘thematic core’. It minimally consists of a thematic verb (V) which may be augmented by a non-inflecting preverbal (PV) element of a class which, following Nash 1982, I will refer to as ‘lexical’: [(PV lexical])=V], or by PVs derived from other phrasal categories. I will argue that the thematic core of the larger verbal constituent ‘maps onto’ an event structure which represents its predicate argument structure (PAS) and its Aktionsart properties. This study investigates the relationship between the PV and V forms which instantiate the thematic core, from the perspective of their individual and combined contribution to the underlying event structure. It also compares the event structure of ‘heavy verbs’ (HV) with their ‘light verb’ (LV) homophones, and also with synonymous PV-LV complex verbs.

This paper aims at combining different theoretical and methodological approaches for the analysis of discourse, focusing in particular on argumentative structures. At a first level an attempt is made to include argumentation in critical discourse analysis in order to extend the analysis of interaction between “structures of discourse” and “structures of ideologies” (T. A. van Dijk, R. Wodak and M. Meyer (eds.), Methods of Critical Discourse Analysis. Sage, London, 1995) to higher levels of language description. At a second level the study will integrate the qualitative approaches of critical discourse analysis and argumentation theory with the quantitative tools of corpus linguistics, so that the analysis can be carried out on a representative amount of texts and in a more systematic way. Even though corpus linguistics tends to be focused on meanings localized at the level of words, while argumentative structures stretch out through longer units of text, an integration can be attempted by circumscribing the enquiry to those aspects of argumentation which are signalled by indicators, and are therefore electronically retrievable. In particular, this paper investigates the use of dissociation and presupposition in a corpus of newspaper articles published in the run up to the war on Iraq. Both structures respond to retrievability criteria while being powerful instruments to convey ideologically oriented messages.

Phraseme constructions (PhraCons), also known as constructional idioms, can be most simply defined as syntactic patterns consisting of lexically fixed anchor words and empty slots for fillers. The article discusses the most important morphosyntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of PhraCons as compared to similar construction types (e. g., lexically fully specified idioms or fully schematic syntactic idioms). It is shown that PhraCons are characterised by a group of features which are all nuanced rather than categorical in nature. This notwithstanding, PhraCons can be discerned by these features as constructions in their own right.

Background: Verb difficulties in aphasia often co-occur with difficulties specifying argument structure of the sentence. Recent exploration of verb and argument structure deficits has shown dissociations between lexical semantic information, argument structure information, and production of the argument structure. There is currently limited evidence regarding the implications of these dissociations for treatment.Aims: This paper explores the patterns of generalisation following intervention to increase access to verb argument structure for a 62-year-old woman (YR) with chronic agrammatic aphasia. YR had good access to nouns and verbs in picture naming alongside severe sentence production difficulties characterised by difficulty specifying argument structure.Methods & Procedures: Detailed pre-therapy language assessment investigated single word and sentence comprehension and production, with a specific focus on whether YR could produce argument structure. Intervention targeted verb retrieval, awareness of argument structure information, cueing of arguments, and production of argument and syntactic structure involving transitive verbs. A single-subject multiple baseline design was used to monitor the effectiveness of treatment. The primary outcome measure was accuracy of two-argument structures in sentence production to picture and sentence generation to written word tasks, with effects on treated and untreated verbs considered. Other measures of sentence comprehension and production were also obtained to determine any further generalisation.Outcomes & Results: Following the first phase of therapy, YR showed a significant improvement in the production of two-argument structures across both treated and untreated verbs in sentence production to pictures, with a corresponding significant reduction in incomplete argument structures. No change was seen in two-argument structures in sentence generation to written words. After the second phase of therapy, significant gains were seen in two-argument structures with both treated and untreated verbs in the sentence generation task while sentence production to picture performance maintained. Gains in sentence generation were more vulnerable following the cessation of therapy. Other tasks of sentence production also improved with no change seen on a control task.Conclusions: Argument structure can be selectively impaired in aphasia, in the presence of good verb and noun access at the single word level, and targeted in therapy to improve sentence production. The study highlights the complexity of the relationship between verbs and argument structure and that argument structure difficulties are not always a consequence of a semantic verb deficit. Generalised improvement in argument structure production provides evidence that therapy targeted general processes rather than lexically specified argument structure information.

This paper is concerned with the morphosyntax of deverbal zero-derived nominals (e.g., to climb > a climb), which have received much less attention in the literature than suffix-based nominals (cf. the climb-ing, the examin-ation, the assign-ment). In the generative literature, in particular, after Grimshaw’s (1990) seminal work on suffix-based nominals and their possibility to inherit verbal event and argument structure, zero-derived nouns have been claimed to lack such properties: e.g., in syntax-based models of word formation, which take argument realization in deverbal nouns to indicate the inheritance of functional structure from the base verb, they have been analyzed as derived not from a verb but from an uncategorized root, as implemented in Borer (2013). Following Rappaport-Hovav and Levin’s (1998) theory of event structure and argument realization, I investigate zero-derived nouns built from verbs with preposed and postposed particles and show that they may realize argument structure on their event readings, which can only come about from the event structure of their base verbs.

The structure of the VP, its complexity, its semantics, its function, and the universality of the heads that it contains are a fascinating puzzle. A lot of progress has been made: this volume features cutting-edge research on the verbal domain, while tackling the problem of the nature and structure of the vP-VP domain. It includes some chapters based on papers presented at the “Little v” workshop which was held at Leiden University on October 25–26, 2013. The volume is divided into three main sections, representing the areas in which contemporary debate on the verbal domain is most active. The first part, entitled Root and Verbalizer, includes four chapters discussing the setup of verbal roots, their syntax, and their combination with other functional heads like Voice and v. This part focuses on the V head. The second section, Voice, discusses the content and necessity of a Voice head in the structure of a clause, and whether Voice is different from v. Voice was originally intended as the head hosting the external argument in its specifier, as well as transitivity. This section explores its relationship with “syntactic” voice, intended as the alternation between actives and passives. The third section, Event and Argument Structure, is dedicated to event structure, inner aspect, and Aktionsart. The main issues it tackles are the one-to-one relation between argument structure and event structure, and whether there can be minimal structural units at the basis of the derivation of any sort of XP, including the VP.

Argument structure and aspect in adjectives and participles: Where are we?

What explains the rich patterns of deverbal nominalization? Why do some nouns have argument structure, while others do not? We seek a solution in which properties of deverbal nouns are composed from properties of verbs, properties of nouns, and properties of the morphemes that relate them. The theory of each plus the theory of how they combine, should give the explanation. In exploring this, we investigate properties of two theories of nominalization. In one, the verb-like properties of deverbal nouns result from verbal syntactic structure (a “structural model”). See, for example, van Hout & Roeper 1998, Fu, Roeper and Borer 1993, 2001, to appear, Alexiadou 2001, to appear). According to the structural hypothesis, some nouns contain VPs and/or verbal functional layers. In the other theory, the verbal properties of deverbal nouns result from the event structure and argument structure of the DPs that they head. By “event structure” we mean a representation of the elements and structure of a linguistic event, not a representation of the world. We refer to this view as the “event model”. According to the event model hypothesis, all derived nouns are represented with the same syntactic structure, the difference lying in argument structure – which in turn is critically related to event structure, in the way sketched in Grimshaw (1990), Siloni (1997) among others. In pursuing these lines of analysis, and at least to some extent disentangling their properties, we reach the conclusion that, with respect to a core set of phenomena, the two theories are remarkably similar – specifically, they achieve success with the same problems, and must resort to the same stipulations to address the remaining issues that we discuss (although the stipulations are couched in different forms).

This paper borrows the idea from the linguistic theories of lexicalism and makes use of event structure to explore how to understand the statement query, so as to eliminate ambiguity and refine the query. It proposes a new query expansion method based on event structure which helps to improve query expansion by combining with the Knowledge based Query Expansion Method. First, use Event Structure based Query Expansion Agent (ESQEA) to identify queries conforming to verbs' argument structures, and then realize the query refinement according to the knowledge structure. The simulation result shows that for the same recall, the precision ratio is improved by the new approach.

Contemporary theoretical approaches to morphology have devoted considerable attention to verbal theme vowels, i.e., the issue of whether they can be shown to possess identifiable syntactic or semantic properties. The position that theme vowels are items without syntactic or semantic import has profound theoretical consequences, entailing the existence of an autonomous component of Grammar dedicated to Morphology (Aronoff 1994, Anderson 1992, Embick and Halle 2003). Approaches that dispense with a separate morphological module must assume that theme vowels do, in fact, have discernible semantic contributions (Jabłońska 2004, 2007). In this paper, we review the arguments from both sides in order to set the stage for and critically examine a series of new contributions published in this Special Collection. On balance, evidence of a link between theme vowels and particular meaning components (either aspect or argument structure) can be observed, though only in the form of (often very strong) tendencies, which figure most prominently in ‘minimal pairs’ of verbs differing only in their theme vowel. We highlight this observation and the methodological approaches that were employed to extract it (quantitative corpus or experimental studies) as the main contribution of this Special Collection and discuss the theoretical significance of this finding. Our position is that it cannot be taken as a falsification of the view that theme vowels are ‘pure morphology’, to the extent that it would require proof of a perfect correlation between theme vowels and a particular semantic property. At the same time, following Marantz (1997) we consider the possibility that categorial rules are not necessarily to be expected in structures involving only a root and a little v, highlighting an innovative approach in terms of markedness hierarchies where aspect/argument structure is only one factor determining theme vowel selection (Milosavljević and Arsenijević 2022) as a possible way of deriving non-categorial rules observed in other papers from a mix of morphosyntactic and phonological factors.

Warlpiri and Warlmanpa (Ngumpin-Yapa languages of Australia) exhibit a complex predicate construction in which a class of preverbs introduces a single argument that is not shared by the argument structure of the inflecting verb, nor is there necessarily any shared event structure. This is problematic for many theories of linking structures of complex predicates, since no arguments or events are shared between the predicative elements of the complex predicate. The same grammatical relation is instantiated by a beneficiary adjunct. In light of new research in event and argument structure, I propose a lexical rule which introduces an applicative argument to account for the beneficiary construction; and that the preverbs take another predicate as one of their arguments to account for the complex predicates. The applicative rule and the preverbs both introduce an argument of the same grammatical relation, leading to interesting interactions, given that two grammatical relations of the same type are not expected to co-occur within a single clause.

The Interpretation of tu and Kavalan Ergativity Hsiu-chuan Liao Abstract Kavalan, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, has been variously analyzed as accusative, ergative, and split ergative. These different conclusions stem from the fact that certain two-argument clause patterns are ambiguous regarding transitivity. To settle the matter, it is necessary to distinguish canonical transitive clauses from dyadic intransitive clauses. In this paper, we evaluate three proposals that have been made concerning Kavalan transitivity and actancy structure in terms of their morphosyntactic and semantic properties. We pay special attention to the form tu and determine that it is best analyzed as an oblique marker rather than as an accusative marker. We also conclude that there is only one canonical transitive construction, that found in two-argument -an clauses. The two-argument m- clauses, commonly analyzed as canonical transitives in most previous analyses, are treated as extended intransitives or pseudo-transitives—a type of intransitive clause. This leads to the conclusion that Kavalan is best analyzed as a purely ergative language. 1. Introduction.1 In the studies of Formosan, Philippine, and other western Austronesian languages as well,2 the distinction between valency and transitivity has often been neglected. Many Austronesianists equate monadic clauses with intransitive clauses, and dyadic clauses with transitive clauses without considering the relevant morphosyntactic and semantic properties that each exhibits. As a result, many such languages are analyzed as having two distinct types of transitive constructions and an unconditional split-ergative system, something that is typologically unusual. Kavalan, an Austronesian language spoken in Taiwan, has been commonly analyzed in this way. This paper reviews these analyses from a broad typological perspective [End Page 140] and determines the canonical transitive construction and actancy structure of Kavalan based on morphosyntactic and semantic criteria. We hope thereby to shed new light on the study of western Austronesian syntax generally. We begin with a brief introduction to our theoretical orientation in section 2. We summarize previous analyses of Kavalan transitivity and actancy structure in section 3. Finally, in section 4, we evaluate three proposals concerning Kavalan transitivity and actancy based on morphosyntactic and semantic criteria (see Hopper and Thompson [1980] and Gibson and Starosta [1990] for detailed discussion). It is shown that the form tu is best analyzed as an oblique marker rather than as an accusative marker. Moreover, based on the morphosyntactic and semantic properties that Kavalan clauses exhibit, we conclude that there is only one canonical transitive construction in Kavalan, that involving two-argument -an clauses. Two argument m- clauses, which have been commonly analyzed as canonical transitives in previous analyses, are treated as extended intransitives or pseudo-transitives, a type of intransitive clause. By analyzing the dyadic -an clauses as canonical transitives and the dyadic m- clauses as extended intransitives, we will conclude that Kavalan is best analyzed as a pure ergative language, rather than as an accusative or split-ergative language. 2. Theoretical Orientation.3 In this paper, we employ a revised version of Dixon's Basic Linguistic Theory to describe Kavalan clause structure. Some notions that are crucial to the discussion of Kavalan clause structures are discussed in this section. 2.1 Core Arguments vs. Peripheral Arguments. Basic Linguistic Theory as outlined in Dixon (1979, 1994) and Dixon and Aikhenvald (2000) distinguishes core arguments from peripheral arguments (also called "adjuncts"). The occurrence of core arguments is determined by the head (usually a verb) of a clause. The core arguments must be stated (or be understood from the context) for a clause to be acceptable. The occurrence of peripheral arguments or adjuncts is less dependent on the nature of the head of a clause; they may optionally be included to indicate place, time, cause, purpose, and so on. Four core arguments (S, A, O, and E) can be distinguished and will be defined as follows in this paper.4 A is the more active core argument of a canonical transitive verb; O is the less active core argument of a canonical transitive verb; S is the sole argument of a canonical intransitive verb, or one of the two core arguments of a dyadic intransitive verb that has the same morphological marking as the sole argument of a...

Background : Some individuals with agrammatic aphasia have difficulty producing verbs when naming and generating sentences (Miceli, Silveri, Villa, & Caramazza, 1984; Saffran, Schwartz, & Marin, 1980; Zingeser & Berndt, 1990). And when verbs are produced there is an over-reliance on verbs requiring simple argument structure arrangements (Thompson, Lange, Schneider, & Shapiro, 1997; Thompson, Shapiro, Schneider, & Tait, 1994). Verbs, as argument-taking elements, show especially complex semantic and argument structure properties. This study investigated the role these properties have on verb production in individuals with agrammatic aphasia. Aim : This treatment study examined the extent to which semantic class and argument structure properties of verbs influenced the ability of seven individuals with agrammatic Broca's aphasia to retrieve verbs and then use them in correct sentence production. Verbs from two semantic classes and two argument structure categories were trained using either a semantic or an argument structure verb retrieval treatment. Specifically, acquisition and generalisation to trained and untrained verbs within and across semantic and argument structure categories was examined. In addition, the influence of verb production on each participant's sentence production was also examined. Methods & Procedures : Utilising a single-subject crossover design in combination with a multiple baseline design across subjects and behaviours, seven individuals with agrammatic aphasia were trained to retrieve verbs with specific argument structures from two semantic classes under two treatment conditions--semantic verb retrieval treatment and verb argument structure retrieval treatment. Treatment was provided on two-place and three-place motion or change of state verbs, counterbalanced across subjects and behaviours. A total of 102 verbs, depicted in black and white drawings, were utilised in the study, divided equally into motion and change of state verbs (semantic classes) and one-place, two-place, and three-place verbs (argument structure arrangements). Verbs were controlled for syllable length, picturability, phonological complexity, and frequency. These same stimulus items were used to elicit the sentence production probe. Outcomes & Results : Both treatments revealed significant effects in facilitating acquisition of verb retrieval in all participants. Minimal within and across verb category generalisation occurred. However, it was found that as retrieval of verbs improved, grammatical sentence production improved. This occurred without direct treatment on sentence, production.