Noun Arguments Research Articles

Licensing nominal clauses: The case of deverbal nominals in Japanese

While Nominal Clauses in Japanese are similar to English nominalization in their argument-taking ability, they are unlike English in that they behave just like verbal clauses in the distribution of verbal Cases on the noun's arguments. In investigating the Nominal Clauses with deverbal nouns serving as their predicates, this paper will demonstrate that a set of licensing conditions must be imposed on the deverbal nouns: they need to satisfy categorial, argument-structural, and semantic requirements. I will propose, however, that these conditions are necessary but not sufficient in licensing a well-formed Nominal Clause, and that a further restriction must be added on the basis of prosodic evidence: I will claim that the deverbal noun must consist of at least four morae. This prosodic constraint provides further support for Poser's (1990) contention regarding the role of the bimoraic foot in Japanese.

Syntactic transparency and sentence interpretation in aphasia

Abstract A semantic anomaly judgement test was used to test the hypothesis that sentence comprehension errors by agrammatic aphasics arise as a consequence of faulty mapping from syntactic functions to thematic roles. In one condition, anomalies arose out of a thematic role reversal which was carried by the syntactic structure (e.g., # The worm swallowed the bird). Mis-mapping in these cases would have the effect of altering plausibility and hence resulting in erroneous judgments. In a second condition, mismapping was of no consequence (e.g., # The cat divorced the milk). Effects of sentence length (“Padding”) and of the transparency with which thematic roles are syntactically encoded (“Moved-arguments”) were examined across both types of anomaly. Overall, the performance pattern of agrammatics reveals considerable sensitivity to syntactic structure per se. Their difficulty seems to lie in the utilization of syntactic information for the assignment of thematic roles, particularly where the syntactic relationship between the verb and its noun arguments is not transparently evident in surface structure.

The semantic organization of some simple nouns and verbs

This paper examines the semantic organization of concrete nouns and verbs and its development during childhood. Memory for semantically related nouns and verbs was compared to memory for unrelated nouns and verbs in adults and children. Greater effects of relatedness were found for nouns than for verbs at all ages. We argue that this is because concrete nouns fall into closely related and hierarchically organized domains, while verbs form a more matrix-like organization. We propose that there are two reasons for these differences in organization. First, the object categories encoded in concrete nouns are independent entities in the mental lexicon, organized chiefly in relation to each other, whereas verbs encode dependent categories with directed connections to their noun arguments. Second, verbs have many elements of meaning which cut across semantic field, e.g., manner, intention. The other major finding was the appearance of marked developmental changes. While ordered recall of semantically related lists improved with slower presentation in older subjects, recall of all list types decreased at slower rates in young children. This finding suggests that active processing is of short duration in young children. In addition, young children had great difficulty recalling verbs after interference tasks. We argue that the differences in semantic organization of concrete nouns and verbs, together with limitations in active processing in young children, can explain a variety of age-related changes in performance with verbs, including poor recall after interference tasks and the syntagmaticparadigmatic shift in free associations. There is no need to postulate developmental changes in semantic organization.