Verb Argument Research Articles

Reservoir population ecology, viral evolution and the risk of emerging infectious disease.

The ecology and life history of wild animals influences their potential to harbour infectious disease. This observation has motivated studies identifying empirical relationships between traits of wild animals and historical patterns of spillover and emergence into humans. Although these studies have identified compelling broad-scale patterns, they are generally agnostic with respect to underlying mechanisms. Here, we develop mathematical models that couple reservoir population ecology with viral epidemiology and evolution to clarify existing verbal arguments and pinpoint the conditions that favour spillover and emergence. Our results support the idea that average lifespan influences the likelihood of an animal serving as a reservoir for human infectious disease. At the same time, however, our results show that the magnitude of this effect is sensitive to the rate of viral mutation. Our results also demonstrate that viral pathogens causing persistent infections or a transient immune response within the reservoir are more likely to fuel emergence. Genetically explicit stochastic simulations enrich these mathematical results by identifying relationships between the genetic basis of transmission and the risk of spillover and emergence. Together, our results clarify the scope of applicability for existing hypotheses and refine our understanding of emergence risk.

Developing Students' Critical Thinking Skills and Argumentation Abilities Through Augmented Reality-Based Argumentation Activities in Science Classes.

Due to the COVID-19 pandemic and adapting the classes urgently to distance learning, directing students’ interest in the course content became challenging. The solution to this challenge emerges through creative pedagogies that integrate the instructional methods with new technologies like augmented reality (AR). Although the use of AR in science education is increasing, the integration of AR into science classes is still naive. The lack of the ability to identify misinformation in the COVID-19 pandemic process has revealed the importance of developing students’ critical thinking skills and argumentation abilities. The purpose of this study was to examine the change in critical thinking skills and argumentation abilities through augmented reality–based argumentation activities in teaching astronomy content. The participants were 79 seventh grade students from a private school. In this case study, the examination of the verbal arguments of students showed that all groups engaged in the argumentation and produced quality arguments. The critical thinking skills of the students developed until the middle of the intervention, and the frequency of using critical thinking skills varied after the middle of the intervention. The findings highlight the role of AR-based argumentation activities in students’ critical thinking skills and argumentation in science education.

Language variation in a shifting community: Different patterns of noun incorporation in Modern Chukchi

Research questions: This study asks whether an interface phenomenon such as noun incorporation (NI) displays meaningful socially conditioned variation in the endangered polysynthetic language, Chukchi, by investigating whether speakers of all levels of experience or proficiency make use of NI in a consistent, rule-governed way. Design and methodology: This study compares production data from small groups of speakers of a moribund language. Study tasks include a controlled production task in which speakers are asked to construct sentences using provided lexical items. The lexical items were conditioned so as to trigger NI in certain stimuli (on the basis of verbal valency and argument animacy). Data and analysis: The production data was transcribed and coded for the occurrence and structural type of NI (compounding vs. syntactic incorporation). The results were compared across three groups of speakers: conservative older speakers, younger attriting speakers, and new speakers. Findings/conclusions: NI frequency and productivity clearly differ among the three groups. CSs use incorporation frequently and productively in the expected contexts, while ASs use productive incorporation only in familiar contexts, followed by NSs who make little to no use of incorporation. All speaker groups display knowledge of the appropriate circumstances in which to use incorporation. Originality: This study makes use of a novel experimental methodology in studying several under-researched areas: variation in traditional Chukchi, shift-induced variation in a polysynthetic language, and NI as a locus of variation. Significance/implications: This study contributes to our understanding of the behavior of non-normative speakers of endangered languages and demonstrates that they play a role in language preservation. The study shows that the diffuse nature of the Chukchi speech community is different from comparatively well-studied shift settings (especially in the North American and European contexts) in its lack of a community of use or practice, which presents unique challenges in language maintenance.

The relationship between verb meaning and argument realization: What we learn from the processing of agent-implying intransitive verbs in Japanese.

This study investigated whether some Japanese intransitive verbs, called agent-implying intransitive verbs, are processed differently from other ordinary intransitive verbs. These verbs are special in that they denote agentive events, but they are intransitive verbs, which only allow the patient/theme to be the only nominatively marked argument. The priming experiment was designed based on the situation model theory, assuming that verbs with an agentive semantic structure (e.g., ordinary transitive verbs) has a shorter causal inferential distance than those with a non-agentive semantic structure (e.g., ordinary intransitive verb). In the experiment, participants were instructed to read two sentences that formed a story, of which the second sentence was either a transitive or intransitive sentence. The participants then answered a related question about general knowledge, and their response times were measured. The results show that, whereas the mean response time in the ordinary intransitive condition was significantly longer than that in the ordinary transitive condition, the mean response time in the agent-implying intransitive condition was not significantly different from that of the corresponding transitive condition, suggesting that agent-implying intransitive verbs are interpreted as agentive. The findings suggest that agent-implying intransitive verbs instantly evoke agentivity, whereas ordinary intransitive verbs do not. The theoretical implications of the findings are discussed.

Neuromodulation of verb-transitivity judgments

This study aimed to further clarify the roles of the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain in the processing of verb argument structure. Left inferior frontal brain areas have long been considered important for sentence processing, but recent research links left posterior temporal cortex to knowledge of verb argument structure. We applied cathodal High-Definition transcranial Direct Current Stimulation to 45 participants in a between-subjects design, with 15 participants each for inferior-frontal-cortex stimulation, posterior-temporal-cortex stimulation, and sham stimulation. Set up as a training task during stimulation, participants made overt judgments on the number of participant roles associated with individual verbs. Stimulation of posterior temporal cortex did not yield results that were different from sham stimulation, speeding up task responses overall. By contrast, stimulation of inferior frontal cortex yielded differential results for intransitive versus transitive verbs, speeding up responses to intransitive verbs and increasing accuracy to transitive verbs, relative to other conditions. The transitivity effect, specific to inferior frontal stimulation, suggests a role for inferior frontal cortex in access to verb-argument-structure information, possibly specific to situations of high cognitive load and in which participant roles have to be established for production, as opposed to comprehension.

Goal arguments of ir ‘to go’ and chegar ‘to arrive’ in three African varieties of Portuguese

In research on African varieties of Portuguese, especially Angolan and Mozambican Portuguese, it is often referred that Goal arguments of verbs of movement show a tendency to be headed by locative preposition em ‘in’, contrasting with the use of a ‘to’ and para ‘to, toward’ in European Portuguese. Language contact is generally considered the primary factor with respect to the use of the noncanonical pattern. Using spoken corpora of the urban varieties of Angolan, Mozambican and Santomean Portuguese, this paper develops a case-study of Goal arguments that occur with two frequently used verbs of inherently directed motion, ir ‘to go’ and chegar ‘to arrive’, to assess the contact-induced hypothesis and to explore alternative, semantic-based hypotheses. Overall, a cross-comparison of the varieties at stake and their main contact languages shows that the role of language contact is limited at best. A semantic analysis of em, on the other hand, shows promising results, since the occurrence of this preposition is favored by NPs that denote an entity with well-defined boundaries and is sensitive to the lexical semantics of the verbs, i.e., whether the verb describes a durative or non-durative change of place, and to the type of eventuality described by the predication.

Acquiring verb-argument structure in Tagalog: a multivariate corpus analysis of caregiver and child speech

Abstract Western Austronesian languages have typologically rare but theoretically important voice systems that raise many questions about their learnability. While these languages have been featured prominently in the descriptive and typological literature, data on acquisition is sparse. In the current paper, we report on a variationist analysis of Tagalog child-directed speech using a newly collected corpus of caregiver-child interaction. We determined the constraints that condition voice use, voice selection, argument position, and thematic role assignment, thus providing the first quantitative analysis of verb argument structure variation in the language. We also examined whether children are sensitive to the constraints on variability. Our analyses showed that, despite the diversity of structures that children have to learn under Tagalog’s voice system, there are unique factors that strongly predict the speakers’ choice between the voice and word order alternations, with children’s choices related to structure alternations being similar to what is available in their input. The results thus suggest that input distributions provide many cues to the acquisition of the Tagalog voice system, making it eminently learnable despite its apparent complexity.

Eusociality and the Evolution of Aging in Superorganisms.

AbstractEusocial insects-ants, bees, wasps, and termites-are being recognized as model organisms to unravel the evolutionary paradox of aging for two reasons: (1) queens (and kings, in termites) of social insects outlive similarly sized solitary insects by up to several orders of magnitude and (2) all eusocial taxa show a divergence of long queen and shorter worker life spans, despite their shared genomes and even under risk-free laboratory environments. Traditionally, these observations have been explained by invoking the classical evolutionary aging theory: well-protected inside their nests, queens are much less exposed to external hazards than foraging workers, and this provides natural selection the opportunity to favor queens that perform well at advanced ages. Although quite plausible, these verbal arguments have not been backed up by mathematical analysis. Here, for the first time, we provide quantitative models for the evolution of caste-specific aging patterns. We show that caste-specific mortality risks are in general neither sufficient nor necessary to explain the evolutionary divergence in life span between queens and workers and the extraordinary queen life spans. Reproductive monopolization and the delayed production of sexual offspring in highly social colonies lead natural selection to inherently favor queens that live much longer than workers, even when exposed to the same external hazards. Factors that reduce a colony's reproductive skew, such as polygyny and worker reproduction, tend to reduce the evolutionary divergence in life span between queens and workers. Caste-specific extrinsic hazards also affect life span divergence, but to a much smaller extent than reproductive monopolization.

On verbal arguments in sign languages

     It is now accepted that sign languages ​​have a rich morphological structure in both flexion and derivation terms. Most foreign scholars believe that sign languages show simultaneous morphology rather than a consistent sequential one. Morphological marking of verbal arguments in the Georgian Sign Language (GESL) verbal paradigm is performed in three ways: 1. Deictive marking, such as the incorporated verb paradigm; 2. Possessive-destination marking with semantic content, such as version category, expressing respectful and disrespectful forms, as an additional semantic marking for an indirect object; and 3. Morpho-syntactic marking – adding the morphological markers for arguments conveyed by nouns. The subject of the transitive verb in the aorist is expressed with an ergative case, for the rest verbal forms the subject is in nominative (unmarked), while the indirect object is often marked with a deictive marker of dative case. Thus, here we have the combination of the abovementioned first and third types. In GESL (and in other sign languages as well) such combinations are usual.    The semantic groups of verbs in sign languages can be distinguished according to the following two principles: The first approach follows and repeats the approaches of spoken languages. Here the classification models of verbs are grouped according to the lexical semantics of verb roots. The second approach can be formulated according to the proper characteristics of sign language verbs. With such an approach, the semantic classification of verbs takes into account the kinetic characteristics of the verb and not its lexical-semantic content. In particular, it will be possible to distinguish the following two main groups of verb in sign languages:Body-related (or body anchored) verbs, and B. Free verbs.

Diagnosing unaccusativity in Kawahíva

Unaccusativity, the division of intransitive verbs into two distinct classes, is usually argued for based on a class of cross-linguistic diagnostics, e.g., passivization. However, I diagnose unaccusative verbs in Kawahíva, an endangered Amazonian language, despite the traditional diagnostics being missing. The argument draws on a pattern of i-marking found in several constructions involving object displacement and drop, as well as in a class of intransitive verbs which includes, among others, the verbs i-katu ‘be pretty, well’, i-rovia ‘be happy’. I suggest that, since i- is a result of object dislocation and drop, then the sole argument of i-marked intransitive verbs must be an object that undergoes dislocation. As a result of arguing that i-marked intransitive verbs select an object, as opposed to a subject, they fit into the definition for unaccusative verbs (Perlmutter 1978).

Evidencing Predictors of Adolescent to Parent Violence Re-Offending Through Linkage of Police and Health Records

Current knowledge about the characteristics of adolescents involved in recidivist adolescent to parent violence offending remains limited. This study employed more than 50,000 linked administrative police (from birth) and health (from age five) data events to examine predictors of adolescent to parent violence recidivism in a geographically-distinct case series of 775 Australian adolescents. The predictive association between adverse childhood experiences, health and police involvement related characteristics and frequency of recidivism was found to vary by sex and level of exposure to parental intimate partner violence. Events occurring before an adolescent’s first offence, including sustained exposure to adverse childhood events and IPV exposure combined with sexual offence victimization, amplified the frequency of re-offending. Developmental life-course trajectories involving family violence verbal arguments, and other antisocial behaviors in mid to late adolescence, had a stronger predictive association with the frequency of re-offending. These results highlighted several key intervention points with adolescents and families across the life course.

Rethinking the *-s suffix in Old Chinese: with new evidence from Situ Rgyalrong

Abstract This paper re-examines previous hypotheses claiming the primacy of a perfect(ive) value in certain qusheng (*-s) derivations (in particular nominalization) in Old Chinese. First, it revisits examples previously cited as having been derived from the perfect(ive), and proposes to re-classify them as resulting from three different derivational processes, nominalization, verb argument demotion, and adverbialization. Second, it focuses on Sino-Tibetan comparative data, in particular from Situ Rgyalrong, a language with severe isomorphism across four -s suffixes. Then, on the basis of morphological (especially stem changes) and syntactic criteria, it sorts out the relationship between the different -s suffixes in Situ, while suggesting multiple sources to account for the diverse functions of qusheng (*-s) in Old Chinese.

Defining Unaccusatives in Sudanese Arabic

This article explores the properties of unaccusatives in spoken Sudanese Arabic within the minimalist program. The overall aim is to testify the Unaccusative Hypothesis, in particular, the thematic and argument structure, locative inversion, there-insertion and passivization against the data from Sudanese Arabic. Grammatical judgment questionnaires were given to 10 native Sudanese speakers to test their intuition about unaccusatives. Parallel to the available literature, unaccusatives in Sudanese Arabic are defined by their semantic properties reflected syntactically in their thematic and argument structure. Unaccusatives can appear in locative inversion construction and in thereinsertion structures but cannot undergo passivization. This class of predicates takes a single argument, assigning the thematic role as Theme. Structurally, the single argument of unaccusative verbs moves from its canonical object position within VP to non-canonical surface subject position in [Spec, TP], making the structural derivation of unaccusative similar to that of passives, in that both lack external argument as well as both involve argument raising from lower position to higher position. The findings of this study manifest that languages of the world share some common properties even though they belong to different families. This in turn, provides rich information to comparative syntax, linguistic theories, and language typology.

Verbal Arguments That Precede Dating Violence Perpetration: A Qualitative Analysis.

Verbal arguments often precede physical dating violence perpetration, and research is needed to better understand the content and evolution of arguments in dating relationships in order to develop more targeted dating violence prevention programming. This multisite project qualitatively investigated the content of verbal arguments preceding physical dating violence perpetration reported by 30 undergraduate students. Participants completed a semi-structured interview inquiring about events preceding participants' most recent dating violence episode. Interviews were analyzed using a thematic analysis approach. Verbal arguments often preceded participants' most recent episode of physical dating violence perpetration, with a wide range of argument topics reported, including jealousy, partner noncompliance, and substance use. Findings highlight the need for research to better understand the context of verbal arguments that precipitate dating violence perpetration.

Reflective Critical Thinking on Education and Teaching during the COVID-19 Pandemic

The purpose of this research was to find out Reflective Critical Thinking of Teaching in Class Discussion Learning in the new normal period in the midst of the Pandemic Corona Virus Disease 19 at the Science, Business, Sharia Faculty for the 2021-2022 academic year. Applying critical thinking skills is a challenge for lecturers to find effective teaching alternatives. Qualitative methods and quantitative descriptions were used because the results of the observation and interview processes in the form of percentage values, field notes, and interviews were analyzed. Observational data reveal positive behaviors, ideas, and feelings. Focus on experiences, feelings, and re-evaluation of experiences/ events/ phenomena. Making conclusions or reflective critical thinking commitments that have been carried out by students in class discussions. Perform verbal reasoning, arguments, and decision making. Open questionnaire and interview data revealed the application of Reflective Critical Thinking in class discussions. The results of the research indicated that the discussion class on teaching still lacks the application of reflective critical thinking practices. The impact of the pandemic has resulted in rigidity in learning. This research provides suggestions that Reflective Critical Thinking could be used as a teaching solution in the new normal period.

Assignment of Macroroles to the Double Objects of Verbs of Transferring: A Role and Reference Grammar Perspective

Ditransitive verbs that have two objects can be challenging when analyzed from the perspective of universal theories like Role and Reference Grammar (RRG) because each language deals with them in a different way. That is, each language has its own way to classify these verbs. This leads to some differences in the semantic role that each element performs in the sentence. RRG assumes two main macroroles for arguments in the clause: actor and undergoer. Therefore, the second object of a ditransitive verb is given the role of “non-macrorole direct core argument.” Haspelmath (2008) argues that two macroroles may not be enough to cover the cross-linguistic variations. Therefore, he suggests two additional macroroles. This paper, then, tackles the issue of role assignment in English and Arabic double-object constructions (DOCs) in the light of RRG taking into consideration Haspelmath’s suggestion. A limitation is made in this concern; it will be with ditransitive verbs that encode the action of receiving. It was concluded that the third argument of ditransitive verbs may not receive a non-macrorole direct core argument as the theory assumes, but can receive new roles that express the nature of the relationship between these arguments and their verbs.

The Use of Non-verbal Displays in Framing COVID-19 Disinformation in Europe: An Exploratory Account.

While online disinformation practices have grown exponentially over the past decade, the COVID-19 pandemic provides arguably the best opportunity to date to study such communications at a cross-national level. Using the data provided by the International Fact-Checking Network (IFCN), we examine the strategic uses of non-verbal and verbal arguments to push disinformation through social media and websites during the first wave of lockdowns in 2020 across 16 European countries. Our paper extends the work by Brennen et al. (2021) on the use of visuals in COVID-19 misinformation claims by investigating the use of facial emotional expressions and body pose depictions in conjunction with framing elements such as problems identified and attribution of responsibility in the construction of disinformation messages. Our European-wide comparative analysis of 174 messages indexed by the IFCN during the months of April and May 2020 helps provide a rounder understanding of the use of non-verbal devices in advancing COVID-19 disinformation across the continent, and can provide the basis for a framework for further study of the strategic use of non-verbal devices in COVID-19 disinformation world-wide.

Disembodying language: Actionality does not account for verb processing deficits in Parkinson's disease

Motor structures involvement has been traditionally assumed to account for selective deficits of verb (V) vs. noun (N) processing in Parkinon's disease (PD) patients via action semantic impairment (Embodied Cognition Theory, ECT). Nonetheless, post-semantic accounts, as well as extra-linguistic explanations (task difficulty effects), have not been evenly endorsed. This study aimed at investigating neurocognitive underpinnings of N –V discrepanies in PD patients. PD patients with (PD+) and without (PD-) cognitive impairments were compared to healthy participants (HPs) on tasks evaluating N and V semantic as well as post-semantic processing. Effects of motor content (actionality) of Ns and Vs and of verb argument structure (VAS) complexity were assessed . All groups performed worse in V than in N lexical retrieval. PD patients performed worse than HPs on both lexical and semantic tasks. By contrast, only N/V naming tasks discriminated PD-from PD + patients. PD + patients showed selective difficulties in retrieving low-actionality as well as transitive and unaccusative Vs. No associations were detected between the action semantic measure and V-naming performances. ECT-framed explanations cannot account for N –V discrepancies in PD patients. Indeed, these patients showed semantic deficits not limited to the action domain and retrieved most easily high-actionality Vs. N –V discrepancies in PD patients would thus reflect a magnification of a differential processing demand for Vs vs . Ns - which is intrinsic to the neurocognitive system. Nonetheless, PD patients being sensitive to VAS complexity might imply fronto-striatal involvement in V post-semantic processing, possibly at the lemma level. • Both healthy participants (HPs) and Parkinson's disease (PD) patients show noun-verb ( N –V) discrepancies. • action semantic impairment does not account for V deficits in PD patients. • N –V discrepancies are likely to reflect task-difficulty effects in both HPs and PD patients: • PD patients show argument structure complexity effects in V processing.

Impersonal Verbal Constructions in Biblical Hebrew: Active, Stative, and Passive

In this paper I focus on the syntactic properties of subjects in impersonal verbal constructions in Biblical Hebrew. It is claimed that four types of subjectless verbal clauses—active finite and participial plural, active finite singular, passive, and stative—feature three types of impersonal subject: covert indefinite pronoun, inflectional morpheme, and zero-subject. It will be demonstrated that these subjects have different, only partly overlapping syntactic properties: The covert indefinite pronoun implies an animate subject that does not necessitate “collective interpretation” and can have generic scope; the subject can be topicalised, negated, and relativised, the verbal predicate is temporally vague. The 3rd masculine plural inflectional morpheme implies an animate collective subject; it can be controlled from the matrix clause and be used for participant tracking and anaphora; the verbal predicate is quite precisely anchored in time. The dummy zero-subject has no explicit subject properties; it can be theorised that the syntactic slot of a subject is taken by an overt cognate argument (Cause or Theme) of stative or passive verbs, but practically such a subject leaves no syntactic traces.

Beyond affectedness – partitive objects and degrees of agenthood in Ancient Greek

Abstract In several ancient and modern Indo-European languages, the partitive-genitive may be used in place of the accusative to encode the second argument of two-place verbs. In Ancient Greek the two types of object encoding can alternate with change-of-state verbs, alternation being viewed as connected with degrees of patient affectedness: the partitive-genitive encodes partially affected objects. Alternation also extends to experiential verbs, which are typically characterized by a low degree of transitivity and do not imply any change of state of the object-stimulus. Rather than concentrating on the implications of case alternation on the construal of the object, I consider the effects of variation on the whole construction, and argue that genitive vs. accusative marking of the object (NomGen vs. NomAcc constructions) reflects the construal of the subject-experiencer. While the different construal of the experiencer in terms of degrees of control cross-linguistically often results in non-nominative encoding of the experiencer, in Ancient Greek it is object encoding that affects the construal of the experiencer and reflects a scale based on possible control. The distribution of constructions with experiential verbs shows that NomAcc is typical of verbs of sight, thought, intellectual knowledge and emotions connected to sight and awareness, such as wonder and fear. NomGen is connected with touch, smell, taste, memory, forgetfulness, care and desire. In the in-between area, verbs of hearing, learning and verbs of affection may feature both accusative and genitive encoding, thus constituting a fuzzy transition area. The connection between sight and other experiential verbs that feature accusative encoding reflects an embodied conceptualization of experiential situations.