Complements Of Verbs Research Articles

Collostructional nativisation in New Englishes

The present paper investigates the strength of verb-construction associations across various New Englishes on the basis of comparable corpora. In contrast to previous studies into verb complementation in New Englishes, we start off from three basic constructions in English — the intransitive, the monotransitive and the ditransitive construction — and analyse the co-occurrences of the three constructions and a wide range of verbs. The present study is based on the Hong Kong, the Indian, and the Singapore components of the International Corpus of English (ICE) because the three varieties represent markedly different stages in the process of the evolution of New Englishes with British English as the historical input variety. Our quantitative analysis includes multiple distinctive collexeme analyses for the different varieties. The results show, inter alia, that, firstly, processes of structural nativisation of New Englishes can also be observed at the level of verb-construction associations, which can be subsumed under the notion of “collostructional nativisation”, and that, secondly, there are identifiable intervarietal differences between British English and New Englishes as well as between individual New Englishes. In general, there is a correlation between the evolutionary stage of a New English variety and its collostructional nativisation: The more advanced a New English variety is in the developmental cycle, the more dissimilar its collostructional preferences are to British English.

The effect of borderline examples on language learning

Imbalanced training sets, where one or more classes are heavily underrepresented in the training data compared to the others, prove to be problematic when trying to classify new instances that belong to a rare class. In the present article, class imbalance occurs in the datasets of three language learning applications: automatic identification of verb complements, automatic recognition of semantic entities and learning taxonomic relations. All three applications are tested on Modern Greek text corpora; verb complement identification is applied to English corpora also, and comparative results are presented. The difference in statistical behaviour between the classes may be attributed to the low pre-processing level of the corpora, and/or the automatic nature of the pre-processing phase, and/or the exceptional occurrence of the linguistic information of interest in the data. Two different approaches are experimented with in order to deal with the problem: one-sided sampling (OSS) of the dataset and classification using support vector machines (SVMs). OSS removes redundant, noisy and misleading instances of the majority class, reducing thereby the training set size, while SVMs, without removing any instances, take into account only examples that appear close to the borderline region between the classes. The better results achieved by OSS in all test cases lead to some very interesting observations regarding the impact of the various training instances on classification, depending on their position in the feature-vector space.

La directionnalité et la nature non-téléologique de l’évolution linguistique

This paper deals with the nature of linguistic change, and, taking examples from the history of English, seeks to show that, contrary to what appears to be a widely held assumption, there is no reason to suppose that because one language undergoes a certain type of change, a similar change will necessarily take place in other, related languages. On the contrary, purely local factors may, and indeed often do decide which potential innovations will succeed, and which will fail. We look at two areas of English grammar in particular, the so-called ‘narrative perfect’ and infinitival complements of causative verbs, and compare the changes which have taken place within these fields in English to those which have occurred in French. The comparison shows not only that French and English have evolved in completely different directions, but also that assuming language change to be teleological in nature can lead to the wrong predictions being made as to which developments are likely to take place in the future

Icelandic Control Is Not A-Movement: The Case from Case

A rich literature on Icelandic syntax has established that infinitival complements of obligatory control verbs constitute a case assignment domain independent from the matrix clause, and in this differ systematically from all types of A-movement, which manifest case dependence/preservation. As Landau (2003) has observed, these facts provide significant counterevidence to the movement theory of control (Hornstein 1999 and subsequent work). Boeckx and Hornstein (2006a) attempt to defend this theory in light of data from Icelandic. We offer here a review of the relevant literature, and we show that Boeckx and Hornstein's reply fails on several counts. We further argue that contrary to their claims, PRO in Icelandic receives structural rather than default (nominative) case, leaving the movement theory with no account for the distinction between PRO and lexical subjects.

Analysis of Sentence Types based on Verb Complements

Analysis of Sentence Types based on Verb Complements

Des surbordonnées en if compléments non interrogatifs ?

Clauses introduced by if are traditionally assigned two functions: they are analyzed either as conditional adjuncts or as (indirect) interrogative complements. Yet in some structures the status of the if clause is not clear-cut, since the clause seems to describe (indirectly) the object argument of the embedding verb, but is clearly not interrogative (as it seems semantically similar to a conditional). These cases have often been overlooked in the literature. Our aim is to show that a third type of if clauses should be contemplated, i.e. if clauses that are complements of embedding verbs even though they do not involve epistemic questioning. A tripartite categorization is thus put forward.

Epistemics with Attitude

No abstract.

Instrumentalphrasen in der Ereignisstruktur polnischer Verben

The article explores the grammatical status of the noun phrase marked for instrumental with four semantic types of verb: i.) verbs of change of state such as “łamać coś czymś” (‘to break sth. with sth.’), ii.) verbs which express forceful contact with a surface such as “bić w coś czymś” (‘to beat sth. with sth.’), iii.) verbs which express complete transferral of a substance such as “wypełniać coś czymś” (‘to fill sth. with sth.’), and iv.) verbs of throwing such as “rzucić czymś” (‘to throw sth.’). Conceived of as events, these verbs differ as to the semantic status which they attribute to their instrumental phrase. This has immediate syntactic implications too. The instrumental phrase is marginal to the event in the first two groups and, hence, a mere adjunct in syntax. With the other two groups on the other hand, it is the actual, but dislocated theme and a verbal complement akin to a direct object.

Intensional verbs and their intentional objects

The complement of transitive intensional verbs, like any nonreferential complement, can be replaced by a 'special quantifier' or 'special pronoun' such as something, the same thing, or what. In previous work on predicative complements and that-clauses I argued that special quantifiers and pronouns introduce entities that would not have occurred in the semantic structure of the sentence without the special quantifier, entities that one would refer to with the corresponding nominalization. Thus something in John thinks something or the same thing in John thinks the same thing as Mary ranges not over propositions, but rather over entities of the sort 'John's thought that S' or 'the thought that S', without those entities acting as arguments of the think-relation. Despite initial apparent lack of evidence for this view for transitive verbs like need, a closer inspection of a greater range of data gives in fact further support for the 'Nominalization Theory' of special quantifiers, once 'nominalization' is viewed in a suitably extended and flexible way.

Direct, Indirect and Inferred Causation: Finite and Infinitive Complements of <i>Deixar</i> and <i>Fazer</i>

The present article examines the variation between finite and infinitive complements of the two Portuguese causation verbs deixar and fazer from a cognitive perspective. It is argued that the difference between these complements is mainly semantic and that it can be explained by the notion of linguistic iconicity, i.e. the semantic differences can be seen in the formal differences. Accordingly, a minor formal distance between the main verb and the complement verb in the infinitive complements signals a prototypically direct causation. On the other hand, a greater distance in the finite complements implies an indirect causation. Further, it is claimed that the indirect causation is often of an inferential and more complex character, thus giving rise to a higher degree of subjectification in the finite complements than in the infinitive complements.

When Events Meet Phrase Structure: Perception Verb Complements

When Events Meet Phrase Structure: Perception Verb Complements

The identification of stages in diachronic data: variability-based neighbour clustering

In this paper, we introduce a data-driven bottom-up clustering method for the identification of stages in diachronic corpus data that differ from each other quantitatively. Much like regular approaches to hierarchical clustering, it is based on identifying and merging the most cohesive groups of data points, but, unlike regular approaches to clustering, it allows for the merging of temporally adjacent data, thus, in effect, preserving the chronological order. We exemplify the method with two case studies, one on verbal complementation of shall, the other on the development of the perfect in English.

The Meaning and Structure of English Perception Verb Complements

The Meaning and Structure of English Perception Verb Complements

Les compléments de verbes régis par en

This work aims at improving the understanding of en preposition identity within the verbal complementation framework. We come in the continuity of the theoretical approach of Saussure and Harris, for whom language is an autonomous system whose semantic structure can’t be defined through referential or conceptual intuition. We studied the structures N1 V en N2 and N0 V N1 en N2 through a large corpus, thanks to a software facilitating the sorting and classifying of the data. Syntactic tests allowed to list verbs admitting the prepositional group en N as a complement, and to classify them into three groups : those that establish N0 identity (Ses adieux consisterent en trois baisers, La cylindree s’exprime en centimetres cubes), those that suppose N0 (L’infirmiere sembla gagner en absurde) or N1 (Lucienne me fournissait en chansons) modification and those that assume N0 or N1 transformation (La personne s’evanouirait en chimere). The property of the en preposition is to present en N as constituting and defining for the subject (or object) during the statement.

Semantic expansion and complements of experiential perception verbs - with special focus on hierarchy of five perception modality

Semantic expansion and complements of experiential perception verbs - with special focus on hierarchy of five perception modality

The island status of clausal complements: Evidence in favor of an information structure explanation

The present paper provides evidence that suggests that speakers determine which constructions can be combined, at least in part, on the basis of the compatibility of the information structure properties of the constructions involved. The relative ‘‘island’’ status of the following sentence complement constructions are investigated: ‘‘bridge’’ verb complements, manner-ofspeaking verb complements and factive verb complements. Questionnaire data is reported that demonstrates a strong correlation between acceptability judgments and a negation test used to operationalize the notion of ‘‘backgroundedness’’. Semantic similarity of the main verbs involved to think or say (the two verbs that are found most frequently in long-distance extraction from complement clauses) did not account for any variance; this finding undermines an account which might predict acceptability by analogy to a fixed formula involving think or say. While the standard subjacency account also does not predict the results, the findings strongly support the idea that constructions act as islands to wh-extraction to the degree that they are backgrounded in discourse.

When learners know more than linguists: (French) direct object clitics are not objects

This article draws on empirical findings from child language in order to evaluate syntactic analyses of object clitic constructions in adult French, focusing on two long-standing issues in the literature: (i) the argumental status of direct object clitics, and (ii) the site of their first merge. Two sets of acquisition data bearing on these questions are discussed: the persistent occurrence of object (clitic) omission, and the lack of clitic misplacement observed in child French. I argue that the former can only be adequately explained if object clitics are not argumental, and that the latter presents evidence against a first merge of the clitic in the verbal complement. This leads to the conclusion that the developmental data considered here are fully consistent only with syntactic analyses of object clitics as inflectional markers generated outside the complement of the verb, as proposed, for example, in Roberge (1990) and Sportiche (1996).

Grammaticalisation under Control: towards a functional analysis of same-subject identity-sharing

The notion of a missing or understood subject of infinitive and other non-finite clauses has been the topic of a vast enterprise of syntactic research for more than thirty years. It has also increasingly become the focus for discussion in semantic domains, with the tendency to determine control relations by the lexical nature of the verbs within their scope. The present study addresses the topic from a functionalist, grammaticalisation perspective, examining some examples from Colloquial Singapore English (CSE) in which subject Control relations appear to be absent. Within such enquiry, it is questioned what implications such examples may have for definitions of subject Control under a grammaticalisation account, and the relation of subject Control to subject selection in the complement. It is hypothesised that the presence of subject Control implies that the controlled subject must be selected by the complement verb and that the subject selection properties of the complement verb are determined by the level of grammaticalisation of the main verb. Furthermore, the presence of topic-prominent, rather than subject-prominent sentence structure in CSE underlies the contact influence most likely to contribute to the apparently reduced semantic relations holding between the verb and subject for speakers of that dialect.

À propos de X / à ce propos / à propos : évolution du XIVe au XIVe siècle

The aim of this paper is to give an account of the emergence and evolution of the French « topicalization marker » à propos de (‘about’), as well as two other phrases : à propos and à ce propos. This study is corpus-based and deals with texts in Middle and Pre-Classical French (14th to 16th centuries). As we try to refine the chronology of the evolution, we show that all three expressions have always displayed both postverbal and preverbal (even initial) positions. While the expressions in postverbal position have always functioned as complements, strongly linked to the verb, those in initial position go through an important change : from verbal complement to topicalization or enunciative markers. As we explain in our paper, this evolution roughly corresponds to the three-staged movement described by Traugott in the global framework of grammaticalization, namely from a more objective to a more subjective value, or in other words, from a propositional to an expressive function, through a textual one.

Untersuchungen zur verbalen Valenz im biblischen Hebraisch. By MICHAEL MALESSA.

Constructions with a direct object, a prepositional phrase, an infinitive, or a complement clause constitute an interface between syntax and the lexicon. As Hebrew dictionaries predominantly focus on meaning, while grammars cannot pay sufficient attention to individual verbs, a more systematic account of the numerous forms of verbal complementation was long overdue. Michael Malessa's dissertation, supervised by Takamitsu Muraoka and defended in 2003, successfully addresses this need from a mostly synchronic perspective, based on the customary albeit simplistic distinction between ‘Classical’ and ‘Late Biblical’ Hebrew. It proceeds from verb valency, that is, the idea that different verbal predicates require different numbers of arguments, including the subject, in order to arrive at well-formed sentences (pp. 1–26). Dependency grammar, which defines structure by means of the relation of a word (in this case the verb) to its various dependents, serves as a descriptive framework, because it is both rational and close to the linguistic surface.