Complex Verb Constructions Research Articles

English-to-Hindi Mapping of Compositional Verb-Particle Constructions

The present study investigates the semantic correspondence in the Hindi translation equivalents of compositional English verb-particle constructions (EVPCs) with the particle up. The compositional constructions include the directional and aspectual functions of particles. The study concentrates on the semantic representation of literal spatial directional and aspectual completive functions of the particle up in Hindi, a major Indian language. The researchers selected some frequent EVPCs, took examples from the British National Corpus and manually translated them into Hindi with the help of relevant dictionaries and corpus resources, including native speaker intuitions. Further, the obtained Hindi translational equivalents were analyzed for morphosyntactic structure and semantic correspondence. The study found that the compositional EVPCs are mapped in Hindi by simple(v) and complex verb constructions(verb/noun/adjective/adverb-verb). The spatial directional sense of the particle up is either lexicalized in the simple Hindi verb or polar verb (v1) of the Hindi compound verb(v1-v2), whereas in Hindi conjunct verb constructions, this directional sense is explicitly realized as a verbal modifier (generally adverb). The vector verb (v2) of the Hindi compound verb appears to map the aspectual-completive sense of the respective particle.

Semantic scope restrictions in complex verb constructions in Dutch

AbstractThis article addresses the question of how and why verbs combine in complex verb constructions in Dutch. We discuss introspective data reported in reference grammars and add evidence from corpus data to uncover the systematic ways in which Dutch verbs combine. Our analysis shows that verbs expressing meanings such as tense, aspect, modality and evidentiality are organized in a semantic scope hierarchy; that is, some verb meanings systematically have scope over others but not the other way round. We argue that this scope hierarchy reflects hierarchies of functional categories, elaborated in both functional and generative frameworks.

Complex Verb Constructions in Old Dutch

Abstract This article presents a corpus study of complex verb constructions in Old Dutch. A systematic search of the Old Dutch Corpus uncovers a set of fifteen complex verb constructions which all stack two auxiliaries (one finite and one nonfinite) on top of a main verb. The oldest and most frequent complex verb construction in the corpus is a future passive construction combining finite sullan ‘shall’ with nonfinite werthan ‘be’ and a past participle. The article discusses all fifteen complex verb constructions in detail and sketches the wider linguistic context in which they are found.

Полисемия и грамматикализация глаголов бросания: данные горномарийского языка

The paper deals with verbs of throwing in Hill Mari (Finno-Ugric). The data were collected in fieldwork mainly by elicitation, as well as by analyzing the corpus of transcribed oral narratives. First of all, two dominant lexemes of this semantic field are taken into account. These lexemes display clear differences in their Aktionsart properties. The differences between the lexemes with regard to a number of parameters previously proposed in typology are investigated, their relevance is evaluated. New parameters for their opposition are put forward. In addition, the article discusses the peripheral verbs of adjacent semantic fields (destruction and distribution in space). The correlations between more general distributive semantics of the peripheral lexemes and their semantic content in the contexts of throwing are considered. Special attention is paid to the grammaticalization of dominant verbs of throwing in complex verb constructions and to the analysis of their distributional constraints. Both the similarities between the constructions (participant with a semantic role of Patient, semantics of destruction) and the diff erences between them (constraints on plurality) are studied. Data on complex verb constructions are also discussed in the light of the cross-linguistic variation in the semantic shifts typical of the domain under consideration

Pseudo-grammaticalization: The anatomy of "come" in Modern Hebrew pseudo-coordination constructions

The paper examines the pseudo-coordination construction featuring the verb come preceding a lexical verb in Modern Hebrew, and shows that this is a mono-clausal mono-eventive construction, which did not emerge via a process of grammaticalization. That is, there is no tightening of internal dependencies between parts of the construction (Haspelmath 2004), nor evidence of a lexical unit starting to assume grammatical functions (Heine, Claudi & Hünnemeyer 1991). I go on to argue that, in this particular construction, the verb come is a “lexical restructuring verb” (Wurmbrand 2004, 2014), whose lexical properties do not differ from those of ‘simple’ change-of-location uses of come in that both feature a deictic meaning component. Particular attention will be paid to what looks like the absence of a motion component, suggesting that even if simple come selects for a prepositional complement, it does not necessarily encode a motion component, and therefore the absence of the PP, in a complex verb construction is not tied to loss of motion, but merely to a change in the type of complement. The current account provides substance to claims stressing a metaphorical relation between the two occurrences of come, since it points to the close similarities in the lexical-pragmatic properties of this lexeme in its two environments of use, and locates the difference between them in the choice of complement that produces the effect of transfer from the location realm to a more abstract one characteristic of metaphoric meanings.

Constructional complexification

Abstract This articles investigates the rise of double modal constructions in Dutch. Double modal constructions combine two modal auxiliaries with one lexical verb (e.g. zal moeten gaan ‘shall have to go’). Little is known on why and how such complex verb constructions came into being. This article presents historical data for the earliest double modal constructions in Middle Dutch (13th century) drawing on both previous corpus studies and on new empirical observations. The historical data is then analyzed from a diachronic construction grammar perspective. The main theoretical point of this article is that the emergence of double modal constructions is a case of ‘constructional complexification’, i.e. the process in which constructions become increasingly larger in size.

Are suffixed verb forms in complex verb construction really nouns?

Are suffixed verb forms in complex verb construction really nouns?

Bilingual Complex Verbs: So what’s new about them?

<p>In this paper I describe bilingual complex verb constructions in Bengali-English bilingual speech. Bilingual complex verbs have been shown to consist of two parts, the first element being either a verbal or nominal element from the nonnative language of the bilingual speaker and the second element being a helping verb or dummy verb from the native language of the bilingual speaker. The verbal or nominal element from the non-native language provides semantics to the construction and the helping verb of the native language bears inflections of tense, person, number, aspect (Romaine 1986, Muysken 2000, Backus 1996, Annamalai 1971, 1989). I describe a type of Bengali-English bilingual complex verb which is different from the bilingual complex verbs that have been shown to occur in other codeswitched Indian varieties. I show that besides having a two-word complex verb, as has been shown in the literature so far, bilingual complex verbs of Bengali-English also have a three-part construction where the third element is a verb that adds to the meaning of these constructions and affects their aktionsart (aspectual properties). I further show that monolingual Bengali complex verbs directly contribute to the rise of these bilingual complex verbs.</p>

Ergatives, antipassives and the overt light v in Hindi

This paper investigates the nature of ergative case assignment in a type of complex verb construction in Hindi. This construction involves a verbal complex that contains a main verb stem followed by a light verb. It is shown that the ergative case assignment in this construction depends crucially on the light verb. The evidence presented in the paper is highly suggestive of a view of vP shells in which the external argument introducing little v is a distinct head from the case assigning little v. Furthermore, a study of a range of lexical exceptions to the canonical ergative case assignment patterns in Hindi provides an argument that ergative case in Hindi is an inherent case.

Sentence Parsing in a Morphologically Rich Language – Finnish

AbstractWe review evidence on how sentences are parsed in Finnish – a morphologically rich language. The reviewed studies focus on effects of word order, morphological agreement, and morphological complexity. As regards word order, it has been shown that infrequent word orders are more difficult to process than frequent word orders. Moreover, pragmatic constraints can wipe out the effect of structural frequency, although the pragmatic influence is non‐immediate. Morphological agreement in modifier–head noun phrases facilitates their processing. The effect is delayed in nature, which (in combination with other evidence) suggests that facilitation operates at the level of syntactic integration. Finally, evidence is reviewed that demonstrates an effect of morphological complexity and density in the processing of complex verb constructions, but only when the complex and less complex constructions are equally frequent. This is not the case when the complex construction is more frequent, suggesting the structural frequency can override a morphological complexity effect.

Information Extraction Using Concept Node Analysis of Brain Radiology Reports Summarization

OBJECTIVE: Electronic Medical Record contains the majority of clinical data in unstructured text. The information in the textual document can be stored in conceptual format and used to support clinical care by text summarization technique. In this study, we present Information Extraction(IE) using Concept Node(CN) which is extraction rule in case frame from brain radiology reports in SNUH(Seoul National University Hospital) for summarization. METHOD: Following steps are performed: design conceptual model to define semantic entities as extraction templates of brain radiology report, build CN dictionary based on statistical syntactic pattern and development of parser to extract relevant information based on defined templates. RESULTS: The three evaluation results shows that 19% precision improvement after post processing supplemental specified complex verb construction and 19.24~21.25% accurate semantic effectiveness with extracting additional Korean noun. The average of precision is 85.18%, average of recall is 93.71% and F-measure is 0.89. CONCLUSION: Our approach has advantageous elements for different language at the same sentence. We expect this IE technology can summarize vast amount radiology texts material for clinical decision support system effectively and hope this study helps the evolution of clinical data representation in Korean medical records and its integration into the EMR in the future.

The development of complex verb constructions in British Sign Language.

This study focuses on the mapping of events onto verb-argument structures in British Sign Language (BSL). The development of complex sentences in BSL is described in a group of 30 children, aged 3;2-12;0, using data from comprehension measures and elicited sentence production. The findings support two interpretations: firstly, in the mapping of concepts onto language, children acquiring BSL overgeneralize the use of argument structure related to perspective shifting; secondly, these overgeneralizations are predicted by the typological characteristics of the language and modality. Children under age 6;0, in attempting to produce sentences encoded through a perspective shift, begin by breaking down double-verb constructions (AB verbs) into components, producing only the part of the verb phrase which describes the perspective of the patient. There is also a prolonged period of development of non-manual features, with the full structure not seen in its adult form until after 9;0. The errors in the use of AB verbs and the subsequent protracted development of correct usage are explained in terms of the conceptual-linguistic interface.

Crossing Boundaries (review)

Reviewed by: Crossing boundaries ed. by István Kenesei Catherine Rudin Crossing boundaries. Ed. by István Kenesei. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999. Pp. 301. The last decade has been an exciting period for generative work on Eastern European languages as Eastern European linguists have gained easier access to western linguistic theories and western theorists have gained easier access to Eastern European data. This crossing of boundaries—geographical, political, theoretical, and even syntactic—is the foundation for this book, a collection of selected proceedings from the first Conference on Linguistic Theory in Eastern European Languages (Hungary, 1998). The volume is unusually coherent and well-organized for a conference collection. All of the papers treat syntactic issues in some Eastern European language, within a more-or-less minimalist framework. Kenesei’s excellent introduction outlines the papers, pointing out common themes and differences among them and explaining their division into three groups, ‘Clitic, head, and phrasal movement’, with six papers; ‘DP structure’, with three papers; and ‘Clausal structure’, with two papers. The range of languages discussed makes the volume broadly representative of Eastern Europe: Three papers concentrate primarily on Hungarian, two on Bulgarian, and one each on Macedonian, Serbo-Croatian, Polish, Romanian, and Albanian. Olga Tomic, ‘Cliticization and clitichood’, distinguishes two types of clausal clitics, ‘inflection’ and ‘operator’, and argues that some clitics are not inherently directional. Ljiljana Progovac, ‘Eventive TO and the placement of clitics in Serbo-Croatian’, provides evidence that second-position clitic placement in Serbo-Croatian is syntactic, not phonological, and suggests that it is a reflection of (covert) V2. David Willis, ‘The structure of Old Russian periphrastic verbal construction’, argues that participle movement in Old Russian is adjunction to I, not long head movement, and includes fascinating data on the historical reanalysis of conditional Aux as a particle. María Luisa Rivero, ‘Stylistic verb movement in yes-no questions in Bulgarian and Breton’, argues that stylistic verb movement in several languages is a ‘hybrid’ rule between syntax and phonology. Katalin É Kiss, ‘Strategies of complex predicate formation and the Hungarian verbal complex’, analyzes complex predicates in Hungarian as strings of light verbs subject to both syntactic and phonological constraints. She argues that verb modifier climbing is head movement, triggered by a restriction against light verbs in VP-initial stressed position. Hilda Koopman and Anna Szabolcsi, ‘Hungarian complex verbs and XP-movement’, address exactly the same data as É Kiss but argue for an XP movement analysis and come to different conclusions about the factors which trigger movement within the complex verb construction. Marcel den Dikken, ‘On the structural representation of possession and agreement’, analyzes patterns of case and agreement within two types of possessive constructions in three different dialects of Hungarian, arguing against an earlier analysis by Szabolcsi. Ewa Willim, ‘On the syntax of the genitive in nominals: The case of Polish’, uses comparative data from a dozen languages [End Page 198] to argue that differences in how many genitive arguments are allowed within a nominal phrase are due to differences in availability of a D head and strength of genitive case features of N and/or D. Polish has only one genitive argument per NP because it lacks D. Alexandra Cornilescu, ‘Aspect and nominalizations: The case of Romanian’, claims that event nominals have the same argument structure as their corresponding verbs and that which arguments are projected depends crucially on aspect. Iliyana Krapova, ‘Subjunctive complements, null subjects and case checking in Bulgarian’, distinguishes two types of subjunctive clauses in Bulgarian, with pro vs. PRO subjects. The two differ in the morphological content of subjunctive tense, resulting in different case checking properties. Dalina Kallulli, ‘Non-active morphology in Albanian and event (de)composition’, derives the several readings of ‘nonactive’ constructions through the interaction of various semantic and morphological factors. Most of the papers are well-written, clearly argued, and interesting, and the volume as a whole testifies to the liveliness and sophistication of Eastern European linguistics in the post-communist era. Catherine Rudin Wayne State College Copyright © 2002 Linguistic Society of America

Another Look at the Topology of Serial Verb Constructions: The Grammaticalization of Temporal Relations in Bislama (Vanuatu)

Another Look at the Typology of Serial Verb Constructions:The Grammaticalization of Temporal Relations in Bislama (Vanuatu) Miriam Meyerhoff Abstract This paper analyzes serial verb constructions (SVCs) in Bislama, the creole spoken in Vanuatu. The form of SVCs in Bislama does not appear to fit neatly into existing formal typologies of SVCs, and evidence is introduced in favor of this pattern being a direct transfer from some of the substrate languages in Vanuatu. It is proposed that Seuren's (1990) typology of SVCs be extended to include the Vanuatu data. The paper notes that another property of Bislama and other languages of Vanuatu is that there is no grammaticalization of a past/nonpast temporal relation as in, for example, English. One way of analyzing this difference is to say that Bislama and English differ with respect to which relationship between temporal operators is grammaticalized in a finite clause: in English, the ordering of S(peech time) and E(vent time) is realized overtly; in Bislama, the ordering of S and R(eference time) is. If R is associated with a functional projection (FP) below tense (TP), a number of constraints on the second verb in Bislama SVCs follow from the claim that this FP is anaphorically dependent on the first clause and the second verb phrase is not finite (but also not nonfinite). 1. Introduction. This paper analyzes series of verbs in Bislama (the pidgin/creole spoken in Vanuatu).1 It shows that serial verb constructions (SVCs) in Bislama (and several substrate languages) do not fit neatly into existing typologies of SVCs, and the paper demonstrates how such typologies need to be extended to [End Page 247] accommodate the Vanuatu data. It suggests that the form of these constructions in Bislama and several constraints barring modification of the second verb in series may be accounted for by positing an impoverished structure associated with the second verb. It is suggested that the second verb in series lacks an independent specification for what Reichenbach (1947) calls reference time (R). In Bislama, it is argued, R is required for a clause to be finite. A language-specific definition of finiteness is given (the verb may occur with all person and number agreement options); when it is not finite, an unmarked inflection occurs on the verb. A terminological point is needed from the outset. Calling these series of lexical verbs SVCs perhaps suggests that (a) SVCs are a more unified class than is actually the case (Durie 1997, Senft 2001), and (b) that they differ from other syntactic constructions in a more systematic way than they in fact do. The class of constructions under consideration in this paper is a good deal narrower than those considered by Durie (1997) in his cross-linguistic review of SVCs. Narrowing the focus of investigation like this is not a covert claim about what is or is not a "proper" SVC; it is simply a pragmatic decision to try and make sure the constructions being compared are indeed comparable in the face of this heterogeneity. There is undoubtedly something to be said about the relationship between the Bislama SVCs discussed here and Bislama verbs that select bare complements, such as want and try, but this matter will only be touched on briefly. In addition, it seems likely that there are similarities between the SVCs to be discussed here and what have been called complex predicates and have been discussed in some detail for Indo-European languages, for example, in Romance (Kayne 1975, Zubizaretta 1985, Burzio 1986), Urdu (Butt 1997), Bengali (Fitzpatrick-Cole and Lahiri 1998), and Hindi (Bhatt 1998). The goal of this paper is not to provide a typology of all such complex verb constructions, but it is hoped that the data will add to the growing cross-linguistic corpus in a manner that contributes something to the development of more general theory. What the paper focuses on is an unusual property of the second verb in SVCs in Bislama (and some other Vanuatu languages). Although the lower verb is inflected, the usual subject-verb agreement paradigm does not appear. Since this pattern for SVCs has not been discussed in the literature, these data are of some...

Siraya Reduplication

Siraya Reduplication1 K. Alexander Adelaar Abstract The main patterns of reduplication in Siraya (West Formosa) include monosyllabic root reduplication, an inherent lexical property of certain wordbases, and disyllabic reduplication, which adds the notion of diffuseness (including plurality, variety, similarity) to nominal wordbases, and the notion of diffusenes (repetition of action, plurality of actants) or continuity (including state, process) to verbal wordbases. The same meanings are conveyed by rightward reduplication, which applies when the last three or four segments of a root are copied at the end (losing the final consonant if there is one). First-syllable reduplication basically forms cardinal numbers with nonhuman referents. Ca- reduplication is part of verbal morphosyntax indicating progressive aspect, generic aspect, or a state, but it also forms deverbal nouns; it is, moreover, used with ordinal numerals, and with cardinal numerals and other count words having a human referent. Contrary to the general pattern found in other Austronesian languages (Blust 1998), the meaning of Siraya nouns derived through Ca- reduplication is not restricted to that of instrument but also includes that of agent, abstract noun, undergoer, and (in combination with the suffix -an) location. Finally, pa- reduplication is a morphosyntactic device forming causative verbs. 1. Introduction. Siraya, an extinct West-Formsoan language, has a large variety of reduplication patterns. It has many of these in common with other Formosan languages (cf. Blust 1998, Chang 1998). The following overall patterns can be distinguished formally alongside some less common patterns: monosyllabic-root reduplication, disyllabic-root reduplication, rightward reduplication, first-syllable reduplication, Ca- reduplication, pa- reduplication. These patterns are shown in underived as well derived words. Monosyllabic root reduplication and disyllabic root reduplication can each be divided into subpatterns on the basis of the phonemic structure of the wordbases with which they are found. In the following sections, an overview is given of all apparent patterns and subpatterns as well as of their respective functions and meanings. [End Page 33] Conventions. Siraya examples in this article are taken from the Siraya Gospel of St. Matthew (Gravius 1661, Campbell 1888) and, occasionally, from the Siraya Catechism (Gravius 1662). For the sake of philological soundness, out-of-context examples of verbs are sometimes given in the derived form in which they occur in the sources, although their meaning may be rendered into English with an infinitive or participle. Furthermore, for practical reasons, the English glundergoer-orientedness of some of these examples. Source places are given immediately after lexical examples, and after theoss does not translate the translation in the case of sample sentences. Source places in the gospel text are given between brackets by a roman numeral (indicating gospel chapter) followed by a semicolon and arabic numeral (indicating verse). Source places in the Catechism are given between brackets with a capital C followed by the page number of the 1662 printing; this page number is followed by a "v" if reference is made to a verso page. Angle brackets will be used for roots that only occur in derivations, as for example <tangi>, which does not occur by itself but is found in t-m-angi-tangi (ii:18) 'to cry' and tangi-tangi-ən (xiii:42) 'crying'. There is, or course, no way of telling whether these roots were really bound forms in spoken Siraya or whether they just happen not to occur underived in the existing corpus of Siraya data.2 Terms. The reader is referred to Adelaar (1997) for a grammatical description of Siraya. What follows here is a simple listing of special terms used in this publication. (a) The AFFECTIVE prefix ka- occurs with undergoer-oriented verbs including those expressing a sensation, feeling or emotion. (b) The agent-oriented prefix is M- and has two allomorphs: m-, which occurs before initial vowels, and -m-, which occurs after initial consonants. The allomorph m- also replaces initial p- in the transitive prefix pa- (which then becomes ma-). It also replaces p- in a number of lexical prefixes, such as pako-/paku- (+calling), paki- (+find), păta- (+talk), which become respectively mako-/maku-, maki-, and măta- through affixation of M-. (c) In Siraya complex-verb constructions, the first verb obtains all the marking; the...

Affixial verbs in syntax: A reply to Grimshaw and Mester

We have pointed to a range of data which fulfill exactly the predictions G & M ascribe to a syntactic theory of Eskimo complex verb constructions. In particular we have found that complex verbs occur in different phrase structure configurations from ordinary verbs and trigger different kinds of case marking and that anaphoric processes must recognize clause boundaries within complex verbs; that the internal structure of certain complex verbs is unique in a way that argues for word-internal clause boundaries; that derivations by means of suffixes of the -kqu- class have the same sorts of properties as syntactic causatives; that certain suffixes distinguish between basic and derived stems, and that certain derived forms do not interact freely with other word formation processes.