Frequency Of Verbs Research Articles

The Present Progressive in Discourse: Grammar versus Usage Revisited

Certain uses of the present progressive in informal spoken English discourse remain difficult for even the most advanced ESL learners. This article focuses on the increasing frequency of the so-called stative verbs found in the progressive aspect. It is proposed that the use of stative verbs in the progressive is not necessarily exceptional or contrary to standard accounts of the English present progressive; rather, it is a predictable consequence of the meaning of the present progressive and the particular discourse contexts in which progressive statives are found. A consideration of the progressive from a discourse perspective provides a principled account of the discrepancy between grammar book and usage and offers a number of implications for ESL pedagogy.

Construction of matched verbal and design continuous paired associate tests.

We developed verbal and figural continuous paired associate tests (CPAT) that are matched on internal consistency and on the distributional properties of mean item difficulty, variance, and skewness. The Verbal CPAT is composed of high frequency nouns, verbs, and adjectives. Selection of the designs was guided by literature on the effects of right-hemisphere damage on memory for designs. One hundred subjects were given 80 items from the verbal CPAT and 80 items from the designs CPAT. Twenty subjects at these five ranges of Wechsler Memory Quotient were evaluated: less than or equal to 79, 80-89, 90-99, 100-109, greater than or equal to 109. The final 40-item version of the Verbal CPAT had a mean of 26.72, a SD of 7.03, and an alpha of .859. The Designs CPAT had a mean of 26.42, a SD of 7.75, and an alpha of .886. Neither test was significantly skewed. These matched tests should be useful in making inferences about differences between verbal and figural memory that are not confounded with the problem of differential test sensitivity.

Frequency of Verbs: Is Our Translation Natural?

Frequency of Verbs: Is Our Translation Natural?

The acquisition of mental verbs: A systematic investigation of the first reference to mental state

It is generally recognized that the ability to contemplate and communicate about the knowledge, beliefs, and goals of oneself and others is a benchmark of human cognition. Yet, little is known about the beginnings of this ability, in large measure because methods for accurately assessing very young children's ability have been unavailable. Here we present the results of using a method of convergent analyses of naturally occurring speech to assess the young child's ability to contemplate and communicate about mental state. The first study describes the frequency and function of verbs of mental reference such as think and know in the speech of one child from 2;4 to 4;0. The second examines shorter samples of speech collected from 30 two-year-olds over a 6 month period. Results from both studies suggest that the earliest uses of mental verbs are for conversational functions rather than for mental reference. First attempts at mental reference begin to appear in some children's speech in the second half of the third year. Since most of the children studied exhibited the linguistic knowledge necessary to make reference to mental states, we conclude that the absence of such reference earlier suggests that still younger children lack awareness of such states, or at the very least, an understanding of their appropriateness as topics of conversation.

Verb Frequency and Source Criticism

Verb Frequency and Source Criticism

Verb Frequency and Source Criticism

Statistical methods, which, it is claimed, can show whether a passage is composite, and, if so, distinguish its constituent parts, and can also differentiate between oral and written material, have been proposed by Ronald E. Bee 1). Results to date include an analysis of Deuteronomy into various strata, one identified with Hilkiah's document. Here those methods are examined together with the general question of the applicability of statistical techniques to source criticism.

Falsification of the hypothesis that word frequency is a unified variable in sentence processing

In this study the relationship of word frequency to sentential processing complexity was investigated. Thirty-two S s listened to sentences and pushed a button in response to a word beginning with a preestablished phoneme (target words), and reaction time was taken as an index of local processing difficulty. Lexical items immediately preceding the target words were manipulated: they were either high or low frequency adjectives, nouns, or verbs. It was found that only low frequency adjectives produced longer RTs. No effect of word frequency for nouns or verbs was observed.

Different Gender, Different Arabic? The Case of Israel

The present article indicates that women and men write different Arabic in the Israeli press. These differences are observable in the frequency of main and secondary clauses (i.e. in sentence length and in variation), in word order, in the frequency of clauses containing adjectives, as well as those containing adverbs. We see these differences in the frequency of verbs without any visible noun, as well as in the choice of conjunction and the choice of particle of negating the past. These variations in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) are due to the gender of the reader, as is the case with adjectives, where women writers use markedly fewer adjectives than men do, except when writing for men. But the variation is otherwise dependent on the gender of the writer. This alternation is not between grammatical or ungrammatical Arabic. Indeed, both genders write correct Arabic. Instead it is (mostly) a question of choice, of style.

The Frequency of Verbs and Tenses in Recent Spanish Plays

The Frequency of Verbs and Tenses in Recent Spanish Plays