Full Verb Research Articles

Helgoländisch mut: von finitem Modalverb zu epistemischer Partikel

In the Frisian dialect of Heligoland sentences are found which apparently contain two finite verbs, the modal verb mut ‘must’ in the verb second position and a full verb in the verb final position. It will be argued that the original 3rd person present form mut developed into an epistemic particle, so that the inflection shifted to the former infinitive. The grammaticalization of this particle, its spread from deliberative questions to declarative clauses and its epistemic status are discussed in some detail. The epistemic particle mut in Heligolandic is compared to similar particles occupying the verb second position in West and North Germanic languages.

The categorization of causatives in modern Chinese

The article presents a model for applying methods of corpus linguistics to the categorization of causatives that convey semantics of causality in contemporary Chinese. The author employs the core functions of the corpus manager Sketch Engine, including thesaurus, concordance and word list in order to select contextual synonyms, search to find illustrative material and generate lexical units with preset parameters accordingly. Specifically, online corpus of Chinese Web 2017 (zhTenTen17) Simplified, which contains approximately 16.6 billion tokens, was used to conduct the study.Notably, in modern Chinese, the category of causality is primarily realized through causative constructions, which/whose type is determined by the causative predicate. The present paper studies both lexical and grammatical causatives. The results illustrate that lexical causatives include mono- andmulti-component types, while grammatical causatives are divided into those formed by two full verbs; those formed by a full verb and a resultative component; and those formed by a combination of light and non-causative verbs. Besides, grammatical causative constructions are divided into two main subtypes: morphological and analytical. The morphological one conveys semantics of causality either through causative affixes or phonological changes, while the analytical one being the most prevalent in modern Chinese are further classified into three models, namely: those formed with causative markers; those formed with the causative preposition 把; and those formed with the word 得. Future research may focus on the pragmatics of the choice in different types of causative constructions, with a regard to the conceptual and linguistic worldview of the Chinese people.

EFL Students’ Difficulties on Using Subject-Verb Agreement

The purpose of this study is to determine the common subject-verb agreement difficulties that students encounter in the English Education Study Program at the University of Bengkulu. This study adopted a qualitative methodology. The population was the sixth semester of the 2022/2023 a English Education Study Program. The sample of this study was 33 students consisting of 11 males and 22 females. Data collection was done through validated and reliable tests consisting of 30 items representing 6 subject-verb agreements; full verbs, linking verbs, modals, auxiliary be, auxiliary have, and auxiliary do. Furthermore, this study used simple statistics (percentage and average) to analyze the data. In accordance to the study's findings, the majority of learners have struggles using subject-verb agreements. Found 540 obstacles in the test. The students' own difficulties were difficulties using Full Verbs (18%), Linking Verbs (21.5%), Modals (23%), Auxiliary be (16.5%), Auxiliary have (14%), and Auxiliary do (7%). Modal becomes the dominant difficulty for students. It was possible that students have difficulty understanding patterns in modals and did not know the term modals themselves. Moreover, students also could not identify the subject and verb in the sentence, lacked vocabulary, did not practice often, and did not recheck wrong answers. This result suggests that an appropriate method is still needed to improve understanding with subject-verb agreement.

Event integration as a driving force of language change: evidence from Chinese 使-shǐ-make

AbstractTalmy’s (1991; 2000a; 2000b) influential work on motion events provides a strong two-way typology that can examine and account for the typology of a language, but this framework is basically synchronic. It may not be equally valid to explain language change. In this paper, we apply the event integration theory and its latest development, The Macro-event Hypothesis (Li, 2020, 2023), to account for the development of the causative verb 使-shǐ-make (SHI for short) in Chinese. This study reveals that, firstly, the multi-functional behavior of SHI represents a typical case of grammaticalization, with a full verb acquiring the role of conjunction and expressing abstract meanings. Secondly, the semantic division of the causative and non-causative uses of SHI in Contemporary Chinese is the most clear-cut. Thirdly, causative SHI shows a greater level of semantic bleaching, and the construction profiles a single causal activity and has a higher degree of event integration when compared to its lexical verbal use. The constructional grammaticalization of SHI confirms that event integration is key to its development. This study verifies The Macro-event Hypothesis of a continuum of grammaticalization in language and uncovers the process of semantic gradation that takes place in Chinese.

SISTEM GLAGOLSKIH PREDIKATA U „USTAVU REPUBLIKE SRBIJE“

The conducted analysis examined the syntactic features of simple and complex verbal predicates in the Constitution of the Republic of Serbia, the supreme legal act that has a prescriptive function. Since patient is the dominant instance in the mentioned document, the function of predicate occupies a central place in the analysis. By combining functional and structural criteria, the place of verbal predicates in the corpus that belongs to the administrative functional style is determined. Bearing in mind that this style is charac- terized primarily by nominal expression, the analysis seeks to examine how this character- istic is reflected in the use of verbal predicates. The research results showed the following: 1) Simple verbal predicates appear in the corpus as predicates of both independent and dependent clauses, with the dominant use of the present tense which gives the impres- sion of validity of prescribed norms. The use of simple verbal predicates consisting of transitive verbs with the particle se is frequent, with the purpose of achieving anonymous and impersonal character of the text through the neutralization of the subject. Existential type impersonal sentences are sporadically found in the corpus, with a logical subject in genitive and a negative impersonal form of the verb imati, which contributes to a clear formulation of legal definitions; 2) Both simple and complex verbal predicates often appear in the corpus in the form of the reflexive passive. The first part of such predicates contains verbs moći and smeti (which express deontic modality), as well as aspectual verbs počinjati, nastavljati, nastaviti and prestajati. Regarding modal verbs within complex predicates, adjectives dužan, slobodan, sprečen i ovlašćen are found in the text. Their presence shows that this way of constructing a complex verbal predicate is very productive. All copulative adjective expres- sions in the corpus are accompanied by full verbs in the form of da + present, which seeks to achieve a communicative exchange between the government and citizens. A decomposed predicate biti u mogućnosti is found as well, which functions as the modal part of a complex verbal predicate and represents another indicator of the tendency of using nominal expres- sions within the system of verbal predicates.

De nuevo sobre la polisemia de «saber + infinitivo» y su comportamiento gramatical: otro universal vernáculo del español

"This grammar note describes and analyzes the polysemy of the verb saber (‘to know’) in current Spanish. Specifically, it summarizes the values that it presents as a full verb or saber1, with a base meaning of ability or capacity (Juan sabe nadar), and as a double auxiliary: saber2 or frequent aspectual auxiliary verb equivalent to soler, acostumbrar (Los sillones vacíos saben estar ocupados a veces), and saber3 or culminative aspectual auxiliary verb similar to alcanzar, lograr, llegar a (Es un país que supo ser espléndido). Likewise, the forms it adopts (saber + infinitive), the verb tenses in which it appears registered, and its use as a modal verb are reviewed. Documentation of this use throughout the history of the Spanish language as well as examples in other Romance languages is offered. All this allows us to propose that we are facing a vernacular universal in Spanish."

Information packaging strategies serving the communicative needs of speakers

This paper presents the findings of a study of diverse information packaging strategies employed by speakers of English to better serve their communicative needs in given contexts, based on examples from the British National Corpus (BNC). More precisely, the analysis centres around the information packaging possibilities offered by light verb constructions (LVCs) in comparison to their full verb counterparts. As is conventionally recognised in previous studies, LVCs formally stretch the predicate over a verbal and a nominal element (e.g. to order vs to give an order). It is precisely this fact that makes it possible for speakers to structure their utterances in various ways. Thus, either all participants are overtly realized in the sentence and the communicative focus could be placed on each one of them depending on the context, or some participants are reduced, which is the preferred strategy when their identity is implied, unfamiliar, irrelevant or would rather be concealed.

Gendered Existence? Existential-There Construction in English-Polish Translation

This paper analyses a possible effect of the variable of gender on semantic enrichment of existential sentences translated from English to Polish. Existential-there clauses in English typically take the form there + be + indefinite NP (+place/time adverbial). Since there-constructions lack a structurally congruent counterpart in Polish, they can be rendered in Polish with several syntactic constructions ranging from the verb ‘być’ (E. to be) through ‘mieć’ (E. to have) to verbs semantically richer than ‘być’ (e.g., verbs of perception, verbs of location, etc). We ask the question of whether the gender factor is correlated with the factor of text type/genre. To this purpose, we compiled a corpus of English texts representing belles-lettres and popular science writing, male-authored, female-authored and multi-authored and translated by male and female translators. Our preliminary results show that the choice of Polish translations of English existential-there follows from the interplay of genre, narrative/descriptive modes of text, and the gender of the translator, with female translators tending to replace the simple copula ‘be’ with a full lexical verb more often than male translators in dialogic parts of belle-lettres.

Grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification in an Iranian modal verb: A paradox resolved by Dutch

ABSTRACT This paper deals with the grammatical and semantic development of a modal verb in four West Iranian languages: gu/ga in Kahangi, gijabon in Semnani, boGostæn/bogostæn in the Takestan dialect of Tati and goan in Vafsi. Field work data demonstrate that, from the perspective of the grammaticalization and (inter)subjectification literature, this verb in these languages poses a challenge. It occurs as a non-grammaticalized full verb and as a grammaticalized auxiliary. Yet the full verb features an arguably more (inter)subjectivized meaning than the auxiliary: the former expresses volition, the latter dynamic, deontic and epistemic modal meanings. The absence of historical data for these languages does not allow the puzzle to be resolved directly, but a comparison with the modal verb hoeven ‘need’ in Dutch, which in the present-day language has properties similar to those of the Iranian verbs, and which has been investigated diachronically, suggests a solution: the present situation may be the result of a convoluted diachronic evolution, in which the semantic and grammatical developments do not align. The case thus demonstrates that one cannot easily draw conclusions from synchronic observations about diachronic relations between forms and/or meanings.

Lexical Hedging in English Abstracts of Russian Research Articles on Economics: A Corpus-Based Study

An important area of academic English competence, the use of hedges in various regional varieties of English, has been the subject of numerous cross-cultural studies worldwide. However, hedging in the Russian variety of English as an academic lingua franca remains largely under-researched. This paper reports the results of a corpus-based study of lexical hedges in English abstracts of 200 Russian research articles published over the past few years in the leading national Journals of Economics. The data obtained in this research are compared to the findings of an earlier similarly designed study of British and American abstracts, shedding light on the peculiarities of lexical hedging use by Russian authors. Quantitative corpus linguistics methods are used, notably statistical analysis of corpus frequency data based on Dunning's log-likelihood test. Our analysis shows that although Russian economics research writers employ quite a wide range of lexical hedging devices – largely over 70% – coinciding with those used by native English writers, they use most categories of lexical hedges (modal verbs, adverbials, quantifiers and full verbs) less frequently while employing hedging nouns more frequently than their British and American counterparts. The findings can be useful for further research into hedging in the abstracts of scientific articles on other disciplines as well as for teaching English research abstract writing to Russian speakers.

The origin of the causative and simulative suffix -ter in Hakha Lai and Falam Chin

Abstract This paper investigates the origin of the causative (CAUS) and simulative (SML) suffix -ter in two varieties of Lai language, Hakha Lai and Falam Chin. It also shows that Proto Central Chin (PCC) full verbs *tiir ‘to send someone to do an errand’ and *der ‘to pretend to’ grammaticalized and merged into the Lai CAUS and SML suffix -ter due to frequency pressure, the first time this type of argument for semantic change is used in Kuki-Chin (KC).

The effect of decay and lexical uncertainty on processing long-distance dependencies in reading

To make sense of a sentence, a reader must keep track of dependent relationships between words, such as between a verb and its particle (e.g. turn the music down). In languages such as German, verb-particle dependencies often span long distances, with the particle only appearing at the end of the clause. This means that it may be necessary to process a large amount of intervening sentence material before the full verb of the sentence is known. To facilitate processing, previous studies have shown that readers can preactivate the lexical information of neighbouring upcoming words, but less is known about whether such preactivation can be sustained over longer distances. We asked the question, do readers preactivate lexical information about long-distance verb particles? In one self-paced reading and one eye tracking experiment, we delayed the appearance of an obligatory verb particle that varied only in the predictability of its lexical identity. We additionally manipulated the length of the delay in order to test two contrasting accounts of dependency processing: that increased distance between dependent elements may sharpen expectation of the distant word and facilitate its processing (an antilocality effect), or that it may slow processing via temporal activation decay (a locality effect). We isolated decay by delaying the particle with a neutral noun modifier containing no information about the identity of the upcoming particle, and no known sources of interference or working memory load. Under the assumption that readers would preactivate the lexical representations of plausible verb particles, we hypothesised that a smaller number of plausible particles would lead to stronger preactivation of each particle, and thus higher predictability of the target. This in turn should have made predictable target particles more resistant to the effects of decay than less predictable target particles. The eye tracking experiment provided evidence that higher predictability did facilitate reading times, but found evidence against any effect of decay or its interaction with predictability. The self-paced reading study provided evidence against any effect of predictability or temporal decay, or their interaction. In sum, we provide evidence from eye movements that readers preactivate long-distance lexical content and that adding neutral sentence information does not induce detectable decay of this activation. The findings are consistent with accounts suggesting that delaying dependency resolution may only affect processing if the intervening information either confirms expectations or adds to working memory load, and that temporal activation decay alone may not be a major predictor of processing time.

Grammar is background in sentence processing

abstractBoye and Harder (2012) claim that the grammatical–lexical distinction has to do with discourse prominence: lexical elements can convey discursively primary (or foreground) information, whereas grammatical elements cannot (outside corrective contexts). This paper reports two experiments that test this claim. Experiment 1 was a letter detection study, in which readers were instructed to mark specific letters in the text. Experiment 2 was a text-change study, in which participants were asked to register omitted words. Experiment 2 showed a main effect of word category: readers attend more to words in lexical elements (e.g., full verbs) than to those in grammatical elements (e.g., auxiliaries). Experiment 1 showed an interaction: attention to letters in focused constituents increased more for grammatical words than for lexical words. The results suggest that the lexical–grammatical contrast does indeed guide readers’ attention to words.

The Development of Exceptional Case Marking in Romance with a Particular Focus on French

Abstract This paper traces the development of so-called Exceptional Case Marking (ECM) under perception, permissive and causative verbs in Romance. Synchronically, we can observe various patterns in the distribution of ECM complements under these verbs. In Portuguese and Spanish, ECM is often possible under all permissive and causative verbs, whereas in French, Catalan and Italian it is usually restricted to perception and permissive verbs. A detail that has not been much discussed is the fact that, for many speakers, ECM with a given verb is often restricted to contexts in which the embedded ‘subject’ is a clitic. Some speakers of Modern French display this pattern with the verb faire ‘make’, for example (Abeillé, Anne, Danièle Godard & Philip Miller. 1997. Les causatives en français : Un cas de compétition syntaxique. Langue Française 115. 62–74. https://doi.org/10.3406/lfr.1997.6222). In this paper, I claim that laisser ‘let’ probably also displayed this pattern in Middle French. In Old French, however, what appears to be the opposite pattern is observed. Following (Pearce, Elizabeth. 1990. Parameters in Old French syntax: Infinitival complements. Dordrecht: Kluwer), I attribute this to the morphological variability of dative case in Old French. I propose a case-based analysis of the clitic ECM pattern, whereby ECM complements in Romance are phases unlike clause union complements (see Sheehan, Michelle & Sonia Cyrino. 2018. Why do some ECM verbs resist passivisation? A phase-based explanation. In Sherry Hucklebridge & Max Nelson (eds.), Proceedings of NELS 48 (vol 3), 81–90. University of Massachusetts). Where such complements are embedded under light verbs, the Phase Impenetrability Condition (Chomsky, Noam. 2001. Derivation by phase. In Michael Kenstowicz (ed.), Ken hale: A life in language, 1–52. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press) prevents accusative case from being assigned to the lower subject except in instances of cliticization. When the matrix verb is reanalysed as a full verb, however, v becomes the case-assigning head and so ECM becomes generally available, regardless of the clitic/non-clitic status of the causee.

A Multifactorial Analysis of Concessive Clause Positioning

ABSTRACT Previous works have identified multiple factors and their interplay that condition the positioning of the concessive adverbial clauses. This study continues this line of research by 1) focusing exclusively on the positioning of although-led concessive adverbial clauses (although-clauses hereafter) among different concessive clause relations; 2) supplementing the factor set with more linguistic features, such as sentence-initial adverbials and hedging terms; and, 3) extending and generalizing the scope of competition among semantic, discoursal and processing motivators to a higher-level competition between ‘clarity’ and ‘processability’. Data were retrieved from 1,738 concessive sentences of student argumentative essays from the BAWE and NESSIE corpora. Models were generated based on binary logistic regression and random forests. The results show that the motivator of the relationship between the although-clauses and their main clauses was the most significant variable in all models, denoting its priority in conditioning concessive clause positioning, under the Competition Model framework. Subordinate clause complexity and deranking (i.e. clauses that do not have a full verb) were the least significant among all motivating factors. Overall, clarity-related motivators outweigh processability-related ones, prioritizing clear meaning-conveying in competition with processing motivators.

Formas de identificação/qualificação e de ação na construção do humor

Objetiva-se descrever, em manchetes do jornal popular Meia Hora, efeitos de sentido gerados pela conexão entre formas referenciais e verbais. De um lado, os estudos da Linguística de Texto concebem a referenciação como o processo de interpretação e de (re)categorização da realidade. De outro lado, pesquisas em Linguística Funcional demonstram que, ao contrário dos verbos plenos – como “balear” –, há aqueles que se fundem a uma base nominal, formando verbos suporte – como “meter muito tiro” – ou expressões idiomáticas – como “largar o dedo”. Embora tais postulações teóricas tenham representado avanços na descrição dos fenômenos linguístico-textuais, pouco se tem discutido sobre a relação entre formas de identificação, de qualificação e de ação. Nesse sentido, sob a teoria da Análise Semiolinguística do Discurso, este trabalho demonstrará como, em manchetes populares, expressões referenciais e perífrases verbo-nominais operam, conjuntamente, na construção de jogos de palavras e na caracterização dos objetos de discurso, consistindo em procedimentos linguísticos que podem suscitar o humor.

Translating English Light Verb Constructions Vs. Their Full Verbs Into Arabic

Translating English Light Verb Constructions Vs. Their Full Verbs Into Arabic

Gramatički deficiti govornika srpskog jezika sa Brokinom afazijom - preliminarno ispitivanje

Introduction. Studies of language deficits in patients with Broca's aphasia have highlighted agrammatism as a major feature. As the nature of this language deficit is still unknown, further data collection according to the specifics of the particular language is of great importance. Objective. In this paper, we wanted to determine grammatical deficits in Serbian speakers with aphasia. Methods. Using Boston Diagnostic Aphasia Examination, we determined Broca's aphasia on a sample of 20 subjects, aged 47-70. Speech samples were obtained through two tasks: conversation and picture description. The analysis of samples involved determining the type and subtype of all words and their forms; determining the total number and types of clauses, as well as their functions in a given discourse. Also, the argument structure of the verb was identified. The primary and secondary sentence constituents were determined. Results. The results showed that nouns and full verbs dominate in the speech of patients with Broca's aphasia. Nouns are most often used in the nominative case, and verbs in the present tense. The ability to use verbs is related to the complexity of their argument structure. Speech is dominated by short utterances whose full meaning is often difficult to determine. Conclusion. Our data show that almost all patients with Broca's aphasia exhibit grammatical deficits. The general signs of agrammatism are similar to the signs described in other languages. We single out the difficulties in the use of critics as a prominent characteristic of agrammatism in our respondents.

Students’ Mastery of Parts of Speech in English Writing

The research is entitled “students’ mastery of parts of speech (noun, pronoun, and verb) in English writing. The purposes of this research are (1) to find out the students’ mastery of parts of speech (noun, pronoun and verb), (2) to find out the most and least understood parts of speech among noun, pronoun and verb often found in English writing, (3) to find out the common problems faced by the students,(4). To find out workable solutions to these problems so as to increase the students’ mastery in using parts of speech (noun, pronoun and verb) in English writing. The data collections are done by giving questionnaire, test in completion item and simple English writing. The conclusion of this research are: (1) the students’ mastery of parts of speech is fair (60,30), (2) the most understood parts of speech is Noun (21,66% error) and the least understood parts of speech is Verb (49,46% error), (3) common problems happened in constructing countable and uncountable noun, using possessive pronoun and pronoun function as object, and using full verb and to be in constructing continuous and future tense. (4) The workable solutions that can be used are by using game, and quiz.

Illusions of transitive expletives in Middle English

This paper examines a type of existential there sentence found in Middle English that has been argued to have a structure similar to transitive expletive constructions (TECs) in other Germanic languages, or to follow from the presence of NegP below T during the relevant period. Based on an exhaustive analysis of the 74 examples of this construction found in the Penn Parsed Corpora of Historical English (out of a total of over six thousand sentences from 1125 to 1913 containing there coded as expletive), we observe that 67 contain both a modal verb and clausal negation licensing a negative associate, unlike TECs found in other Germanic languages, and that the construction is found only between 1390 and 1600. We argue that the availability of this construction was due to a transitory alignment of three syntactic properties in this stage of the language: (i) modals were still main verbs merged within vP, but took a reduced complement consisting of only an inner clausal phase, and did not take a thematic external argument; (ii) English still had negative concord; (iii) Voice and viewpoint Aspect shared a single syntactic projection. The confluence of these three factors provided a non-thematic specifier position, [Spec,vP], into which there could merge. Before the late 14th century, modals were full verbs taking a thematic external argument and full clausal complements, and after about 1600, they were merged directly in T, occurring in a monoclausal rather than a (reduced) biclausal structure. At no point did the English monoclausal spine have the structural room to accommodate a true Germanic TEC.