Neutral Verbs Research Articles

Het gebruik van de Nederlandse plaatsingswerkwoorden ‘zetten’ en ‘leggen’ door Franstalige leerders van het Nederlands

AbstractThis research presents the results of a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the use of the Dutch placement verbs zetten (‘put’) and leggen (‘lay’) by French-speaking learners of Dutch. The experiment consisted of a productive task. The results confirm that the use of Dutch placement verbs is problematic for French-speaking learners, but they also reveal some important tendencies. First, our analysis demonstrates that French-speaking learners tend to underuse these verbs, which can be explained by the fact that placement events in French are often described by means of a neutral verb such as ‘mettre’ (‘put’) as opposed to the more specific verbs in Dutch. Secondly, the learners occasionally also tend to overuse the placement verbs in contexts where such verbs are not allowed, an observation which is seemingly paradoxical to the first one. Thirdly, learners also tend to confuse ‘zetten’ with ‘leggen’ and vice versa.

The Expression of Upward Motion by Russian Speakers Acquiring French or English as a Foreign Language

AbstractResearch on multilingual acquisition has investigated various combinations of languages to identify the factors determining how learners express motion. Our research examines the semantics of motion expression in learners whose first language (L1) exhibits more variation than their foreign language (L2/L3). The present study compares upward motion expression in L1Russian instructed learners of L2English and L3French at an elementary level of proficiency. Drawing on second language acquisition (SLA) scenarios reported in previous research literature, we examine the extent to which the learners approximate target patterns. L2/L3 users and L1 control groups orally described animated clips (Hendriks & Hickmann, 2011) showing animals performing voluntary upward motion. Results show that, despite the use of neutral generics, L3French learners successfully approximated a verb‐framed pattern typical of L1French. L3French learners also showed the emergence of additional target motion components. L2English learners heavily relied on generic neutral verbs, which were used only occasionally by L1 speakers of English and never by L1 speakers of Russian. We argue that the learners’ approximation of a target system depends on the degree of overlap between generic means of motion expression available in a target language and its typical target means of motion expression.

Young Children with ASD Use Lexical and Referential Information During On-line Sentence Processing.

Research with adults and older children indicates that verb biases are strong influences on listeners’ interpretations when processing sentences, but they can be overruled. In this paper, we ask two questions: (i) are children with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) who are high functioning sensitive to verb biases like their same age typically developing peers?, and (ii) do young children with ASD and young children with typical development (TD) override strong verb biases to consider alternative interpretations of ambiguous sentences? Participants were aged 5–9 years (mean age 6.65 years): children with ASD who were high functioning and children with TD. In task 1, biasing and neutral verbs were included (e.g., eat cake versus move cake). In task 2, the focus was on whether the prepositional phrase occurring with an instrument biasing verb (e.g., ‘Chop the tree with the axe’) was interpreted as an instrument even if the named item was an implausible instrument (e.g., candle in ‘Cut the cake with the candle’). Overall, the results showed similarities between groups but the ASD group was generally slower. In task 1, both groups looked at the named object faster in the biasing than the non-biasing condition, and in the biasing condition the ASD group looked away from the target more quickly than the TD group. In task 2, both groups identified the target in the prepositional phrase. They were more likely to override the verb instrument bias and consider the alternative (modification) interpretation in the implausible condition (e.g., looking at the picture of a cake with a candle on it’). Our findings indicate that children of age 5 years and above can use context to override verb biases. Additionally, an important component of the sentence processing mechanism is largely intact for young children with ASD who are high functioning. Like children with TD, they draw on verb semantics and plausibility in integrating information. However, they are likely to be slower in processing the language they hear. Based on previous findings of associations between processing speed and cognitive functioning, the implication is that their understanding will be negatively affected, as will their academic outcomes.

The dynamic influence of emotional words on sentence comprehension: An ERP study.

In the present study, we explored the influence of emotional words on the semantic integration of their following neutral nouns during sentence comprehension. We manipulated the emotionality of verbs and the semantic congruity of their following (neutral) object nouns in sentences. Event-related potentials were recorded to the verbs, which were either negative or neutral, and to the object nouns, which were either semantically congruent or incongruent relative to the preceding contexts. We found an N400 and a P600 effect in response to the semantic congruity of the nouns when they followed the neutral verbs. However, the P600 (but not the N400) semantic congruity effect may have been attenuated when the nouns followed the negative verbs. Meanwhile, the negative verbs elicited a larger P2 and N400 than did the neutral verbs. The results indicate that the attention captured by emotional words impaired reanalysis of the following incongruent information, demonstrating a dynamic influence of emotional words on the semantic processing of following information during sentence comprehension.

Motion into and out of in English, French and Norwegian

This paper presents a contrastive study of Norwegian predications of motion events with the compound prepositions ut av (‘out of’) and inn i (‘into’) and their translations into English and French. The motivation for choosing these two types of predication is that French, unlike English, is said to avoid the use of manner verbs with boundary-crossing events. The paper examines all occurrences in the Oslo Multilingual Corpus (OMC) of self-motion predications containing the two Norwegian prepositions, in all of which path is coded in the prepositional phrase. The verb may also code path, it may code manner, or it may be a neutral verb of movement. We first analyse the Norwegian originals with respect to their coding of path and manner and then turn to the two sets of translations and investigate the extent to which they retain the manner/path coding choices of the source predications and, if not, what sort of alterations they make. If the contention that French avoids manner verbs with boundary-crossing actions is correct, the French translations should exhibit a much greater degree of path or neutral motion coding in the verb than either the Norwegian originals or the English translations. The data show that this is indeed the case. There are also, however, more occurrences of manner verbs in French with boundary-crossing actions than one would expect given the language’s reputation in the literature for avoiding this construction.

Production of Verb Tense in Agrammatic Aphasia: A Meta-Analysis and Further Data.

In a majority of languages, the time of an event is expressed by marking tense on the verb. There is substantial evidence that the production of verb tense in sentences is more severely impaired than other functional categories in persons with agrammatic aphasia. The underlying source of this verb tense impairment is less clear, particularly in terms of the relative contribution of conceptual-semantic and processing demands. This study aimed to provide a more precise characterization of verb tense impairment by examining if there is dissociation within tenses (due to conceptual-semantic differences) and an effect of experimental task (mediated by processing limitations). Two sources of data were used: a meta-analysis of published research (which yielded 143 datasets) and new data from 16 persons with agrammatic aphasia. Tensed verbs were significantly more impaired than neutral (nonfinite) verbs, but there were no consistent differences between past, present, and future tenses. Overall, tense accuracy was mediated by task, such that picture description task was the most challenging, relative to sentence completion, sentence production priming, and grammaticality judgment. An interaction between task and tense revealed a past tense disadvantage for a sentence production priming task. These findings indicate that verb tense impairment is exacerbated by processing demands of the elicitation task and the conceptual-semantic differences between tenses are too subtle to show differential performance in agrammatism.

The dynamic influence of emotional words on sentence processing

In the present study, we aimed to examine how the emotionality of words influences online sentence processing-specifically, the influence of emotional words on the processing of following words in sentences. We manipulated the emotionality of verbs as well as the orthographic correctness of their following (neutral) object nouns, so that the orthographic violation of the (neutral) nouns occurred in either emotional or neutral sentences. Event-related potentials (ERPs) were recorded to both the nouns and the verbs. We found that the orthographic violation of the nouns elicited a P2 and an N400 effect in the emotionally neutral sentences, but an LPC effect in the emotionally charged sentences. We also found that the emotional verbs elicited a larger N1, a larger P2, and a larger N400 than did the neutral verbs. The ERP results suggest that emotional words capture more attention than neutral words, which further affects early orthographic analysis of the following words. Our findings demonstrate a dynamic influence of emotional words on sentence processing.

Early adolescents show sustained susceptibility to cognitive interference by emotional distractors

A child's ability to continuously pay attention to a cognitive task is often challenged by distracting events. Distraction is especially detrimental in a learning or classroom environment in which attended information is typically associated with establishing skills and knowledge. Here we report a study examining the effect of emotional distractors on performance in a subsequent visual lexical decision task in 11- to 13-year-old students (n=30). Lexical decisions about neutral verbs and verb-like pseudowords (i.e., targets) were analysed as a function of the preceding distractor type (pleasant, neutral, or unpleasant photos) and the picture–target stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA; 200 or 600 ms). Across distractor categories, emotionally arousing pictures prolonged decisions about word targets when compared to neutral pictures, irrespective of the SOA. The present results demonstrate that similar to adults, early adolescent students exhibit sustained susceptibility to cognitive interference by irrelevant emotional events.

Motor Simulation during Action Word Processing in Neurosurgical Patients

The role that human motor areas play in linguistic processing is the subject of a stimulating debate. Data from nine neurosurgical patients with selective lesions of the precentral and postcentral sulcus could provide a direct answer as to whether motor area activation is necessary for action word processing. Action-related verbs (face-, hand-, and feet-related verbs plus neutral verbs) silently read were processed for (i) motor imagery by vividness ratings and (ii) frequency ratings. Although no stimulus- or task-dependent modulation was found in the RTs of healthy controls, patients showed a task × stimulus interaction resulting in a stimulus-dependent somatotopic pattern of RTs for the imagery task. A lesion affecting a part of the cortex that represents a body part also led to slower RTs during the creation of mental images for verbs describing actions involving that same body part. By contrast, no category-related differences were seen in the frequency judgment task. This task-related dissociation suggests that the sensorimotor area is critically involved in processing action verbs only when subjects are simulating the corresponding movement. These findings have important implications for the ongoing discussion regarding the involvement of the sensorimotor cortex in linguistic processing.

Time course and task dependence of emotion effects in word processing

The emotional content of stimuli influences cognitive performance. In two experiments, we investigated the time course and mechanisms of emotional influences on visual word processing in various tasks by recording event-related brain potentials (ERPs). The stimuli were verbs of positive, negative, and neutral valence. In Experiment 1, where lexical decisions had to be performed on single verbs, both positive and negative verbs were processed more quickly than neutral verbs and elicited a distinct ERP component, starting around 370 msec. In Experiment 2, the verbs were embedded in a semantic context provided by single nouns. Likewise, structural, lexical, and semantic decisions for positive verbs were accelerated, and an ERP effect with a scalp distribution comparable to that in Experiment 1 now started about 200 msec earlier. These effects may signal an automatic allocation of attentional resources to emotionally arousing words, since they were not modulated by different task demands. In contrast, a later ERP effect of emotion was restricted to lexical and semantic decisions and, thus, appears to indicate more elaborated, task-dependent processing of emotional words.

Is There Ergativity in Korean? ―The definition of ergativity and other uses of the term ‘ergative’―

영문 벼리: This paper critically reviews the previous research on ergativity in Korean, in which the concept of ergativity has been applied to Korean morpho-syntax. We have investigated the concept of ergativity from the viewpoint of linguistic typology, and claim that there is no ergativity in Korean. Korean is an accusative language, and it is unfortunate to use the term 'ergative' in some constructions in Korean. The term 'ergativity' was used morphologically to refer to the case marking on constituents of a noun phrase, and has been extended to the marking of syntactic functions by particles or adpositions. The term 'ergative' has also been used in a syntactic sense to apply to coreferentiality constraints on the formation of complex sentences, through coordination and subordination. In terms of the well defined use of the term, Korean has neither morphological ergativity nor syntactic ergativity. Some scholars, however, have used 'ergative' in further ways, that are sometimes confusing and misleading. One particular unfortunate use of the term 'ergative verb' has been employed in connection with pairs of sentences such as John moved the stone and The stone moved. The use of 'ergative' in this lexical-semantic/causative sense is quite confusing and misleading, and this misuse originated from Halliday (1967) and Lyons (1968). If the term 'ergative' is used in this way then every language would show 'ergativity'. We will propose that this relationship can be better captured as either null-causative or neutral verb constructions. We have also critically reviewed works in generative linguistics in connection with the so-called 'ergative verb that bring about case altenations in exceptional case-marking construction, long-form negation, double subject constructions. This is another way in which the term 'ergative' is used which differs from the standard definition.

Relational clauses in English technical discourse

This paper reports on patterns of verb choice in identifying relational clauses (e.g. ‘X is Y, Y is X’) in English technical manuals. While it is obvious that specific lexical verbs will feature in identifying clauses of different functions, e.g. mean (defining), call (naming), exemplify (exemplifying), less transparent is the distribution of these more specific verbs and the general or neutral verb be. The findings suggest that verb choice in (technical) identifying clauses is strongly associated with the degree of equivalence constructed between the two central nominal groups in the clause (the Token and Value). Equivalence relations are one-to-one (rather than one-to-many) and exhaustive (rather than semantically open). Major grammatical influences on equivalence include nominal group structure, ergativity of the clause, and the inclusion of features (e.g. interpersonal, logical or textual) that undermine the privileging of an experientially homogeneous world-view. The results challenge the notions that be and specific verbs are interchangeable and that be is an unmarked choice. On the contrary, the data reveal that under certain conditions be is the more marked choice. The results have practical implications for teachers and students of English (in particular, students of English for Academic and/or Specific Purposes) as well as translators.

Neutral Verbs in English

This article presents a first attempt at systematically classifying neutral verbs in English. Neutrality, also known as the ergative construction or the causative alternation, is present when the following equation holds: (1) N0 V N1 = N1 V In the following sentences, for example: (2) a. Max chimed the bells. b. The bells chimed. (3) a. The enemy sank the battleship. b. The battleship sank. the direct object of the (a) sentence is the subject of the (b) sentence, and the meanings are similar. Following Boons, Guillet, Leclère (1976), who presented a classification of over 400 neutral verbs of French, we systematically examined the English lexicon and compiled a list of over 500 neutral verbs of English, indicating an appropriate N1 along with the morphological properties of human and non-human for each N0 and N1. A preliminary glance at these verbs suggests that the morphological and transformational properties associated with each verb are highly idiosyncratic. Furthermore, this study shows that although certain semantic classes tend to favor neutrality, they do not automatically assure it, and presents further evidence for building a formal lexicon, or lexicon-grammar, where pertinent lexical and syntactic information is listed for each individual verb.

Measuring lexical access during sentence processing.

The results from “on-line” investigations of sentence comprehension are often difficult to interpret since it is not always apparent what component processes are reflected in the response measure. The results of two experiments reported here indicate that response latencies from phoneme-triggered lexical decision (PTLD) reflect the time needed for lexical access during sentence processing. Listeners were presented with sentences and were asked to make a word/nonword judgment for items beginning with a particular word-initial target phoneme. Speed of lexical access was manipulated by varying the semantic predictability of the target-bearing word. WORD judgments were faster for words that were preceded by semantically related verbs than were WORD judgments for words that were preceded by neutral verbs. The present results are consistent with other studies showing semantic facilitation of lexical access during the processing of fluent speech. It is argued that the phoneme-triggered lexical-decision task is a more suitable measure of lexical access during sentence processing than phoneme monitoring (Foss, 1969) or word monitoring (Marslen-Wilson & Tyler, 19751. In addition, it is pointed out that the phoneme-triggered lexical-decision task lends itself to modifications which should enable investigators to study various aspects of on-line sentence processing.

Effects of Vicarious Verbal Stimuli on Conditioning of Hostile and Neutral Verbs

Effects of Vicarious Verbal Stimuli on Conditioning of Hostile and Neutral Verbs

STUDIES OF VERBAL CONDITIONING. I. EFFECTS OF AGE, SEX, INTELLIGENCE, AND "REINFORCING STIMULI".

The variables of sex, IQ, and type of reinforcing stimuli were examined for their effects on the conditioning of hostile verbalization at two grade levels (grades 4 and 6). In two of the experiments, the children were presented with a series of 3 by 5 cards on which was typed the pronoun I and a hostile and neutral verb matched for frequency. After establishing initial operant levels, Ss were reinforced, E said Good, for all sentences in which the hostile verb was used. Suitable control groups were employed. In experiment III, Ss were presented with four pronouns and a single verb, either hostile or neutral. Sentences including the pronoun They were in one of three ways: Good, a light flash which the Ss understood meant Good, and a light flash. Age and sex differences were not significantly different. There was a greater tendency for the bright Ss to emit more hostile verbalizations. Differences between reinforcements indicated that the socially reinforced groups conditioned, but the light-flash group did not. There were significantly more They responses for those groups having the hostile verb in contrast to the neutral verb groups. The extinction trials reduced the emission of hostile verbalizations but not to the initial operant level.

Conditioning of hostile and neutral verbs in neurotics and normals.

Conditioning of hostile and neutral verbs in neurotics and normals.