Verb-noun Pairs Research Articles

The noun–verb distinction in two young sign languages

Many sign languages have semantically related noun-verb pairs, such as ‘hairbrush/brush-hair’, which are similar in form due to iconicity. Researchers studying this phenomenon in sign languages have found that the two are distinguished by subtle differences, for example, in type of movement. Here we investigate two young sign languages, Israeli Sign Language (ISL) and Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), to determine whether they have developed a reliable distinction in the formation of noun-verb pairs, despite their youth, and, if so, how. These two young language communities differ from each other in terms of heterogeneity within the community, contact with other languages, and size of population. Using methodology we developed for cross-linguistic comparison, we identify reliable formational distinctions between nouns and related verbs in ISL, but not in ABSL, although early tendencies can be discerned. Our results show that a formal distinction in noun-verb pairs in sign languages is not necessarily present from the beginning, but may develop gradually instead. Taken together with comparative analyses of other linguistic phenomena, the results lend support to the hypothesis that certain social factors such as population size, domains of use, and heterogeneity/homogeneity of the community play a role in the emergence of grammar.

Thin slices of creativity: Using single-word utterances to assess creative cognition

We investigated the hypothesis that individual differences in creative cognition can be manifest even in brief responses, such as single-word utterances. Participants (n = 193) were instructed to say a verb upon seeing a noun displayed on a computer screen and were cued to respond creatively to half of the nouns. For every noun–verb pair (72 pairs per subject), we assessed the semantic distance between the noun and the verb, using latent semantic analysis (LSA). Semantic distance was higher in the cued ("creative") condition than the uncued condition, within subjects. Critically, between subjects, semantic distance in the cued condition had a strong relationship to a creativity factor derived from a battery of verbal, nonverbal, and achievement-based creativity measures (β= .50), and this relation remained when controlling for intelligence and personality. The data show that creative cognition can be assessed reliably and validly from such thin slices of behavior.Electronic supplementary materialThe online version of this article (doi:10.3758/s13428-013-0401-7) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.

What can Metaphor Tell us about the Language of Translation?

This paper illustrates an exploratory study aimed at devising a methodology for the analysis of the language of translations through a comparison of metaphor use in original and translated texts. It uses a pilot monolingual comparable corpus of corporate sustainability reports made up of 2 sections: a subcorpus of Spanish originals and a subcorpus of translations from English into Spanish. VERB-NOUN metaphors are analyzed to compare collocation variety, typical collocations and degree of metaphorical conventionality of the VERB-NOUN pairs in original and translated texts. Results suggest that metaphors in translated texts show both a tendency to normalization and a preference for unconventional uses arising from original text expressions “shining through” in the translations.

Nominal Possession in American Sign Language

This study re-visits an alternation in American Sign Language wherein the nominal member of a noun-verb pair is characterized by tense reduplication of the movement associated with the root (Newport and Supalla 1978, Klima and Bellugi 1979). This alternation is shown to be (a) highly productive but (b) constrained to the derivation of non-event nominalizations in the sense of Grimshaw (1990). The absence of an eventive interpretation supports root-level application of the morphosyntactic process involved and explains the observed restrictions on how possessor arguments in nominalizations of this type are interpreted.

Event-related potentials reveal early activation of body part representations in action concept comprehension

With tasks involving action concept comprehension, many fMRI studies have reported brain activations in sensori-motor regions specific to effectors of the referent action. There is relatively less evidence whether such activations reflect early semantic access or late conceptual re-processing. Here we recorded event-related potentials when participants recognized noun–verb pairs. For Congruent pairs, the verb was the one most commonly associated with the noun (e.g., football-kick). Compared with a control condition, verbs in Congruent pairs showed priming effects in the time windows of 100–150ms and 210–260ms. Such activation seems to be specific to body part but not other aspects of the action as similar priming effect was also found when the noun and verb involved different actions though sharing the same body part (e.g., football-jump), documenting for the first time the early activation of body part representations in action concept comprehension.

Different notions of function: results from an experiment on the analysis of an existing product

Academic debate has long recognised that function is a problematic concept, for which many different notions exist. While progress has been made in relating these different notions theoretically, designers in practice still struggle with the concept of a function and a functional breakdown, even though these ideas form a key part of many established design methodologies. This paper describes the findings of an experiment which explores how different engineers understand the notions of function and functional breakdown in the context of design by modification. The experiment was conducted with a group of 20 design engineers, who had all received or provided the same education at the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology. A second experiment was run with a group of 18 engineers at another university. The subjects were asked to analyse how a hydraulic pump works, summarising their understanding in a function tree. The findings demonstrate the fluidity of notions of function between different individuals expressing both goals and behaviour as functions. Many participants had a syntactic notion of function, expressing functions as verb–noun pairs, but failed to apply this consistently. These observations highlight the need for pragmatic approaches for handling the concept of function.

Sign Language Acquisition (review)

Reviewed by: Sign Language Acquisition Deborah Chen Pichler Sign Language Acquisition, ed. Anne Baker and Bencie Woll (Amsterdam: Benjamins, 2008, 178 pp., hardcover, $120.00, ISBN 978-90-272-2244-2) This volume features a collection of papers published in 2005 as a special issue of Sign Language and Linguistics (8[1/2]). The papers originated from a workshop on acquisition hosted by the Inter-sign Network, an organization established to promote collaborative sign language linguistic research throughout Europe. In line with this mission, these papers cover a healthy variety of national sign languages (including Sign Language of the Netherlands/NGT, Finnish Sign Language/FinnSL, and British Sign Language/BSL) and address methodological issues relevant to data exchange and cross-linguistic research. These issues still pose formidable challenges in the field of sign language acquisition, a point that is acknowledged by all of the authors, who offer frank evaluations of specific practices in transcription, coding, and language assessment. In chapter 1 Anne Baker, Beppie van den Bogaerde, and Bencie Woll provide a helpful guide of best practices for designing and conducting sign language acquisition research projects. Their impressively comprehensive discussion presents various research design choices and variables to consider when selecting subjects. Next they deal with data collection and consider the pros and cons of spontaneous versus elicited data. They also offer very practical suggestions on how to position the video camera(s) during filming, how long to film, and how to minimize the effects of the researcher's presence on the production of the signers who are being filmed (the well-known "observer's paradox" [Labov 1972]). In addition, the authors address transcription and coding, areas in which fieldwide standards have traditionally been conspicuous [End Page 637] by their absence, greatly hampering collaboration among sign researchers. To explain this state of affairs, the authors list the many variables that researchers must consider when designing a transcription system: which levels of language data to transcribe and which units of analysis to choose, what software to use for creating transcripts, how to represent voicing or mouthing that accompanies signing, how to distinguish between early gesture and early signs, and how to gloss specific sign language structures. Throughout their discussion, the authors raise problematic issues and offer the solutions that their respective research teams adopted, but they do not promote one solution over another. Instead, they emphasize that different research questions invariably lead to various choices in transcription practice. The chapter concludes with a general timeline of the stages of sign language development, drawn from acquisition reports on ASL and several European sign languages. The authors warn that this timeline is still very preliminary and hence should not be regarded as in any way definitive; still, it provides a useful orientation to the reader and at the same time reminds us of how much work remains to be done in the area of sign language acquisition. Baker, van den Bogaerde, and Woll are painstakingly thorough in their discussion of the many features of data collection and transcription that researchers must consider before designing a sign acquisition project. Their thoroughness makes chapter 1 the most widely useful one in this volume. It would be even more helpful if it included mention of two developments highly relevant to the topic of transcription standardization. The first is the new sign phonetic notation system proposed by Johnson and Liddell (2011), which permits description of the formational properties of signs in exhaustive detail. Through testing and refining by many users, this system could conceivably become the sign equivalent of the IPA for spoken languages, filling a longstanding gap in the sign linguist's toolbox. Another fairly recent development involves the concept of ID-glosses, promoted by Johnston (2010) and others as a solution to the cumbersome variation in glossing conventions developed by different researchers for the same sign languages. For example, rather than using different glosses for EAT and FOOD, one can agree to use a single ID-gloss for all signs that are plausibly related to the same root sign (e.g., noun-verb pairs such as FOOD [End Page 638] and EAT, as well as morphological variations such as EAT[continuous] and EAT[unrealized inceptive...

The functional role of motor activation in language processing: Motor cortical oscillations support lexical-semantic retrieval

There is increasing experimental evidence that processing action-related language results in the automatic activation of associated regions of the motor and premotor cortex. However, the functional significance of motor activation in language processing is still under debate. In the present EEG study, we set out to investigate if language-induced motor activation primarily reflects the retrieval of lexical-semantic information or post-lexical motor imagery. The processing of action verbs was found accompanied by an early activation of motor-related brain areas, as reflected by a desynchronization in the mu- and beta-frequency bands which was localized to motor and premotor areas. A stronger motor activation was observed for verbs presented in an animal context (e.g. “The deer jumped over the stream”) compared to a human context (e.g. “The athlete jumped over the fence”) and motor resonance was directly modulated by the cloze probability of the noun–verb pairs. The onset of the motor effects preceded classical measures of semantic integration (i.e. the N400 component) and the strength of motor activation was found inversely related to the size of the N400 effect. These findings support the hypothesis that motor activation in language processing primarily supports the retrieval and integration of lexical-semantic information.

Second occurrence focus and the acoustics of prominence

Partee (1991) challenged the significance of the observation that certain adverbs (e.g., only) reliably associate with phonologically prominent words to truth-conditional effect, noting second occurrence (i.e., repeated or given) focus (SOF) appears to lack a phonological realization. Rooth (1996), Bartels (2004), Beaver et al. (2004), Jaeger (2004), and Fry and Ishihara (2005) argued that, while not intonationally prominent, an SOF word can be marked by increased duration and/or increased rms intensity. An acoustic study of verb-noun homophone pairs is reported. Three sophisticated speakers uttered five repetitions of the targets, embedded in discourses, in first occurrence (FOF), SOF, and unfocused (NF) contexts, both pre- and postnuclearly. Syntagmatic comparison shows a durational effect for focus and ordering in the FOF/NF case, yet only an effect of ordering in SOF/NF; similarly, an effect of spectral balance (H1-H3) was found for FOF/NF but none for SOF/NF. Results suggest, contrary to previous assumptions, that simple durational difference is not a straightforward cue of prominence. Sluijter and van Heuven (1996) and Campbell and Beckman (1997) have shown spectral balance calculated by various means is a cue to focus; its absence in these data raises doubts that prominence is reliably produced (let alone perceived) on SOF words.

Against category-less roots in syntax and word learning: objections to Barner and Bale (2002)

This paper argues against analyzing grammatical category as a morphological epiphenomenon irrelevant for syntax. Using evidence from English and Greek it refutes the account in Barner and Bale [Lingua 112 (2002), 771], whereby coinages are derivations of the free syntactic insertion of roots in nominal and verbal environments, and presents evidence suggesting they are products of meta-linguistic processes. Rehearsing the discussion in Chomsky’s Remarks on Nominalization [Readings in English Transformational Grammar (1970) 184], the paper goes on to show that seeking to syntactically derive nouns and verbs from roots stumbles upon the idiosyncratic differences many noun–verb pairs display between them. Towards this, it foregrounds the role of non-zero derivational morphology in Greek and Hungarian.

Learning semantic lexicons from a part-of-speech and semantically tagged corpus using inductive logic programming

This paper describes an inductive logic programming learning method designed to acquire from a corpus specific Noun-Verb (N-V) pairs---relevant in information retrieval applications to perform inde...

Linguistic theory and neuroimaging evidence: an fMRI study of Broca’s area in lexical semantics

There has been a long debate on the functional characterization of left inferior frontal cortex, including proposals regarding syntactic and lexico-semantic involvement. We studied nine right-handed adults, using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) during performance on a semantic decision task in which subjects had to determine whether noun–verb pairs were semantically associated. In comparison with a visuoperceptual control task, activation clusters were seen in left inferior frontal and middle temporal regions, as well as the bilateral superior frontal gyrus. In agreement with previous studies, our findings suggest that Broca’s area is involved in semantic processing. Findings of lexico-semantic as well as syntactic processing in the inferior frontal lobe may be accounted for in terms of working memory demands.

Nouns and verbs in Australian sign language: an open and shut case?

Results of the noun-verb pair comprehension and production tests from the Test Battery for Auslan Morphology and Syntax (Schembri et al., 2000) are re-presented, re-analyzed, and compared to data from two other cases also dealing with noun-verb pairs: the Auslan lexical database and a comparison of Auslan and American Sign Language (ASL) signs. The data elicited through the test battery and presented in this article confirm the existence of formationally related noun-verb pairs in Auslan in which the verb displays a single movement and the noun displays a repeated movement. The data also suggest that the best exemplars of noun-verb pairs of this type in Auslan form a distinct set of iconic (mimetic) signs archetypically based on inherently reversible actions (such as opening and shutting). This strong iconic link perhaps explains why the derivational process appears to be of limited productivity, though it does appear to have "spread" to a number of signs that appear to have no such iconicity. There appears to be considerable variability in the use of the derivational markings, particularly in connected discourse, even for signs of the "open and shut" variety. Overall, the derivational process is apparently still closely linked to an iconic base, is incipient in the grammar of Auslan, and is thus best described as only partially grammaticalized.

Vowels as a morphological tool in Santiago Creole Portuguese (Cape Verde)

In Cape Verde, the Afro-Portuguese Creole of the island of Santiago, the so-called Badew, displays many contrastive verb-noun pairs in which the verb is characterized by a mid-open vowel, and the noun by an open one. The origin of this phenomenon has a historical explanation, in this case a stress-shift (from the last-syllable to the penultimate one) of the verb-word (derived from the oxytonic Portuguese infinitive), due to a dominant /'CVCV/ pattern in Badew. Nevertheless, in modern Badew, diachrony does not account for all the verb-noun pairs based on the opposition between mid-open and open vowels. This opposition has become a morphological device that enables Badew to derive new nouns from verbs and vice-versa. Considering the fact that Badew is a Creole language, the appearance of this new derivational system, inexistant in Portuguese, the lexifier language, could have been favored by the necessity of compensating for the failures and ambiguities of a poor vocabulary inherited from the pidgin stage of the language.

Adult Age Differences in Memory for Verbs and Nouns

Younger and older adults were asked to remember noun pairs (e.g., head – cap), verb pairs (e.g., bounce – throw), and verb-noun pairs (e.g., break – stick). For half of the pairs, participants used imagined objects and performed an action or series of related actions for each pair. For the other half of the pairs, participants read but did not perform the pairs. Free recall and cued recall tests revealed that age differences in memory for both performed and nonperformed items were larger for verbs than for nouns. The recall advantage of nouns over verbs was larger for older than for younger adults. Verbs are hypothesized to be more difficult for older adults to remember because they are more and less specific than nouns and because it is more difficult to integrate verbs with other words than to integrate nouns with other words.

Verb Generation Priming Involves Conceptual Implicit Memory

Brain activation patterns differ and generation latencies are reduced when generating verbs to repeated nouns (Raichle et al., 1994). Amnesic participants show normal magnitude of priming (Seger et al., 1997). Despite its importance in neuropsychology, verb generation priming is not well characterized psychologically. Six behavioral studies found that verb generation priming was specific to the verb rather than to the noun or the noun–verb pair, was equivalent after overt or covert generation and after reading verbs or generating verbs, was affected by levels of processing, and transferred completely across languages in bilinguals. These results indicate that verb generation priming involves priming of particular responses and happens at a conceptual level. These findings provide new insights about the significance of brain imaging and neuropsychological studies involving verb generation priming.

Influences of Age, Performance, and Item Relatedness on Verbatim and Gist Recall of Verb-Noun Pairs

Age differences in adults' memory for performed actions (e.g., wave hand) are sometimes smaller than age differences in memory for nonperformed phrases. In this study, we examined the conditions under which performance reduces age differences in recall. Younger and older adults performed or read verb-noun phrases that were either related (e.g., actions performed in a kitchen) or unrelated. Performance did not reduce age differences in recall of the exact verbs and nouns used to describe an action, but performance did reduce age differences in memory for the gist of related actions. Older adults especially had difficulty recalling the exact verb used to describe the action. These results suggest that older adults may have better memory for actions than is revealed by tests of verbatim recall. They may remember performing the action but not remember the exact words used to describe the action.

The role of lexical co-occurrence in aphasic sentence production

ABSTRACTThis study explores the notion that learned associations based on lexical co-occurrence probability influence sentence planning and, consequently, may contribute to the ability of aphasic speakers to produce well-formed sentences. To encourage aphasic speakers to rely on such associations, the subjects were administered a sentence generation task in which an uninflected transitive verb was the sole basis for sentence planning. Performance by normal control speakers was used to identify verb-noun pairs reflecting some degree of lexical association. The aphasic subjects tended to use proportionately fewer associated word pairs in their sentences. The level of associate use was not correlated with either their picture naming scores or their performance on a test of semantic judgment. Finally, despite the aphasic subjects' below normal production of associated word pairs on sentence generation, when nouns associated with the target verbs were included in the sentences, performance was less anomalous for each subject. These findings are used to explore how a network of lexical associates might facilitate sentence processing.

Formalized specification of functional requirements

With the increasig use of the computer as a design aid, the need for new software products is increasing rapidly. Computer aids for the conceptual phase of the design process are now emerging. A basic problem in making design aids for this phase is to formulate the functional requirements in a way suitable for computer processing. In this paper, an approach to solving this task is presented. These functional requirements (FRs) are formulated as a set of verb-noun pairs. A thesaurus will define the set of verbs and nouns applicable in the definitions of the FRs and a synonym table will be available, to aid the user in finding appropriate words within the thesaurus. For further processing of the FRs a classification system for verbs and nouns is proposed. The classification is based on object oriented programming languages.

Pair-relational encoding of performed nouns and verbs

Subjects had to learn lists of noun pairs and verb pairs. They were informed in advance about the test types and were tested for free recall (FR) and cued recall (CR). Three classes of encoding instructions were used: standard learning instructions, item-specific enactment instructions (to perform the denoted action of the verb or a typical action for the noun, and to do the same plus finding separate goals for the two elements of each pair), and enactment instructions that were completed by explicit instructions to integrate the word pairs (find a common goal, and find a common goal plus rating your success). There was no effect of encoding instructions on FR of nouns. There was a better FR under all enactment instructions than under standard instructions for verbs. CR decreased after item-specific enactment instructions, in contrast with standard learning instructions, but more for nouns than for verbs. CR increased after the instructions to integrate the pairs, in contrast with item-specific enactment instructions, but more for nouns than for verbs. It was concluded that enactment provides excellent item-specific information that can hardly be enhanced further, and that the item-specific information provided by concrete nouns is fundamentally good and is difficult to enhance by enactment. It is further assumed that enactment not only provides excellent item-specific information, but also hinders pair integration. Therefore, CR decreases after enactment. This decrease can only be overcome when subjects actively try to integrate the word pairs.