Verb Pairs Research Articles

The role of exposure condition, awareness and item type in developing implicit and explicit knowledge of collocational rules.

This study expands on previous SLA research by focusing on learning collocational rules. The study also explores the interaction between exposure conditions, awareness, and item-related variables in the context of collocation learning. Chinese learners of English were exposed to sentences from large corpora, featuring four target node verbs (replaced with pseudowords) and their respective noun collocates. There are two pairs of novel verbs with different L1-L2 congruencies in the experimental material. Participants were divided into incidental and intentional groups. The learning effectiveness was assessed through a plausibility judgment test (PJT), which included trained, new, and swapped items. Awareness of the underlying rules was measured using source attributions, retrospective verbal reports, and posttest thinking aloud. The results revealed that participants acquired both explicit and implicit knowledge of collocational rules. Rule-searching led to greater explicit knowledge but did not improve overall learning outcomes. Additionally, an interaction was observed among awareness, rule type, and test type. As the difficulty level increased in terms of L1-L2 congruency or item type, the importance of awareness in meeting the learning demands also increased.

On the nature and organisation of morphological categories: verbal aspect through the lens of associative learning

The process by which awareness and/or knowledge of linguistic categories arises from exposure to patterns in data alone, known as emergence, is the corner stone of usage-based approaches to language. The present paper zooms in on the types of patterns that language users may detect in the input to determine the content, and hence the nature, of the hypothesised morphological category of aspect.The large-scale corpus and computational studies we present focus on the morphological encoding of temporal information as exemplified by aspect (imperfective/perfective) in Polish. Aspect is so heavily grammaticalized that it is marked on every verb form, yielding the practice of positing infinitival verb pairs (‘do’ = ‘robićimpf/zrobićpf’) to represent a complete aspectual paradigm. As has been shown for nominal declension, however, aspectual usage appears uneven, with 90% of verbs strongly preferring one aspect over the other. This makes the theoretical aspectual paradigm in practice very gappy, triggering an acute sense of partialness in usage. Operationalising emergence as learnability, we simulate learning to use aspect from exposure with a computational implementation of the Rescorla-Wager rule of associative learning. We find that paradigmatic gappiness in usage does not diminish learnability; to the contrary, a very high prediction accuracy is achieved using as cues only the verb and its tense; contextual information does not further improve performance. Aspect emerges as a strongly lexical phenomenon. Hence, the question of cognitive reality of aspectual categories, as an example of morphological categories in general, should be reformulated to ask which continuous cues must be learned to enable categorisation of aspectual outcomes. We discuss how the gappiness of the paradigm plays a crucial role in this process, and how an iteratively learned, continuously developing association presents a possible mechanism by which language users process their experience of cue-outcome co-occurrences and learn to use morphological forms, without the need for abstractions.

Контрасты квантификации глаголов творити – сътворити и их синонимов в древнерусских источниках (на материале исторического корпуса «Манускрипт»)

The article presents the first attempt to describe the quantification contrasts of verbs belonging to lexical series dělati – sъdělati, dějati – sъdějati, tvoriti – sъtvoriti. Quantification is understood as a quantitative measurement of qualitative characteristics, namely grammatical parameters of lexical units. The research is based on the "Manuscript" historical corpus. For the analysis, the author selects the Gospels and Chronicles subcorpora; birchbark letters data are also involved. The author discovers that the named verb pairs express the aspectual meaning as long as they are represented by identical lexical meanings. The entire lexical range is related by synonymy. Secondary imperfectivation led to the series expansion with three more lexemes: sъdělovati, sъděvati, sъtvarjati. The quantification results demonstrate a group of contrasting correlations: a quantitative predominance of the verb pair tvoriti – sъtvoriti; a larger quantitative weight of the perfective verb, unlike the other two verb pairs; a noticeable quantitative predominance of Present forms, primarily from imperfective verbs in the Gospels; a significant predominance of perfective Aorist forms, and so on. The contrasting relations reveal the discursive features of texts, as well as the special role of the tvoriti – sъtvoriti verbs in expressing predication and substitution. The replacement of the tvoriti verb with the dělati verb is first noticed in the Suzdal Chronicle.

Conversion in languages with different morphological structures: a semantic comparison of English and Czech

This article presents a comparative study of the semantics of conversion between verbs and nouns in two languages with different morphological structures – English and Czech. To make the cross-linguistic comparison of semantic relations possible, a cognitive approach is used to provide conceptual semantic categories applicable within both languages. The semantic categories, based on event schemata introduced by Radden and Dirven (2007) primarily for syntactic description, are applied to data samples of verb–noun conversion pairs in both languages, using a dictionary-based approach. We analyse a corpus sample of 300 conversion pairs of verbs and nouns in each language (e.g., run.v – run.n, pepper.n – pepper.v; běhat ‘run.v’– běh ‘run.n’, pepř ‘pepper.n’ – pepřit ‘pepper.v’) annotated for the semantic relation between the verb and the noun. We analyse which relations appear in the two languages and how often, looking for sizeable differences to answer the question of whether the morphological characteristics of a language influence the semantics of conversion. The analysis of the annotated samples documents that the languages most often employ conversion for the same concepts (namely, instance of action/process and result) and that the range of semantic categories in English and Czech is generally the same, suggesting that the differences in the morphology of the two languages do not affect the range of possible meanings that conversion is employed for. The data also show a difference in the number of types of combinations of multiple semantic relations between the verb and the noun in a single conversion pair, which was found to be larger in English than in Czech, and also in the frequency with which certain individual semantic relations occur, and these differences seem to be at least partially related to the morphological characteristics of Czech and English.

The New Bulgarian and Czech Verb Vocabulary: Word-Formation Competition and Dynamics of Contemporary Communication

The aim of the article is to explore to what extent and in what ways the competition at word-formation level is related to the differentiation of the individual communication spheres and/or their unification. To this end, selected types of variant pairs (lines) of new Bulgarian and Czech verbs are analysed and examination of the communication specifics of the texts in which they occur and are used is performed. In other words, the focal point is the creation and use of new words and expressions as a factor causing tension not only between parallel functioning linguistic means (already existing or currently emerging in the language), but also within texts typical for a certain sphere of communication. As source of linguistic material are used written units of communi-cation (i.e. texts functioning in a particular communication situation) published on the Internet. A conclusion is drawn that relations of competition between word-formation methods, processes and means characteristic of communication situations and texts of a given sphere of communication (in the presence of favourable condi-tions) can penetrate other spheres of communication for which they are – quite on the contrary – new and uncharacteristic. The word-formation competition in the field of new Bulgarian and new Czech verbal lexicon is stipulated however by the typological features of each individual language system.

Особенности реализации таксисной семантики последовательности в конструкциях с деепричастиями от глаголов движения

The research examines the taxis semantics of consecution in utterances with adverbial participles formed from verbs of motion, which has not been studied earlier. The aim of the research is to characterize aspectual-taxis situations which include adverbial participles formed from verbs of motion. The study was carried out with the use of the method of functional analysis based on Alexander Bondarko’s theory of categorical situations. The material of the study is adverbial participles formed from correlative pairs of non-prefixed autocausative verbs of motion and their prefixed derivatives with spatial semantics (v-, vy-, pod-, ot-, pri-, u-), utterances with these adverbial participles taken from the main subcorpus of the Russian National Corpus. As a result, it was established that a significant role in expressing taxis semantics belongs not only to the aspect forms of adverbial participles in taxis pairs, but also to lexical semantics of adverbial participles and finite verbs, as well as of their expanders. Along with the standard aspectualtaxis situations of consecution with perfective adverbial participles, special types in which imperfective adverbial participles function were identified: (1) precedence of completed actions non-localized in time; (2) precedence of processes localized in time; (3) implicit following of completed actions localized and non-localized in time. In the situation of precedence of completed actions non-localized in time, the adverbial participles of both aspects are synonymous, differing in their interpretive component. In the situation of precedence of processes localized in time, subtypes were described that are distinguished depending on unidirectional/non-unidirectional movement expressed by adverbial participles, as well as semantics of finite verbs. Imperfective adverbial participles with the semantics of unidirectional movement can express both a process that has reached a spatial goal and an interrupted process. Imperfective adverbial participles with the semantics of non-unidirectional movement can express the completion of a process of movement due to uncontrolled moving of the subject to a place. In the situation of implicit following of completed actions, imperfective adverbial participles denote the time limits within which the action of a finite verb is done, and taxis semantics is expressed with the help of lexical meanings of members of a taxis pair, expanders, extralinguistic factors. The conducted research shows that studying utterances with adverbial participles formed from particular lexical groups of verbs enables to expand the idea of aspectual-taxis situations that can be conveyed in adverbial participial constructions.

Schematicity vs. lexicality: typological differences between Danish and Spanish

ABSTRACT The aim of this article is to demonstrate how Danish and Spanish from a typological, cross-linguistic perspective differ systematically from each other both within the domain of verbal lexicalization patterns related to the encoding of the semantic components Motion, Manner and Path and in terms of the predicate formation strategies dominating the two languages. First, on the basis of a contrastive analysis between the Spanish Motion-Path conflating verb pairs meter ‘insert’/sacar ‘extract’ and entrar ‘enter’/salir ‘exit’ and the Danish activity/Manner-of-motion verbs sprøjte ‘spray’ and stikke ‘stick’, it is argued that each language disposes of sets of abstract lexemes that do not exist in the other language. They lexicalize on different levels, one could say. Second, and strongly related to the first point, the article suggests that the preference of Danish to create complex schematic expression structures, where Spanish tends to concentrate information in monomorphemic, semantically saturated lexemes, can be explained by applying a template for valence variation that distinguishes between two basic and two extended sentence structures. Specifically, it is the (im)possibility of realizing the so-called A relation, the ‘third’ argument, that constitutes the differentiating factor between Danish and Spanish.

Analisis Kontrastif Verba Khusus Keigo dengan Verba Khusus Undak Unduk Basa

This study discusses the contrastive analysis of Japanese honorific (keigo) with Sundanese honorific (undak unduk basa). This research was conducted to obtain similarities and differences between the two types of honorific. The data used in this study are sentences and dialogues that use a variety of honorifics in Japanese and Sundanese corpus, movies, and books. This study used a descriptive method and data collection was carried out through recording techniques. Based on data analysis, similarities and differences can be found in both types of honorific. From the four pairs of special verbs contrasted, it can be concluded that there are similarities including the verbs meshiagaru/pour, itadaku/neda, irassharu/angkat and mairu/mios can be translated as equalized, but the four pairs of special verbs have different contexts in their use due to the steps that can be used in the uchi environment (closest to the speaker) while keigo cannot be used in the immediate environment.

The noncausal/causal alternation in Kagulu, an East Ruvu Bantu language of Tanzania

Abstract This paper explores the formal correspondences between the members of verb pairs participating in the noncausal/causal alternation in Kagulu, a Bantu language from Tanzania. Our investigation shows that Kagulu has a predominance of equipollent verb pairs, with the anticausative and causative correspondences following close behind. We argue that, diachronically, the causative correspondence was much more prominent than it is in present-day Kagulu. However, due to morphophonological changes triggered by the historical causative suffix *-i, a significant number of verb pairs that are diachronically causative can be synchronically reanalyzed as equipollent. This study highlights the complexity of diachronic morphology in synchronic analyses of comparative-typological phenomena such as the noncausal/causal alternation, and contributes to the growing body of research on noncausal/causal verb pairs in African languages.

Exploring the Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Twitter in Japan: Qualitative Analysis of Disrupted Plans and Consequences.

Despite being a pandemic, the impact of the spread of COVID-19 extends beyond public health, influencing areas such as the economy, education, work style, and social relationships. Research studies that document public opinions and estimate the long-term potential impact after the pandemic can be of value to the field. This study aims to uncover and track concerns in Japan throughout the COVID-19 pandemic by analyzing Japanese individuals' self-disclosure of disruptions to their life plans on social media. This approach offers alternative evidence for identifying concerns that may require further attention for individuals living in Japan. We extracted 300,778 tweets using the query phrase Corona-no-sei ("due to COVID-19," "because of COVID-19," or "considering COVID-19"), enabling us to identify the activities and life plans disrupted by the pandemic. The correlation between the number of tweets and COVID-19 cases was analyzed, along with an examination of frequently co-occurring words. The top 20 nouns, verbs, and noun plus verb pairs co-occurring with Corona no-sei were extracted. The top 5 keywords were graduation ceremony, cancel, school, work, and event. The top 5 verbs were disappear, go, rest, can go, and end. Our findings indicate that education emerged as the top concern when the Japanese government announced the first state of emergency. We also observed a sudden surge in anxiety about material shortages such as toilet paper. As the pandemic persisted and more states of emergency were declared, we noticed a shift toward long-term concerns, including careers, social relationships, and education. Our study incorporated machine learning techniques for disease monitoring through the use of tweet data, allowing the identification of underlying concerns (eg, disrupted education and work conditions) throughout the 3 stages of Japanese government emergency announcements. The comparison with COVID-19 case numbers provides valuable insights into the short- and long-term societal impacts, emphasizing the importance of considering citizens' perspectives in policy-making and supporting those affected by the pandemic, particularly in the context of Japanese government decision-making.

From Motion to Causation: The Diachrony of the Spanish Causative Constructions with traer (‘Bring’) and llevar (‘Take’)

This paper describes the historical evolution of the Spanish causative micro-constructions with the motion verbs llevar (‘take’) and traer (‘bring’) (e.g., el miedo llevó al ladrón a cometer un error, ‘the fear caused the thief to make a mistake’). In order to reconstruct the historical development of these micro-constructions between the 13th and 20th centuries, all causative uses of llevar and traer were extracted from the Corpus del Diccionario Histórico. This corpus was annotated for a series of formal and semantic parameters that count as indexes of grammaticalization, and was submitted to a quantitative productivity analysis. The results point to the existence of a subschema formed of verbs of caused accompanied motion, which has semantically specialized in the expression of indirect causation. From a formal point of view, this subschema is characterized by a low level of syntactic incorporation of the causative verb and the infinitive. In addition, it is shown that the productivity of the causative micro-constructions under study is determined by semantic changes experienced by llevar and traer as full lexical verbs during the history of Spanish. The late development of the micro-construction with llevar is explained by the initial tendency of this verb to express motion events not bounded by an endpoint. From the 16th century onwards, the decline in the micro-construction with traer and the rise in the micro-construction with llevar results from the consolidation of the deictic meaning of the verb pair.

How did you break that?

AbstractCross-linguistic research has brought extensive evidence on how languages differ in their categorization of actions and events, pointing out the differences in the semantic categories they establish, their boundaries and their degree of granularity with respect to the variety of events they refer to. Verbs describing breaking events vary in terms of generality or specificity of the action description (e.g., breaking or snapping a twig) or salience of specific semantic components characterising the event (e.g.,smashbeing associated with violent destruction) and the same event can be construed differently within the same language (e.g.,crack/break an egg). In this article we set out to explore the semantic boundaries of verbs describing breaking events within and between languages. We propose a new methodology combining corpora and a video ontology, using verb pairs generally regarded as translation equivalents in bilingual dictionaries. The study contributes to research on semantic categorization and verbs correspondences between Italian and English.

Threatening in Russian with or without sja : Grozit′ vs. grozit′sja *

Abstract: This article explores the two verbs, grozit′ and grozit′sja , which can both be translated as 'threaten'. We adopt a "local" approach and offer a thorough analysis of corpus data, which indicates that the two verbs, although they share a number of properties, are semantically and syntactically distinct. We show that the two verbs collocate with different parts of speech and tend to occur in different syntactic constructions. Grozit′sja is typically used with regard to interactions between two persons, while grozit′ has a wider range of uses. This tendency has become more pronounced over time. As for the meaning of the verbs, grozit′sja tends to express verbal threats, while grozit′ often conveys non-verbal threats. On a more theoretical level, our study contributes to our understanding of the morpheme sja . While labels like "reflexive", "middle", and "passive" are helpful as far as they go, we demonstrate how detailed studies of individual verb pairs (a "local" approach) may shed light on the complex syntactic and semantic properties of sja . On the methodological level, our study underscores the value of corpus data for the study of sja , both data from large internet corpora such as the Araneum Russicum Russicum Maius and the Russian National Corpus (RNC). While the former corpus enables us to identify general tendencies through collocations and semantic vectors, a smaller curated corpus like the RNC is suitable for detailed analysis of semantic and syntactic properties.

The noncausal/causal alternation and genealogical affiliation: Quantitative testing in three Niger-Congo language families

The noncausal/causal alternation is the pairing of two verb forms that refer to the same core event but differ in the absence vs. presence of a causer for this event (e.g. rise vs. raise, open (intr.) vs. open (tr.), die vs. kill). Languages differ in their overall preferences among the possible strategies for coding this alternation. This study uses machine-learning methods (clustering and tree-based computational classifiers) to investigate the predictive power of the noncausal/causal alternation for the genealogical affiliation of 38 languages belonging to the Atlantic, Mande and Mel families. The languages studied here belong to different contact areas in Senegal and its surroundings. The three families are all affiliated to the Niger-Congo phylum but display quite different typological profiles. The present paper elaborates on an earlier study that used a standard list of 18 verb pairs to establish the coding strategies in these languages. Apart from highlighting which coding strategies are favored in each family, our quantitative analyses show that the family affiliation of the 38 languages can be predicted with an accuracy above the majority baseline based on the information of the noncausal/causal alternation in the 18 verb pairs, but that the predictive power of verb pairs 1‑9 is generally lower than the one of verb pairs 10‑18. Our results confirm the hypothesis that the first group of verb pairs shows universal rather than lineage-specific tendencies concerning the noncausal/causal alternation. Furthermore, our analyses identify which of the 18 verb pairs (and their correlated coding strategies) have the highest predictive power. This study opens new avenues for identifying the relevant synchronic data for genealogical classification in historical linguistics. Future studies could replicate the same analysis in different language families to assess if our results are universal or specific to some language families.

The noncausal/causal alternation and genealogical affiliation: Quantitative testing in three Niger-Congo language families

The noncausal/causal alternation is the pairing of two verb forms that refer to the same core event but differ in the absence vs. presence of a causer for this event (e.g. rise vs. raise, open (intr.) vs. open (tr.), die vs. kill). Languages differ in their overall preferences among the possible strategies for coding this alternation. This study uses machine-learning methods (clustering and tree-based computational classifiers) to investigate the predictive power of the noncausal/causal alternation for the genealogical affiliation of 38 languages belonging to the Atlantic, Mande and Mel families. The languages studied here belong to different contact areas in Senegal and its surroundings. The three families are all affiliated to the Niger-Congo phylum but display quite different typological profiles. The present paper elaborates on an earlier study that used a standard list of 18 verb pairs to establish the coding strategies in these languages. Apart from highlighting which coding strategies are favored in each family, our quantitative analyses show that the family affiliation of the 38 languages can be predicted with an accuracy above the majority baseline based on the information of the noncausal/causal alternation in the 18 verb pairs, but that the predictive power of verb pairs 1‑9 is generally lower than the one of verb pairs 10‑18. Our results confirm the hypothesis that the first group of verb pairs shows universal rather than lineage-specific tendencies concerning the noncausal/causal alternation. Furthermore, our analyses identify which of the 18 verb pairs (and their correlated coding strategies) have the highest predictive power. This study opens new avenues for identifying the relevant synchronic data for genealogical classification in historical linguistics. Future studies could replicate the same analysis in different language families to assess if our results are universal or specific to some language families.

The noncausal/causal alternation in Muher (Ethiosemitic)

This paper is concerned with noncausal/causal verb pairs in Muher — a little-known South Ethiosemitic language of the so-called Gunnän Gurage sub-group in Ethiopia. Muher is a morphologically complex language, characterized by nonconcatenative verb morphology and the use of prefixes in combination with template changes to derive verbs. The study is based on a dataset of the Muher equivalents for the verb pairs in Haspelmath (1993). Muher uses several strategies to mark the noncausal/causal alternation, whereby directed pairs dominate. Within these pairs, a causal verb is more often derived than a noncausal verb. Non-directed pairs, i.e., equipollent, labile and suppletive verb pairs, are also attested, but are less frequent. Moreover, for five of the original items in the list, Muher has no pairs, i.e., one verb only occurs in the noncausal form while four verbs lack a noncausal counterpart. These four verbs, as well as most of the other verbs in the list with a human subject, make use of a morphosyntactic construction, the impersonal, to express an event in which the patientive object is foregrounded.

Variation in the coding of the noncausal/causal alternation: Causative *-i in East Bantu languages

In this paper, we discuss shifts in the formal relation, i.e. “correspondence” (Haspelmath 1993; Nichols et al. 2004), between members of noncausal/causal verb pairs in eight East Bantu languages. These shifts are the effect of diachronic changes to the morphophonological structure of the verbs involved, conditioned by reflexes of a reconstructed Proto-Bantu causative suffix *-i. In the history of many Bantu languages, the high vowels i and u conditioned a series of sound changes on the preceding consonant. The suffixing of the causative suffix *-i to a verb root is one context in which these sound changes occurred. We investigate noncausal/causal pairs in eight East Bantu languages in which the causal verb is historically derived by a reflex of the suffix *-i. We argue that many of these noncausal/causal pairs changed from a causative to another correspondence. Our analysis has implications for the study of the formal alternations of noncausal/causal verb pairs across all Bantu languages and beyond.

The noncausal/causal alternation and the limits of ambitransitivity in a sample of sub-Saharan languages

The first part of the present article concentrates on noncausal/causal pairs whose noncausal member is a monovalent verb referring to a process typically undergone by concrete inanimate entities. The cross-linguistic variation in the coding of such pairs is analyzed in a convenience sample of 30 sub-Saharan languages from various genetic units. 10 of the 30 languages show an extremely high degree of preference for the ambitransitivity strategy in the coding of this particular type of noncausal/causal pairs, whereas none of them shows such a high degree of preference for any of the other possible strategies. The second part of the article concentrates on the 10 languages of the sample making a systematic use of the ambitransitivity strategy for the type of noncausal/causal pairs investigated in the first part of the article. It analyzes the extension of the ambitransitivity strategy to the coding of other semantic types of noncausal/causal pairs and to the coding of the psych alternation. In the questionnaire used to test the extension of the ambitransitivity strategy, a sizeable proportion of ambitransitive pairs is found in only three languages. In the others, the lack of any systematicity is the situation that predominates for the semantic types of noncausal/causal pairs other than that investigated in the first part of the article and for pairs of psych verbs.

Verbal derivation in Kambaata (Cushitic), with a focus on the encoding of noncausal/causal alternations

Kambaata, a Cushitic language of Ethiopia, has a rich verbal morphology. This paper first sets out to describe its productive verbal derivation processes, i.e. the forms and functions of the causative, the passive and the middle (autobenefactive) derivation. In the second part, the study starts from Haspelmath’s (1993) list of 31 verbal concepts to determine the preferred morphological strategies to express noncausal/causal alternations. The analysis shows that the causative strategy is predominant in Kambaata, but that the decausative strategy follows closely behind. If the whole documented lexicon including the numerous ideophones are considered, the equipollent strategy is a very important third strategy. Kambaata has only a single labile verb but otherwise distinguishes consistently between transitive and intransitive verbs. Finally, two suppletive verb pairs are found in the list: ‘die/kill’ and ‘finish (intr./tr.)’.

The noncausal/causal alternation in the Western Serengeti languages

This paper takes a look at the noncausal/causal alternation in a sample of about 30 verb pairs in the Western Serengeti languages (WS) Ikoma, Ishenyi, Nata and Ngoreme, spoken in the Mara region of Tanzania. Based on the data presented, these languages can be said to favour a strategy of causativization, i.e. deriving the causal verb from a noncausal base, in coding this alternation. In a preliminary cross-linguistic comparison, this preference for causativization seems to be stronger than in other (Tanzanian) Bantu languages for which data is available. The data also shows that the reflexive prefix is used more often than the neuter suffix in anticausative pairs. While the latter has a widespread use across Bantu languages to derive noncausal verbs, it is unproductive in WS.