Prototypical Verbs Research Articles

Un comme qui marque une fonction qui se démarque. L'attribut de l'objet en comme et les verbes de nomination

This contribution examines, for the so-called nomination verbs, some of the hypotheses that have been formulated in order to explain the use of comme ( “as”) in object complement constructions. It will appear that comme is used in marked instances of the complement structure. The marking concerns the formal and lexical properties of the object complement, as well as the information structure of the sentence and the verb meaning. In presence of comme, the object complement conforms less often to the properties of a prototypical predicate and, even less so, to those of a resultative predicate. The secondary predication contained within the construction tends, moreover, to adopt some characteristics of what is considered to be a marked information structure. The use of comme, finally, correlates with non prototypical verb meanings in that the verb less often refers to the attribution of a professional duty that is intimately linked to the meaning of the verb.

Un comme qui marque une fonction qui se démarque. L'attribut de l'objet en comme et les verbes de nomination

This contribution examines, for the so-called nomination verbs, some of the hypotheses that have been formulated in order to explain the use of comme ( “as”) in object complement constructions. It will appear that comme is used in marked instances of the complement structure. The marking concerns the formal and lexical properties of the object complement, as well as the information structure of the sentence and the verb meaning. In presence of comme, the object complement conforms less often to the properties of a prototypical predicate and, even less so, to those of a resultative predicate. The secondary predication contained within the construction tends, moreover, to adopt some characteristics of what is considered to be a marked information structure. The use of comme, finally, correlates with non prototypical verb meanings in that the verb less often refers to the attribution of a professional duty that is intimately linked to the meaning of the verb.

On the category adjective in Southern Guaykuruan languages

The morphology of “adjectives” in Southern Guaykuruan (SG) languages (Pilagá, Toba and Mocoví) includes forms that look more like nouns (they manifest both gender and number categories) and forms that look like verbs (they inflect for number, but not for gender). Gender affixes on adjectives coincide with gender markers used for nouns. However, adjectives do not share the feature of possession with nouns. Furthermore, most adjectives, or PROPERTY CONCEPT WORDS that inflect for number and gender are in the semantic categories of color and dimension. Words denoting properties, states and qualities which have only number are more verb-like. These translate as adjectives, do not occur with a copula, and can take verbal inflection (aspect, directionality, negation). Some adjectival concepts are expressed by full-fledged verbs, with the subject pronominal prefix functioning as the sole argument of the predicate. There are also a few adjectives with unknown etymologies that cannot be synchronically derived from nouns or verbs. We conclude that in SG languages there is a class of prototypical nouns at one end of a continuum and another class of prototypical verbs at the other end of this continuum. In addition, there are two classes of property concept words within the continuum that are realized as nominal adjectives and verbal adjectives. Situated in the middle of this continuum is a small group of words that show neither derivational nor inflectional categories.

Combining corpus and machine-readable dictionary data for building bilingual lexicons

This paper describes and discusses some theoretical and practical problems arising from developing a system to combine the structured but incomplete information from machine readable dictionaries (MRDs) with the unstructured but more complete information available in corpora for the creation of a bilingual lexical data base, presenting a methodology to integrate information from both sources into a single lexical data structure. The BICORD system (BIlingual CORpus-enhanced Dictionaries) involves linking entries in Collins English-French and French-English bilingual dictionary with a large English-French and French-English bilingual corpus. We have concentrated on the class of action verbs of movement, building on earlier work on lexical correspondences specific to this verb class between languages (Klavans and Tzoukermann, 1989), (Klavans and Tzoukermann, 1990a), (Klavans and Tzoukermann, 1990b).1 We first examine the way prototypical verbs of movement are translated in the Collins-Robert (Atkins, Duval, and Milne, 1978) bilingual dictionary, and then analyze the behavior of some of these verbs in a large bilingual corpus. We incorporate the results of linguistic research on the theory of verb types to motivate corpus analysis coupled with data from MRDs for the purpose of establishing lexical correspondences with the full range of associated translations, and with statistical data attached to the relevant nodes.

Phonological information for grammatical category assignments

During language acquisition, children must learn how to classify words into the appropriate grammatical category, such as noun or verb. Adults must also assign words to grammatical categories quickly and accurately. Most theories of this task focus on strategies that exploit semantic and/or syntactic correlates of grammatical class. This paper examines a relatively neglected source of information for grammatical category: phonology. Study one demonstrates that English verbs contain fewer syllables than English nouns, a difference that appears strongly in both adult-adult language and parental speech to children. Studies three and four provide evidence that adults and children are sensitive to this difference. Study three reports that adults use pseudowords more often in sentences as verbs if their syllable number is small, whereas they use pseudowords as nouns more often if their syllable number is large. Study four reports that 4-year old children associate pseudowords with actions (the prototypical verb meaning) more often than objects (the prototypical noun meaning) if the pseudowords contain one rather than three syllables. The relevance of the noun-verb syllable difference for connectionist models of linguistic knowledge is discussed. In addition, possible causes of the syllable number difference between nouns and verbs are proposed and evaluated in study two.

Children's identification of actors and patients in prototypical and nonprototypical sentence types

This research examined if children organize language categories around a prototype. Based on previous research with adults, the hypothesis held that the prototypical transitive sentence contains an animate actor and patient and a highly prototypical verb. The question of interest was if factors that contribute to adult judgments of sentence prototypicality (such as actor-patient animacy and verb prototypicality) affect young childrens' accuracy in correctly identifying sentence actors and patients. That is, are children more likely to make correct identifications in prototypical sentences? Sixty-four 2- and 4-year-old children were trained to to ntify sentence actors and patients in prototypical or nonprototypical sentences and then tested for generalization to sentences of other types. Two factors, verb prototypicality and animacy of sentence participants, combined to influence children's accuracy in actor/patient identification. Regardless of training condition, children produced more correct responses to sentences with animate actors than to sentences with inanimate actors. There was an interaction with verb prototypicality such that it was more typical for inanimate actors to act upon animate patients with what are otherwise low prototype verbs (e.g., low in action, low in intentionality). The results of the study are consistent with the view that similar cognitive mechanisms operate in language and in other nonlinguistic cognitive domains.