Verb Sense Research Articles

THE DYNAMICS OF ENGLISH SENSORY VERBS MORPHOLOGICAL CHARACTERISTICS

The study is focused on the analysis of the dynamic development of the morphological functions of the main sensory verbs, which make up the core of five lexical-semantic fields of visual, auditory, gustatory, olfactory and tactile sensory perception, in the diachronic view and covers all periods of the English language development: Old English, Middle English, Early New English and New English. The objective is a detailed and in-depth study of the grammatical and phonetic characteristics of the main nuclear English sensory verbs at each stage of their development and highlighting the changes that took place in their morphological chronology. The main tasks are to track, analyze and compare the grammatical and phonetic characteristics of sensory verb lexemes of five main lexical-semantic fields to indicate the process of sensory perception in each historical period, comparing their dynamics and identifying all possible grammatical and phonetic changes that took place in the specified time period. Various methods, analyses and approaches were involved to obtain reliable data: phonetic, component, comparative, quantitative analysis, analysis of dictionary definitions, comparative-historical method, diachronic-synchronic approach. The study is based on the use of all possible Old English, Middle English and Modern English dictionaries that are available. The results prove that in the subsystem of English sensory verbs denoting the processes of sensory perception, there have been noticeable changes on the grammatical and phonetic levels. Throughout all periods of the English language development, their grammatical and phonetic functions have been subjected to various forms of alignment and similar influence from the class of strong declension to weak declension. A significant part of the basic nuclear sensory verbs underwent quantitative and qualitative phonetic changes.

‘V고 싶다’ 통사 구조 분석

This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic features of the construction ‘V -go Siphta' in Korean. The construction ‘V-go Siphta' manifested in forms such as ‘NP2 Ul/Lul V-Ko Siphta' and ‘NP2 I/Ka V-go Siphta' has been a subject of debate. To elucidate the similarities and peculiarities of these ‘V-go Siphta' constructions, an analysis was first conducted on the distinguishing features between ‘NP2 Ul/Lul' and ‘NP2 I/Ka'. Both function as essential components of a sentence, indicating the object. However, ‘NP2 I/Ka' exhibits similarities to an object complement in its difficulty to separate from the predicate. In the case of ‘NP2 I/Ka V-go Siphta', the ‘Siphta' has properties similar to an affix. Based on this analysis, corpus searches revealed that when the verb ‘V' corresponds to sensory verbs such as ‘Mekta' (to eat), ‘Pota' (to see), and ‘Tutta' (to hear), the construction ‘NP2 I/Ka V-go Siphta' is more prevalent than ‘NP2 Ul/Lul V-go Siphta'. Verbs that effectively reflect human desires and longings are more likely to be combined with ‘-go shifta' to develop into psychological adjectives. Thus, while the ‘-go-sifta' structure can function as an auxiliary verb structure, it can also function as a psychological adjective in sentences containing verbs that reflect physiological and primal desires. Therefore, in this paper, we propose two types of syntactic structures to explore further.

The Contribution of Selected Linguistic Markers for Unsupervised Arabic Verb Sense Disambiguation

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is the task of automatically determining the meaning of a polysemous word in a specific context. Word sense induction is the unsupervised clustering of word usages in a different context to distinguish senses and perform unsupervised WSD. Most studies consider function words as stop words and delete them in the pre-processing step. However, function words can encode meaningful information that can help to improve the performance of WSD approaches. We propose in this work a novel approach to solve Arabic verb sense disambiguation that is based on a preposition-based classification that is used in an automatic word sense induction step to build sense inventories to disambiguate Arabic verbs. However, in the wake of the success of neural language models, recent works obtained encouraging results using BERT pre-trained models for English-language WSD approaches. Hence, we use contextualized word embeddings for an unsupervised Arabic WSD that is based on linguistic markers and uses sentence-BERT Transformer pre-trained models, which yields encouraging results that outperform other existing unsupervised neural AWSD approaches.

Spatial Hierarchical Attention Network Based Video-guided Machine Translation

Video-guided machine translation, as one type of multimodal machine translation, aims to engage video contents as auxiliary information to address the word sense ambiguity problem in machine translation. Previous studies only use features from pre-trained action detection models as motion representations of the video to solve the verb sense ambiguity and neglect the noun sense ambiguity problem. To address this, we propose a video-guided machine translation system using both spatial and motion representations. For the spatial part, we propose a hierarchical attention network to model the spatial information from object-level to video-level. We investigate and discuss spatial features extracted from objects with pre-trained convolutional neural network models and spatial concept features extracted from object labels and attributes with pre-trained language models. We further investigate spatial feature filtering by referring to corresponding source sentences. Experiments on the VATEX dataset show that our system achieves a 35.86 BLEU-4 score, which is 0.51 score higher than the single model of the SOTA method. Experiments on the How2 dataset further verify the generalization ability of our proposed system.

The Diachronic Evolution of Polysemous Motion Verbs in Chinese—A Case Study of Zǒu ‘Walk’

Based on the actual uses of the polysemous motion verb zǒu ‘walk’ in the corpora of Chinese texts from Old Chinese to Modern Chinese period, this paper argues that the directed motion sense of the manner verb mainly derives from pragmatic inference from the contexts and cognitive preference for the conceptualization of motion events. In addition, it is essential that favorable morphosyntactic constructions in the language promote the pragmatic sense to be lexicalized as the verb’s lexical meaning. That is, the specific direction encoded in the verb and its grammatical behaviors are not fully determined by the lexical semantics of the verb itself as the grammatical constructions available in the language also account for the evolution of its lexical semantics and grammatical behaviors.

A New Methodology for the Analysis of Visuals in Legal Works

The goal of this Article is to introduce a comprehensive methodology for the analysis of visuals used for communication in legal works, by which I mean transactional and litigation documents, legal instruments, primary and secondary sources of law, and legal informational materials. To date, the scholarship on visuals in legal communications has been heavily descriptive, with some forays into the ethical and practical considerations of the use of “visualized” legal works. No one has yet devised a comprehensive analytical methodology that draws upon the disciplines of visual literacy, visual cultural studies, visual rhetoric, and mise en scène analysis to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of actual examples of highly visual legal documents and critique their efficacy and propriety in a variety of legal settings. This Article will fill that gap in the literature. The new methodology evaluates the following aspects of visual legal works: • Immediate Visual Context - Analysis of Meaning -Taxonomy of Purpose and Function • Immediate Verbal Context • Visual Cultural Context • Mise en Scène and the Rhetorical Topic of Arrangement • Visual Rhetoric and the Ethical and Professional Propriety of the Work. Lawyers, judges, and law students typically do not receive training in visual literacy regarding the reading and interpretation of visual images, and much less so in the design principles required to create the most effective visuals for legal communications and legal instruments, such as contracts. This condition persists in spite of the fact that visual images can communicate across language and cultural barriers, taking advantage of the enormous speed and power of visual communication. In equal measure, knowledge and understanding of these principles will enable lawyers to design and use effective visuals, and to challenge or respond to the visual legal communications proffered by their opponents in litigation or negotiation, or their counterparts in a transaction. My intent in this Article and the methodology it presents is to examine visual elements as visuals, not as a translation or alternative form of verbal communication. The approach of trying to translate visual works into verbal arguments or verbal elements of legal reasoning limits the scope and the effectiveness of the visual works, because communication through visuals employs a separate visual language, and not in a literal or verbal sense. The methodology proposed in this Article is a set of tools that can help verbally oriented law-trained writers to become better readers, evaluators, and creators of

Predicting syntactic choice in Mandarin Chinese: a corpus-based analysis of ba sentences and SVO sentences

Abstract This paper investigates the effects of 10 factors on the choice between alternative ba sentences and SVO sentences in Mandarin Chinese. These factors are givenness, definiteness, animacy and pronominality of NP2s, NP2 length, VP length, verb sense, syntactic parallelism, dependency distance, and surprisal. Using corpus data and mixed-effects logistic regression modeling, we find that on the one hand, givenness, syntactic parallelism, and the log-transformed ratio of NP2 length and VP length are significant predictors of the choice between ba sentences and SVO sentences. A new NP2, a large length ratio and a parallel construction predict an SVO sentence rather than a ba sentence. On the other hand, dependency distance and surprisal estimated by the trigram model are effective in predicting the choice between naturally occurring ba/SVO sentences and their alternatives. Naturally occurring sentences are more likely to have shorter dependency distances and smaller surprisal values than the converted sentences. The effects of these five factors on syntactic choice are congruent with results of previous studies, which suggests that some determinants of syntactic choice are shared among languages.

LEXICAL-SEMANTIC SUBSYSTEM OF SENSORY VERBS IN THE MODERN ENGLISH VERB SYSTEM

The article focuses on the study of the lexical-semantic subsystem of sensory verbs in the Modern English verb system. The objectives of the study are to analyse sensory verbs’ semantic features, establish macro- and micro integral connections between them, and to determine their groups and synonymic sets by differential trait and denotative sema. Definitional, componential, comparative, proportional and quantitative analysis, English explanatory dictionaries and thesauri were used in the study. Sensory verbs of five lexical-semantic fields have approximately the same proportion of lexemes that form the core, main part and periphery of each corresponding lexical-semantic field, with a slightly larger number of verbs in the main part. Old English sensory verbs make up a third of the modern perception process subsystem, almost a half of the borrowed lexemes from French and Latin, a tenth of sensory verbs borrowed from the West Germanic group and a small percentage is formed by borrowings from other languages, unknown or imitative origin. The study analysed the share of sensory verbs according to the periods of English language development. Sensory verbs of the Middle English and New English periods make up more than a half of the sensory vocabulary of the modern perception process subsystem. It is established that sensory verbs are combined into groups and synonymic sets by seven differential traits. The results of the study of connections between sensory verbs show that they are not isolated in their lexical-semantic fields and in general in the sensory subsystem of the sensory perception process, i.e. they migrate between sensory lexical-semantic fields. All the lexemes of the sensory subsystem are hierarchical, belong to the hierarchy of lexical-semantic formations and implicitly have all the features of the higher levels of the hierarchy. Thus, lexical-semantic fields of sensory verbs are open systems.

Verb Sense Disambiguation by Measuring Semantic Relatedness between Verb and Surrounding Terms of Context

Word sense disambiguation (WSD) is considered an AI complete problem which may be defined as the ability to resolve the intended meaning of ambiguous words occurring in a language. Language has complex structure and is highly ambiguous which has deep rooted relations between its different components specifically words, sentences and paragraphs. Incidentally, human beings can easily comprehend and resolve the intended meanings of the ambiguous words. The difficulty arises in building a highly accurate machine translation system or information retrieval system because of ambiguity. A number of algorithms have been devised to solve ambiguity but the success rate of these algorithms are very much limited. Context might have played a decisive role in human judgment while deciphering the meaning of polysemic words. A significant number of psychological models have been proposed to emulate the way the human beings understand the meaning of words, sentences or text depending on the context. The pertinent question that the researchers want to address is how the meanings are represented by human beings in mental memory and whether it is feasible to simulate with a computational model. Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA), a mathematical technique which is effective in representation of meanings in the form of vectors that closely approximates human semantic space. By comparing the vectors in the LSA generated semantic space, the closest neighbours of the word vector can be derived which indirectly provides lot of information about a word. However, LSA does not provide a complete theory of meaning. That is why psychological process modules are combined with LSA to make the theory of meaning concrete. Predication algorithm with LSA was proposed by Kintch, 2001 which was sufficient to capture various word senses and was successful in homonym disambiguation. Meaning of a word might have multiple senses specifically verbs. For example, verb “run” has 42 senses in WordNet. In order to find the correct sense of a verb is really a daunting task and resolving verb ambiguity using psycholinguistic model is very much limited. The proposed method has exploited the high dimensional vector LSA space resulted from training samples by applying predication algorithm to derive the most appropriate semantic neighbours for the target polysemous verb from the semantic space. Finally the vector space of test samples are checked with the training samples i.e. semantic neighbours to classify the senses of polysemous words in accurate manner.

Productive versus receptive L2 knowledge of polysemous phrasal verbs: A comparison of determining factors

This study examines factors that might determine EFL learners’ receptive and productive knowledge of polysemous phrasal verbs. The factors include (1) raw phrasal verb frequency, (2) sense-based phrasal verb frequency, (3) entrenchment or individual word frequency, (4) sense opacity, (5) L2 estimated proficiency, and (6) the amount and type of L2 exposure. Sixty EFL learners (L1 Arabic) in Saudi Arabia were administered productive (gap-fill) and receptive (multiple-choice) tests assessing their knowledge of 100 phrasal verb senses. The participants knew almost a third of the 100 senses productively but half of these receptively. Mixed-effects modelling results show that on the productive side, the strongest predictor was corpus-derived frequency (both raw and sense-based), followed by opacity, estimated proficiency and the time spent watching films/videos/TV in English. On the receptive side, only sense-based frequency, opacity, estimated proficiency, and particle frequency predicted knowledge. These results have important implications for the learning and teaching of polysemous phrasal verbs in the EFL context, as they identify factors that might make a phrasal verb sense worthy of teaching time and effort.

On the polysemy of motion verbs in Ancient Greek and Coptic

AbstractIn this paper, we propose a constructional analysis of the meanings of two generic motion verbs in Ancient Greek and Coptic (Sahidic dialect), the verbsbaínōandbôk, respectively, both of which are glossed as ‘go’ and are characterized by extensive polysemy. We argue that an adequate analysis of these meanings can only be achieved in a framework that recognizes lexical constructions at the level of the verb sense, showing that each meaning correlates with encoding features (ranging from morpho-syntactic to semantic, discursive, and lexical ones) that are not predictable, or at best are only partially motivated. Through extensive corpus analysis, we identify such significant, frequency-based patterns of correlation, each of which represents a lexical construction. Our data thus argue strongly for an approach to polysemy in which individual meanings are represented as enriched lexical constructions, which include morphological and discursive specifications (in addition to standard valence information).

Verb Class Induction with Partial Supervision

Dirichlet-multinomial (D-M) mixtures like latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) are widely used for both topic modeling and clustering. Prior work on constructing Levin-style semantic verb clusters achieves state-of-the-art results using D-M mixtures for verb sense induction and clustering. We add a bias toward known clusters by explicitly labeling a small number of observations with their correct VerbNet class. We demonstrate that this partial supervision guides the resulting clusters effectively, improving the recovery of both labeled and unlabeled classes by 16%, for a joint 12% absolute improvement in F1 score compared to clustering without supervision. The resulting clusters are also more semantically coherent. Although the technical change is minor, it produces a large effect, with important practical consequences for supervised topic modeling in general.

The Evidence of Meaning (bayān al-maʿnā) in the Ẓāhirī Approach to the Qur'an

The article carries on the project of a ‘Philosophical Qur'anology’, referring to the possibility of approaching the Qur'an as a philosophical book. Here I will focus on the concept of bayān, exploring the role of language in understanding more thoroughly the Qur'anic idea of God in relation with philosophical topics as ontology and epistemology.My idea is to read Qur'anic obviousness through the pair-couple of ẓāhir and bāṭin in order to make meaning ( maʿnā) manifest (in the sense of the Latin verb: ostendere) in the immediateness of its evidence. The proposed approach is grounded in Ẓāhirī rules of interpretation, which claim to be wholeheartedly faithful to the apparent meaning of the text, but through the a-letheia (‘disclosure’, in Heidegger's terms) of the manifested and the clear truthfulness ( haqīqa) of the content. Taking the thought of Ibn Ḥazm as a starting point, the article will explore Averroes' method through the lenses of the Moroccan philosopher Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī. I will try to show that bayān does mean first of all that a text is clear in the language wherein it has been revealed or however expressed. As the source of all revealed lights is the Arabic language, the Arabic Qur'an is in itself clear and explains itself. The evidence of the Qur'an is the emergence of meaning from the clarity of the text. To provide an illustrative example, al-Ghazzālī's interpretation of the Light Verse will be shortly addressed.

Knowing a Language – What Sort of “Knowing” Is It?

“Knowing a Language” addresses a topic that has received attention especially in the analytical branches of language philosophy. First, the paper discusses some prominent analytical observations as well as selected positions in semiotics, semiology, and linguistics before turning to a post-Husserlian response by way of a description of the intentional acts that we cannot but perform when we use language. The holistic, eidetic portrait of language that emerges is conceived within Husserl’s extended meaning chain, stretching from nonverbal meaning intention and its pre-syntactic categorial relations via their displacement by merely verbal sense, Husserl’s Bedeutung, to their nonverbal, vividly imaginable, proximate reconstruction in Husserl’s Sinn. Meanings are viewed as neither public nor private, but rather as indirectly public on the grounds that they combine of necessity individual instantiations of expressions under the communal coercion of the linguistic linkage compulsion. Thus, the paper provides an alternative explanation of what is involved in knowing how to link the sounds of linguistic utterances with community-sanctioned meanings.

A New Methodology for the Analysis of Visuals in Legal Works

To be published at 15 Florida Int'l Univ. Law Review (2021) The goal of this Article is to introduce a comprehensive methodology for analysis of visuals used for communication in legal works, by which I mean transactional and litigation documents, legal instruments, primary and secondary sources of law, and legal informational materials. To date, the scholarship on visuals in legal communications has been heavily descriptive, with some forays into the ethical and practical considerations of the use of “visualized” legal works. No one has yet devised a comprehensive analytical methodology that draws upon the disciplines of visual literacy, visual cultural studies, visual rhetoric, and mise en scene analysis to evaluate the strengths and weaknesses of actual examples of highly visual legal documents and critique their efficacy and propriety in a variety of legal settings. This Article will fill that gap in the literature. The new methodology evaluates the following aspects of visual legal works: • Immediate Visual Context o Analysis of Meaning o Taxonomy of Purpose and Function • Immediate Verbal Context • Visual Cultural Context • Mise en Scene and the Rhetorical Topic of Arrangement • Visual Rhetoric and the Ethical and Professional Propriety of the Work. Lawyers, judges, and law students typically do not receive training in visual literacy regarding the reading and interpretation of visual images, and much less so in the design principles required to create the most effective visuals for legal communications and legal instruments, such as contracts. This condition persists in spite of the fact that visual images can communicate across language and cultural barriers, taking advantage of the enormous speed and power of visual communication. In equal measure, knowledge and understanding of these principles will enable lawyers to design and use effective visuals, and to challenge or respond to the visual legal communications proffered by their opponents in litigation or negotiation, or their counterparts in a transaction. My intent in this Article and the methodology it presents is to examine visual elements as visuals, not as a translation or alternative form of verbal communication. The approach of trying to translate visual works into verbal arguments or verbal elements of legal reasoning limits the scope and the effectiveness of the visual works, because communication through visuals employs a separate visual language, and not in a literal or verbal sense. The methodology proposed in this Article is a set of tools that can help verbally-oriented law-trained writers to become better readers, evaluators, and creators of visual communications in the law.

Textual and pictorial representations in strategic thinking about linguistic meaning

The aim of this study was to investigate L2 speakers’ ability to think strategically about linguistic meaning by asking them to make sense of particle verb (PV) constructions, a particularly demanding aspect of the English language for L2 speakers. Our focus was on meaning construal strategies in textual and pictorial representations of 22 figurative PVs with the particle down. The participants were asked to express themselves verbally and visually, and we were interested in the nature of their answers as well as their relationship. More specifically, we wished to determine the salience of particular elements in the participants’ strategic meaning construal, the type of relationship between textual and pictorial representations and, finally, potential dominance of one mode over another, which was examined in terms of the well-established concepts of “relay” and “anchorage”. The results showed that participants generally related the meaning of the PV construction to its components in their textual answers, whereas in pictorial answers their main tendency was to attend to the figurative meaning of the PV. Furthermore, their textual and pictorial answers most frequently depended on each other, which allowed us to determine that the text-picture relationship was predominantly that of relay, i.e. that text was perceived as more significant in the text-picture relationship.

The writing teacher: rethinking assessment and transformative learning in the creative writing classroom

ABSTRACT In this paper, the writing teacher is a teacher who writes and thinks of writing in a verbal sense, as a performance and not the object that is the written. The paper explores differences between writing as a rhetorical function and writing as an act of creativity, questioning pedagogical practices and assessment of student work based on literary models that is common in educational structures. It seeks to explore a different way of thinking about writing as subject, and therefore writers as students and teachers, and the modes upon which we assess students’ performances as writers and the opportunities of transformative learning that it presents. Exploring an example of assessment and suggesting a way in which assessment for creative writing might be redirected to how we write rather than what we write, it concludes with a recommendation to rethink how we teach and assess creative writing, especially in high schools, but also in undergraduate programs, by refocusing the current emphasis on literary practices towards creative and thinking practices with the goal of producing transformative learning experiences students can use to expand their understanding of how to engage with the practice of writing.

ФУНКЦИОНИРОВАНИЕ ТРОПЕИСТИКИ И СИНТАГМАТИКИ ГЛАГОЛЬНОЙ СЕНСОРИКИ В ПРОЗЕ С. Н. СЕРГЕЕВА-ЦЕНСКОГО

The article analyses figurative means in S. N. Sergeyev-Tsensky’s prose. The writer’s creative work is still insufficiently investigated from the linguistic viewpoint. S. N. Sergeyev-Tsensky’s prose is full of synesthetic metaphors, personifications, the author’s unique adverbial phrases. The paper focuses on analysing synesthetic metaphors, metonymy, and syntagmatics. Expressive means play a considerable role in the writer’s prose and serve to manifest his individual style. The originality of the study lies in the comprehensive analysis of the semantics of perception verbs in S. N. Sergeyev-Tsensky’s creative work. The researcher provides a contextual and situational description of the figurative semantics of perception verbs, identifies stylistic means and devices used by the writer to develop figurative meanings on the basis of sensory verbs. The paper analyses the influence of a literary genre on the functioning of expressive artistic means.

Topological vs. lexical determination in English particle verbs (PVs)

Author/s
 Renata GeldUniversity of Zagreb, Croatia
 
 ABSTRACT
 The central aim of this work is to describe semantic determination, i.e., topological vs. lexical determination, by investigating aspects of construal (Langacker 1987) in English PVs with in and out. The paper focuses on L2 processing related to what we might call strategic thinking about linguistic meaning. More specifically, it attempts to demonstrate the following: a) how the nature of verbs affects the overall semantic determination of particle verb constructions, and b) if/how the users of English make sense of particle verbs, and how much they rely on topological/grammatical components in the process of constructing meaning. The results suggest that the nature of verbs does affect the users’ strategic meaning construal – it differs in terms of their tendency towards one of the following types of semantic determination: a) topological, b) lexical, and, c) compositional.

The language of an inanimate narrator

Abstract We show by means of a corpus study that the language used by the inanimate first person narrator in the novel Specht en zoon deviates from what we would expect on the basis of the fact that the narrator is inanimate, but at the same time also differs from the language of a human narrator in the novel De wijde blik on several linguistic dimensions. Whereas the human narrator is associated strongly with action verbs, preferring the Agent role, the inanimate narrator is much more limited to the Experiencer role, predominantly associated with cognition and sensory verbs. Our results show that animacy as a linguistic concept may be refined by taking into account the myriad ways in which an entity’s conceptual animacy may be expressed: we accept the conceptual animacy of the inanimate narrator despite its inability to act on its environment, showing this need not be a requirement for animacy.