Simplex Verbs Research Articles

What particle verbs have to do with grammatical aspect in early child English

The current study investigates the relation between aspect and particle verbs in the acquisition of English. Its purpose is to determine whether children associate telicity, as argued in previous studies, or rather perfectivity, which entails completion of a telic situation, with their early particle verb use. The study analyzes naturalistic data of four monolingual children between 1;6 and 3;8 from CHILDES acquiring English as their first language. On the one hand, it finds that children use both –ed and irregular perfective morphology with simplex verbs before particle verbs. They further use imperfective before perfective morphology with particle verbs. These findings suggest that there is no correlation between telic particle verbs and perfective morphology, as would have been predicted on an account which claims that lexical aspect of predicates guides the acquisition of grammatical aspect (Olsen & Weinberg 1999). On the other hand, the study finds that the children’s particle verbs denote telic situations from early on, but not half of them were used to refer to situations that are also completed. This finding questions analyses which claim that, at an initial stage, children will only interpret predicates as telic if they refer to situations that are at the same time completed. Completion information is not necessary for children in order to use particle verbs correctly for telic situations, as would have been predicted on an extended account along the lines of Wagner (2001). As a conclusion, it is suggested that the divergent findings result from a difference in methodology. While restrictions of perfective and imperfective morphology to particular classes of lexical aspect pertain to the production of grammatical aspect morphology, perfective and imperfective viewpoints on situations pertain to the level of interpretation of telic and atelic situations.

The English progressive as picture description

It is a tradition in linguistics to distinguish standard uses and non-standard uses of the English progressive aspect. Although this distinction is important and should be explained by any theory, I would like to question the appropriateness of taking one's starting point in standard uses which, as an inevitable consequence of the approach itself, are described as following directly from the theory and then proceed to the data left to one side in advance, i.e. to the non-standard uses, which are subsequently described in a non-straightforward way. My descriptive strategy takes its point of departure in contrasts posited on the basis of data from child language acquisition. Research shows that English children combine NON-ING-forms with present tense forms of state verbs and ING-forms with present tense forms of activity verbs. This initial system of what I propose to call simplex verbs is named the basic system, which, it is argued, is founded on the perceptual notion of stable and unstable pictures. Later the English child extends the basic system by linking ING-forms to the presentation of a picture of a situation and NON-ING-forms to the presentation of an idea of a situation, thereby creating an extended system of both simplex and so-called complex verbs, where the traditionally recognized standard and non-standarduses are found. In short, the progressive aspect presents the situation named by a verb as being a property of a picture, whereas the non-progressive aspect presents the same situation as being a property of a person or of a thing. From a pragmatic point of view, the former can be said to describe a situation, while the latter can be said to characterize a person or a thing. The theory that results from this strategy diverges from what a purely structural point of view would yield, but, what is more crucial, it is made up of a uniform description of not only subtypes of various context-bound aspect distinctions recognized elsewhere in the literature, but also of otherwise disparate data types left unexplained by more traditional theories. At the same time, the approach itself suggests that there must be what seems to be an important typological contrast between, on the one hand, English aspect that is acquired in the present tense of simplex verbs and, on the other hand, Russian aspect that is acquired in the past tense of complex verbs. The paper is divided into two major parts. The first part (section l– 3) is concerned with verb and situation typology and the second part (section 4–7) with the progressive aspect. Both have an identical structure: first a short examination of existing theories, then criticism, and finally the theory to he proposed. It is important for the reader to bear this overall structure in mind, because concepts which at first seem to be left undefined or only slightly touched upon in the first sections will be defined and dealt with in detail in the final ones.

How difficult are complex verbs? Evidence from German, Dutch and English

Most research on the acquisition of verbs has focused on acquiring the syntactic category verb and on the verb's argument structure. It is assumed that due to their specific syntactic nature verbs are acquired in a different fashion than nouns, and that due to their specific semantic nature verbs do not simply denote activities or situations, but rather package meaning components in a (language-) specific way. This paper refines the problem of acquiring verbs by paying attention to differences in the internal constituency of the verb lexicon in three closely related West Germanic languages - German, Dutch, and English. It is argued that the verb lexicon is not a uniform class but consists of various semantically or morphologically defined subsets, most notably simplex verbs like cover and complex verbs like uncover or cover up. It is shown that while complex verbs do not form an acquisition problem per se, not all (groups of) verbs are acquired in the same fashion and with the same ease. In particular, differences in the acquisition of particle and prefix verbs are discussed as well as differences in the lexical diversity of the verbal subsets in the three languages under investigation

Prädikative Argumente syntaktischer und lexikalischer Köpfe — Zum Status der Partikelverben im Deutschen und Englischen

This article proceeds from the assumption that syntax and morphology are basically distinct components of grammar whose interface is worth studying. Interestingly, when a verb which requires a predicative complement combines with a prepositional stem that is also capable of functioning as an adverb (Germ. weg+laufen; Engl. to run in), the result is formally and semantically indistinguishable as to whether it was formed in the syntax and is therefore a simplex verb with a free adverbal complement or as to whether it is a product of morphological (or lexical) rules and as such represents a complex (particle) verb stem