Specific Verbs Research Articles

An Embodied Account of Argument Structure Development

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt:All information enters the cognitive system through the body. Thus, it is possible that the body—and its morphology—may play a role in structurng knowledge and acquisition. This idea is particularly cogent in the case of verbs, since early learned verbs are about bodily actions and since recent advanc-es in cognitive neuroscience (Pulvermueller, 2005; James and Maouene, 2009) indicate that the neural processing of common verbs activates the brain regions responsible for the specific body parts that perform those actions. Here we provide initial evidence these body-part verb relations may also be related to the argument structures associated with specific verbs. We will conclude that in the same way that verb meaning and argument structure develop out of correlations in linguistic experiences, they may also develop out of correlations in body experiences.

Why some verbs can form a resultative construction while others cannot: Decomposing semantic binding

In this paper it is argued that the occurrence of adjectival resultative constructions in German is grounded on the semantic properties of the verb. The predicting properties can be subsumed under the umbrella concept of semantic binding (SB), which in the case of resultative constructions is the semantic binding of a resultant state (SB-R). It is hypothesized that SB-R is a complex concept which excludes specific verb classes from having a resultant construction and which distributes over a gradual scale of verb classes which vary in the way they can bind additional semantic elements. A regression analysis was applied to a set of seventy-seven German verbs, the criterion variable being SB-R values, and a series of semantic properties as predictor variables. The analysis yielded a model that accurately predicts the SB-R value of each verb and establishes a distinction in six verb classes. The regression model is elaborated in linguistic terms, on the basis of three elementary semantic properties: (1) the time scheme of the verb, (2) the affectedness of the grammatical subject and (3) the affectedness of the object, properties that also play a role in defining transitivity, which can be seen as the SB of an object. The resulting model provides a transparent algorithm for determining the occurrence of adjectival resultative constructions in German.

Reconstructing verb meaning in a second language

This study examines to what extent English speakers of L2 Dutch reconstruct the meanings of placement verbs when moving from a general L1 verb of caused motion (put) to two specific caused posture verbs (zetten/leggen ‘set/lay’) in the L2 and whether the existence of low-frequency cognate forms in the L1 (set/lay) alleviates the reconstruction problem. Evidence from speech and gesture indicates that English speakers have difficulties with the specific verbs in L2 Dutch, initially looking for means to express general caused motion in L1-like fashion through over-generalisation. The gesture data further show that targetlike forms are often used to convey L1-like meaning. However, the differentiated use of zetten for vertical placement and dummy verbs (gaan ‘go’ and doen ‘do’) and intransitive posture verbs (zitten/staan/liggen ‘sit, stand, lie’) for horizontal placement, and a positive correlation between appropriate verb use and target-like gesturing suggest a beginning sensitivity to the semantic parameters of the L2 verbs and possible reconstruction.

Measuring prediction capacity of individual verbs for the identification of protein interactions

Motivation: The identification of events such as protein–protein interactions (PPIs) from the scientific literature is a complex task. One of the reasons is that there is no formal syntax to denote such relations in the scientific literature. Nonetheless, it is important to understand such relational event representations to improve information extraction solutions (e.g., for gene regulatory events). In this study, we analyze publicly available protein interaction corpora (AIMed, BioInfer, BioCreAtIve II) to determine the scope of verbs used to denote protein interactions and to measure their predictive capacity for the identification of PPI events. Our analysis is based on syntactical language patterns. This restriction has the advantage that the verb mention is used as the independent variable in the experiments enabling comparability of results in the usage of the verbs. The initial selection of verbs has been generated from a systematic analysis of the scientific literature and existing corpora for PPIs. We distinguish modifying interactions (MIs) such as posttranslational modifications (PTMs) from non-modifying interactions (NMIs) and assumed that MIs have a higher predictive capacity due to stronger scientific evidence proving the interaction. We found that MIs are less frequent in the corpus but can be extracted at the same precision levels as PPIs. A significant portion of correct PPI reportings in the BioCreAtIve II corpus use the verb “ associate”, which semantically does not prove a relation. The performance of every monitored verb is listed and allows the selection of specific verbs to improve the performance of PPI extraction solutions. Programmatic access to the text processing modules is available online ( www.ebi.ac.uk/webservices/whatizit/info.jsf) and the full analysis of Medline abstracts will be made through the Web pages of the Rebholz group.

A Few Good Words Using Core Vocabulary to Support Nonverbal Students

A Few Good Words Using Core Vocabulary to Support Nonverbal Students

The distribution of French intransitive predicates

This article investigates the distribution of intransitive predicates in French. It argues that within each individual construction, the constraints that govern predicate selection are determined by the necessary semantic compatibility between the participating predicates and the construction itself. This analysis based on the lexical semantics of specific verbs and constructions contrasts with most previous accounts that follow the Unaccusative Hypothesis' claim that predicate distribution follows the specific structure of two distinct classes of intransitives. The local analysis is shown to be preferable to its structural counterpart to describe the behavior of intransitives in three constructions, namely: active impersonals, object raising in the context of the faire 'make' construction, and croire union. Because object raising and croire union are traditionally considered unaccusative diagnostics, the results obtained in this article raise serious questions about the validity of the Unaccusative Hypothesis for French, and suggests a possible alternative methodology to investigate the syntactic behavior of intransitive predicates.

IT 신제품/신기술 용어 사전 구축을 위한 〈NㆍDEVELOP〉 패턴과 부분 문법 그래프 연구

This study aims to describe the linguistic patterns-to extract words of specific domain in the web, concretely for new technologies and new products. The sub-language of IT domain-specific documents can be formalized by the LGG (Local-Grammar Graph) methodology, represented under directed acyclic graphs (DAG), also called Finite-State Automata Graph (FST) and embodied analyzed patterns with Unitex. In this paper, we discuss our approach to describing lexico-syntactic patterns conveying information in texts, present a few LGG graphs constructed for new technologies and product information. For this, we analyzed the Korean IT newspaper JUNJA SINMUN and obtained several specific verbs, for example 'develop', 'launch', etc, to present new technologies and products. We classified these verbs into four types and built a LGG. From this LGG 38,074 patterns were obtained. These patterns can be applied to add unknown terms for new technologies and products to the existing dictionary.

Facilitating research students in formulating qualitative research questions

One of the initial and challenging processes that research students and students undertaking research modules encounter is the formation or appraisal of the research question. Research questions acquire significance as the rigor and validity of the research project rests on the extent to which the conclusions of the study have answered the research question. For qualitative studies the research question acquires even greater significance since the notions of audit trail, which commences from the research question is considered as an indication of a valid or not research. Hence, the formation of a qualitative research question requires to be based on a framework as to have specific content, coherence and structure. The content takes the form of a declarative statement that provides focus on a specific issue, but at the same time allows enough flexibility as for variables to emerge from the data. The coherence should smoothly bridge the philosophical/theoretical propositions of the qualitative paradigms with the practical execution of the study and this is achieved by the use of specific verbs, nouns and phrases. Lastly, the structure needs to adequately answer to the who, when, where, what, how and why of the study.

Sentence-frame frequency effects

This study investigates how sentences of subject-verb-object type are comprehended. We adopted a usage-based approach by first selecting a high frequency and a low frequency sentence frame (SF) determined by the same verb, each SF being characterised by its subject and object belonging to some semantic categories for a specific verb. It was observed in Experiment 1 that the time of comprehending the verb and activating its specific sense through accessing the subject-object semantic features is a significant component of the total sentence comprehension time. Experiment 2 validated the definition of SF frequency by observing SF repetition effects without repetitions of any surface constituents, as long as the subject-object pairs for each verb are characterised by specific semantic features. It may further be concluded that it is not syntactic structure frequency, but sentence frame frequency that is critical in the reading of sentences.

The trouble with nouns and verbs in Greek fluent aphasia

In the past verb retrieval problems were associated primarily with agrammatism and noun retrieval difficulties with fluent aphasia. With regards to fluent aphasia, so far in the literature, three distinct patterns of verb/noun dissociations have been described for individuals with fluent anomic aphasia in languages with different underlying forms; better verb retrieval, poorer verb retrieval and equal retrieval difficulties for verbs and nouns. Verbs and nouns in Greek are considered of similar morphological complexity thus it was predicted that anomic aphasic individuals would suffer from a non-dissociated impairment of verbs and nouns. Problems with verbs and/or nouns may arise at any stage in the process of lexical retrieval, i.e. lexical-semantic, lemma, lexeme or articulation. The aim of this research was to investigate verb and noun retrieval using a picture-naming task to explore any possible selective noun and/or verb comprehension or retrieval deficits in Greek individuals with anomic aphasia. The results revealed a significant verb/noun dichotomy with verbs significantly more difficult to retrieve than nouns. These findings lend support for the growing body of evidence showing a specific verb impairment in fluent anomic individuals as well as Broca's patients. Given the prevailing view, that anomic patients experience difficulty retrieving the morpho-phonological form of the target word, the results show that specific information of the grammatical category is also important during word form retrieval. Learner outcomes: The reader will become familiar with (i) studies investigating grammatical word class breakdown in individuals with aphasia who speak different languages, (ii) the application of the serial model to word production breakdown in aphasia and (iii) the characteristics of verbs and nouns in Greek. It will be concluded that successful verb retrieval for fluent aphasic individuals who speak Greek is dependant on the retrieval of the morpho-phonological information of the target verb.

The linguistic description of minimal social scenarios affects the extent of causal inference making

There is little consensus regarding the circumstances in which people spontaneously generate causal inferences, and in particular whether they generate inferences about the causal antecedents or the causal consequences of events. We tested whether people systematically infer causal antecedents or causal consequences to minimal social scenarios by using a continuation methodology. People overwhelmingly produced causal antecedent continuations for descriptions of interpersonal events ( John hugged Mary), but causal consequence continuations to descriptions of transfer events ( John gave a book to Mary). This demonstrates that there is no global cognitive style, but rather inference generation is crucially tied to the input. Further studies examined the role of event unusualness, number of participators, and verb-type on the likelihood of producing a causal antecedent or causal consequence inference. We conclude that inferences are critically guided by the specific verb used.

The deictic nature of the directives in Biblical Hebrew

Biblical Hebrew has three specific verb forms for performing directive speech-acts such as commands and requests. Hebraists (e.g., Bendavid 1967) observe that two other forms are also used for this purpose, in addition to other uses. In Hatav (1997), I show that those two forms are general modals, which may be used for any kind of modality, including directives. Complying with Grice’s (1975) cooperative rule, I argue in this paper, a biblical character would prefer the specific forms to perform directives. However, I show that the specific forms are deictic in nature, and can be used only when the speech-time functions as the reference-time of the utterance. In case of another reference-time, the speaker must resort to the general modals.

Agent Focus in Mayan Languages

A subset of the Mayan languages makes use of a specific verb form if the subject of a transitive verb is to be focused, questioned or relativized; this form, which renders the verb morphologically intransitive, though semantically transitive, is called ‘agent focus’ among Mayanists. The respective Mayan languages differ in the morphosyntactic implementation of agent focus, i.e. the agreement patterns, the marking of the internal argument and the contexts in which agent focus occurs. The goal of this paper is to provide a lexical approach that accounts for the cross-Mayan variation by means of a small set of faithfulness and markedness constraints. It is proposed that the agent focus marker emerged as a means of disambiguation (by Bidirectional Optimization) and was grammaticalized, thus extending it to contexts where it is not needed and is even counterproductive in terms of the visibility of the arguments’ φ-features (person and number).

Typology of heavy and light again or the eternal return of the same

This paper investigates the expression of preceded events in a sample of 100 languages from all continents in parallel texts. A distinction is made between heavy ‘again’ expressions (such as English again; emphatic, occurring in all languages) and light ‘again’ expressions (such as English re-; non-emphatic, occurring only in some languages). Light ‘again’ expressions develop at least partly from heavy ‘again’ expressions by means of rhetorical devaluation and are generally found to show lexical collocations with specific verbs, even if their degree of lexicalization strongly varies cross-linguistically.

Noun and verb processing in Greek–English bilingual individuals with anomic aphasia and the effect of instrumentality and verb–noun name relation

Noun and verb comprehension and production was investigated in two groups of late bilingual, Greek–English speakers: individuals with anomic aphasia and a control group of non-brain injured individuals matched for age and gender. There were no significant differences in verb or noun comprehension between the two groups in either language. However, verb and noun production during picture naming was significantly worse in the bilingual individuals with anomic aphasia in both languages, who also showed a specific verb impairment in Greek and English. The potential underlying level of breakdown of the specific verb impairment was further investigation with reference to two specific features of verbs: instrumentality and verb–noun relationship. Additional results revealed a facilitatory effect of Instrumentality in both languages. However, there was no effect of verb–noun name relation in Greek, and a negative effect of verb–noun name relation was observed in English. Lemma retrieval seemed to be intact in this group of bilingual individuals whose main problem seemed to arise during the retrieval of the phonological representation of the target word. This impairment was greater in English. The findings are discussed in terms of three current models of word production.

Working memory, animacy, and verb class in the processing of relative clauses

In three eye-movement monitoring experiments, participants’ working memory capacity was assessed and they read sentences containing subject-extracted and object-extracted relative clauses. In Experiment 1, sentences lacked helpful semantic cues, object-relatives were harder to process than subject relatives, and working memory capacity did not moderate syntactic complexity effects. In Experiments 2 and 3, categorical distinctions between critical nouns provided helpful semantic cues to syntactic structure and interpretation. Experiments 2 and 3 showed that helpful semantic cues reduced or eliminated syntactic complexity effects, and that this reduction was not produced by lexical properties of specific verbs. Further, in Experiment 2 working memory capacity moderated the interaction of syntactic complexity and semantic cues.

Starting at the end: the importance of goals in spatial language

We explored the linguistic encoding of Paths in children between the ages of three and seven, in children with Williams syndrome, and in normal adults, focusing specifically on Source and Goal Paths. The results showed an asymmetry, with Goal Paths regularly and systematically encoded, but Source Paths often omitted. This pattern occurred among all groups and across a broad range of domains including Manner of Motion, Change of Possession, Change of State, and Attachment/Detachment events. It also occurred whether participants spontaneously described events or were asked to use a specific verb that biased them towards a Goal or Source Path (e.g. ‘give’ vs. ‘get’). The results are discussed in terms of non-linguistic foundations of spatial language and the linguistic mapping biases that arise when we describe what we see.

Production of infinitives by 5-year-old children with language-impairment on an elicitation task

The infinitive productions of eight 5-year-old children with specific language impairment (SLI) on an elicited production task were compared with the infinitive productions of 25 3- to 5-year-old children with normally-developing language (NL). The basic infinitive structure itself did not seem to be a problem for these children since all eight of the children with SLI produced infinitival complements with at least five different main verbs. However, other aspects of infinitive sentences which must be learned as a lexical property of specific verbs appeared to present more difficulty for some of the children with SLI. Individual children with SLI showed limited or no subcategorization for ditransitivity (production of both an NP and an infinitival complement) or for infinitives with a lexical complement subject. In contrast to previous reports, only one of the children with SLI omitted the infinitive marker to more than once. Reference errors were consistent with what has previously been reported for NL children.

Role and Position of Scientific Voices: Reported Speech in the Media

The aim of this study is twofold: one, to determine the presence and function of scientific knowledge when it is required by such cases as `mad cow' disease, when the crisis breaks in the press; and two, to explore the role of scientific information through the analysis of quoted speech used by journalists in their discourse. Citation is the most explicit form of inclusion of other-discourse (D2) in one's-discourse (D1). Within the framework of the theory of énonciation (Ducrot's poliphony perspective), in combination with a critical view of discourse, we analyse the following: (1) the identity of agents of reference chosen by journalists; (2) the specific linguistic choices made in the pre-citation segment where the agents are introduced, that is, identification of discourse procedures and use of specific verbs of communication. The study shows the proportion of scientific and non-scientific voices, the different ways of representing science agents in the process of news communication as well as the use of citation by journal writers not just to confer authority and legitimation to their discourse but to set the scene of the conflict. The scientific role is not presented as a decisive social role capable on its own of reassuring public alarm and journalists fail to secure appropriate credibility for the scientific community.

Book Review: Telicity in the Second Language

Slabakova sets off with the goal of presenting a detailed study of second-language (L2) acquisition of English telicity marking by native speakers of Bulgarian. To achieve her goal, Slabakova journeys through a large range of topics such as theories of aspect and theories of SLA, semantic and syntactic treatments of telicity, English and Slavic telicity marking, first-language and L2 acquisition of aspect, and of course her own experimental study of the L2 acquisition of telicity. The upfront proposal is to treat the distinction between English and Slavic realization of aspect as due to a parameter. According to this proposal, aspectual meaning in English is compositional, involving properties of a specific verb plus properties of the direct object that occurs with it. In Slavic languages, by contrast, aspectual interpretation is calculated based only on the properties of the verbal form. The main contribution of Slabakova's book, although not the only one, is the investigation into the access to Universal Grammar theories. To the extent that such matters can best be fared out with the help of language acquisition studies, especially experimental studies, Slabakova has made a significant contribution to the field.