Verbal Condition Research Articles

Tense or Aspect?: A Review of Initial Past Tense Marking and Task Conditions for Beginning Classroom Learners of Spanish

This essay contributes to the research on the emergence of tense/aspect morphology by reviewing the results and task conditions of studies supporting either the Aspect Hypothesis (AH) or the Default Past Tense Hypothesis (DPTH) for second language (L2) learners of Spanish. The AH has found that past marking emerges based on inherent aspectual categories (Andersen 1991; Andersen and Shirai 1994), and the DPTH proposes (Salaberry 1999, 2002, 2003, 2008; Salaberry and Ayoun 2005) that beginning learners of Spanish with first language (L1) English initially use perfective past marking as a default tense marker. The present study reviewed the results and task conditions of studies of beginning classroom learners of Spanish with L1 English that support either hypothesis. The review shows that many learners go through a stage of marking preterite regardless of lexical aspect particularly in tasks requiring an explicit focus on forms or in impersonal narratives. On the other hand, beginning learners show prototypical associations of preterite marking with telic predicates in open-ended tasks or personal narratives, and stronger associations of imperfect marking with state verbs especially in personal narratives.

Should pantomime and gesticulation be assessed separately for their comprehensibility in aphasia? A case study

Gesticulation (gestures accompanying speech) and pantomime (gestures in the absence of speech) can each be comprehensible. Little is known about the differences between these two gesture modes in people with aphasia. To discover whether there are differences in the communicative use of gesticulation and pantomime in QH, a person with severe fluent aphasia. QH performed two tasks: naming objects and retelling a story. He did this once in a verbal condition (enabling gesticulation) and once in a pantomime condition. For both conditions, the comprehensibility of gestures was analysed in a forced-choice task by naïve judges. Secondly, a comparison was made between QH and healthy controls for the representation techniques used. Pantomimes produced by QH for naming objects were significantly more comprehensible than chance, whereas his gesticulation was not. For retelling a story the opposite pattern was found. When naming objects QH gesticulated much more than did healthy controls. His pantomimes for this task were simpler than those used by the control group. For retelling a story no differences were found. Although QH did not make full use of each gesture modes' potential, both did contribute to QH's comprehensibility. Crucially, the benefits of each mode differed across tasks. This implies that both gesture modes should be taken into account separately in models of speech and gesture production and in clinical practice for different communicative settings.

Just do it! How performing an action enhances remembering in transient global amnesia

Transient global amnesia (TGA) is a clinical syndrome characterized by the sudden onset of a massive episodic memory deficit that spares other cognitive functions. As such, it provides a unique human amnesia model for testing the enactment effect (i.e., better memory for performed actions than for verbally encoded sentences). Our main aim was to test whether the enactment effect is preserved in TGA patients, both to have a better understanding and to test the robustness of this effect in a massive amnesia.Object-action pairs were encoded under four conditions: verbal, experimenter-performed, and two enacted conditions (self-performed and self-performed with choice). We tested object-action pair retrieval using cued recall (CR) and recognition tasks, and source memory using a free recall task. We also assessed binding, executive functions, short-term memory, episodic memory, anxiety and mood. We run correlations to control for their putative effects on memory for action. Data were collected from 24 patients, 16 of whom were examined during the acute phase and eight the day-after, as well as from 18 healthy controls.The memory performances of the patients in the acute phase improved for both i) the CR score, between the verbal, experimenter-performed and self-performed with choice conditions, and ii) the total recognition score, between the verbal condition and the two enacted conditions. Correlations were found between self-performed task (SPT) enhancement and both the binding and anxiety.In spite of their severely impaired episodic memory, patients with TGA benefit from the enactment effect. These results are discussed in relation to the role of motor components and episodic integration in memory for actions. We suggest that enactment effect can be used in clinical practice and rehabilitation, possible even for patients with a massive memory impairment.

Change of state verbs and result state adjectives in Mandarin Chinese

This paper investigates the derivational relationship between adjectives and verbs in Mandarin Chinese describing related state, change of state (COS) and caused COS meanings. Such paradigms have been observed in various languages to fall into two categories: One in which a word naming a property concept state constitutes the derivational base for the related COS verbs, and another in which a COS verb forms the basis from which the stative word – a ‘result state’ predicate – is derived. I show that in Mandarin, the distinction between morphological paradigms based on property-concept words versus eventive verbs is also found, but the actual derivational relations between verbs and adjectives are influenced by language-particular morphological properties of Mandarin. Specifically, I argue that a gradable property concept adjective systematically alternates to a related COS verb. This alternation, which can be tapped by degree modification and negation contexts, distinguishes adjectives from stative verbs, which do not have consistent COS counterparts, and from underived intransitive COS verbs, which do not have systematic stative counterparts. That is, I show that COS verbs do not lend themselves to the systematic derivation of result state adjectives. Rather, I argue that result state adjectives in Mandarin arise from conceptual-pragmatic factors: The nominal modified by such a result state adjective should be understood as describing a culturally or contextually salient class of entities.

The actual and potential use of gestures for communication in aphasia

Background: Two main conflicting positions exist concerning the relationship of gesture and speech. The first claims that gesture and speech constitute a single bimodal production process that leads to an impairment of both communication channels in the case of aphasia. The second accounts for two independent but tightly coordinated processes with a trade-off relationship of gesture and speech. According to the latter assumption, speakers who have aphasia should be able to compensate for their verbal deficiencies through gesture. Studies provide evidence for both accounts. Furthermore, non-verbal capacities like semantic processing or manual praxis have been shown to influence the gestural performance of speakers who have aphasia.Aims: The first aim of the current study was to clarify the relationship between gesture and speech production in aphasia by exploring how much information speakers with aphasia conveyed by gesture versus speech in narrations. The second aim was to evaluate if these speakers make use of their full communicative potential through gesture. We compared gesture use in a verbal narration with gesture use in a silent condition, where participants were not allowed to speak. Furthermore, the influence of language and non-verbal cognitive capacities on gesture was examined.Methods & Procedures: Sixteen participants with varying degrees of aphasia severity retold short video clips in a verbal and a silent condition. In the latter, participants were asked to retell the stories by exclusively using gestures. Subsequently, healthy speakers judged the comprehensibility of gestures and of the spoken expression in the verbal narration in a forced-choice recognition task. Comprehensibility scores were compared between conditions and influencing linguistic and non-verbal factors were evaluated.Outcomes & Results: In the verbal condition, two participants conveyed more information through gesture than through spoken expression. Furthermore, half of the participants could augment gestural comprehensibility in the silent condition. Communicative efficiency of gesture was predicted by the pantomime-to-command test.Conclusions: Findings support the view that gesture and speech have a trade-off relationship resulting from two separate but tightly coordinated communication channels. Not all participants fully exploited their gestural potential in the verbal condition. Some of them produced more informative gestures in the silent condition, where they had been explicitly asked to solely convey messages through gesture. Among different linguistic and non-verbal tests, pantomime of object use, which is a test of limb apraxia, was the main influencing factor on the comprehensibility of co-speech and speech-replacing gesture.

Quantizing scalar change

This paper provides a new analysis of N-BY-N adverbials that captures their previously unrecognized close connection to verbs of scalar change. After providing a series of arguments that N-BY-N modification requires the VP to provide a scalar interval it can measure, we use this as novel evidence that incremental theme verbs, as well as inherently directed motion and change of state verbs, must make reference to scales. The analysis thus supports a unified scalar account of verbs of variable telicity (e.g., Hay, Kennedy & Levin 1999; Kennedy & Levin 2008; Kennedy 2012). Finally, we show that our analysis avoids empirical problems for previous approaches to these adverbials in both English (Beck & von Stechow 2007; Brasoveanu & Henderson 2009) and Russian (Braginsky & Rothstein 2008).

Lexical learning in mild aphasia: Gesture benefit depends on patholinguistic profile and lesion pattern

Gestures accompany speech and enrich human communication. When aphasia interferes with verbal abilities, gestures become even more relevant, compensating for and/or facilitating verbal communication. However, small-scale clinical studies yielded diverging results with regard to a therapeutic gesture benefit for lexical retrieval. Based on recent functional neuroimaging results, delineating a speech-gesture integration network for lexical learning in healthy adults, we hypothesized that the commonly observed variability may stem from differential patholinguistic profiles in turn depending on lesion pattern. Therefore we used a controlled novel word learning paradigm to probe the impact of gestures on lexical learning, in the lesioned language network.Fourteen patients with chronic left hemispheric lesions and mild residual aphasia learned 30 novel words for manipulable objects over four days. Half of the words were trained with gestures while the other half were trained purely verbally. For the gesture condition, rootwords were visually presented (e.g., Klavier, [piano]), followed by videos of the corresponding gestures and the auditory presentation of the novel words (e.g., /krulo/). Participants had to repeat pseudowords and simultaneously reproduce gestures. In the verbal condition no gesture-video was shown and participants only repeated pseudowords orally.Correlational analyses confirmed that gesture benefit depends on the patholinguistic profile: lesser lexico-semantic impairment correlated with better gesture-enhanced learning. Conversely largely preserved segmental-phonological capabilities correlated with better purely verbal learning. Moreover, structural MRI-analysis disclosed differential lesion patterns, most interestingly suggesting that integrity of the left anterior temporal pole predicted gesture benefit. Thus largely preserved semantic capabilities and relative integrity of a semantic integration network are prerequisites for successful use of the multimodal learning strategy, in which gestures may cause a deeper semantic rooting of the novel word-form. The results tap into theoretical accounts of gestures in lexical learning and suggest an explanation for the diverging effect in therapeutical studies advocating gestures in aphasia rehabilitation.

Progressive Aspect in Nigerian English

This study explores the system of progressive aspect marking in educated adult speakers of Nigerian English (NigE), which has been claimed to differ distinctly from that of other varieties of English. A total of 4,813 progressive constructions drawn from the International Corpus of English (ICE)–Nigeria were analyzed and compared with data from the ICE–Great Britain and previous studies. In addition, the acceptability of progressive constructions was tested in a questionnaire study. The results show both distinct stylistic variation in the use of progressives in NigE and some systematic differences from their use in British English. The corpus-based study further reveals some extended use of the progressive in NigE such as in connection with verbs referring to habitual nonbounded durative activities or stative verbs. Many of these patterns of extended use might be explained by referring to the interplay between aspects of first and second language usage (such as that of Igbo and English). Results from the questionnaire survey suggest that only a subgroup of these extended progressives is considered acceptable by NigE speakers.

When the left hand does not know what the left hand is doing: response mode affects mental rotation of hands

Mentally simulating a movement is known to share temporal and kinematic characteristics with the execution of the same movement, and this is thought to be reflected in the sharing of neural resources between the two activities. A powerful method of implicitly facilitating such mental simulation (or motor imagery) in individuals is to present them with a picture of a hand and ask them to identify its laterality (i.e. left or right). The mental rotation undertaken in order to complete this hand laterality recognition task (HLRT) provides an effective form of motor imagery, and the task has become an influential tool in clinical and experimental studies. However, performance on the task is modified by numerous factors, and there is a suggestion that the method of response demanded by different versions of the task may have a modulating effect. Here, we compared performance on the HLRT when responding verbally or manually in a group of unimpaired right-handed participants. For manual responses, we also compared performance when participants responded unimanually, using the index and middle fingers of their dominant or non-dominant hand. Performance was poorer for the manual compared to the verbal condition both in terms of accuracy and response time. Furthermore, for manual responses, the requirement to make a response with a specific limb selectively disrupted the ability to recognise an image of the corresponding limb. The disruption is considered to reflect difficulty in concurrently planning two actions with the same limb (manual response and mental rotation). Implications for the interpretation of existing and future studies are discussed.

Stage and Individual-level predicates whithin "if" and "when" clauses: what works and what doesn't

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 28.3pt; margin-bottom: 12.0pt; margin-left: 1.0cm; text-align: justify;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt;" lang="EN-US">Clauses headed by <em>if</em> and <em>when</em> are very often considered syntactically and semantically equivalent.  Nevertheless, in this paper we show that the type of predicate has an impact both on the grammaticality and the interpretation of the subordinate clause in Spanish. Theses clauses provide evidence for the proposal that stage-level predicates involve an extra-argument that individual-level predicates lack. Following Kratzer (1995), we assume that this is extra-argument is a spatio-temporal argument. While stage-level predicates in the subordinate clause are perfectly grammatical, individual-level predicates yield to ungrammatical sentences, unless an indefinite or a kind-referring NP is involved.  Kratzer´s Prohibition against vacuous quantification provides a sound account for the asymmetry between the two types of predicates.  In addition, a stative verb in the <em>when</em> clause is grammatical, but it forces an epistemic reading. When both predicates are individual-level predicates in the subordinate and the main clause, the <em>if</em> clause may can take a factual reading while the <em>when</em> clause is ungrammatical unless there is some kind of operator involved through a generic, a kind-referring NP or an indefinite pronoun.</span></p>

The Aspect Marker -Le in Early Child Mandarin

Cross-linguistically, researchers have found a distributional bias of tense/aspect markers in child languages, namely, children initially use past or perfective morphology with telic predicates and use present or progressive morphology with atelic predicates. One attempt to explain this phenomenon is the Prototype Account, which argues that children acquire a linguistic category starting with the prototype of the category and later extend its application to less prototypical cases (Shirai & Andersen 1995). Based on the English data, they argue that children do not distinguish between past/perfective and telicity, which is the prototype for category past and category perfective. This study presents evidence from Mandarin data of two young children, which supports the distributional bias found in the older children in Li (1990), but opposes the Prototype Account given the fact that Mandarin-speaking children do not have a macro-category of past/perfective/telic marked by the perfective -le. The finding argues for (i) a separation between past and perfective/telic and a separation between perfective and telic in child Mandarin, (ii) the necessity to distinguish perfective -le from sentence final le, (iii) the legitimacy to treat Mandarin adjectives as stative verbs, and (iv) the importance to examine verbs appearing in their basic forms without aspect markers.

We’re going through changes: How change of state verbs and arguments combine in scale composition

The role of scalarity has attracted increasing attention in recent analyses of verb-related phenomena such as aspectuality (telicity and durativity) and argument realization. A central issue in this regard is which types of verbs express a scalar change and which do not. There is some agreement that incremental theme verbs do not come with a scale but instead depend on an incremental theme argument which introduces the scale. By contrast, it is assumed that change of state verbs already lexicalize a scale as part of their meaning and may therefore be considered as scalar verbs. In this paper, we tackle the question whether all change of state verbs are scalar in the sense that they fully lexicalize a scale. We argue that a change of state verb can be scalar, even if not all of the scale parameters are lexically specified, and propose a typology of scalar underspecification. We discuss two types of strategies that are applied for the resolution of scalar underspecification: (i) introduction of a missing parameter by the context and (ii) composition with a scale-denoting argument. We focus on the compositional aspects of scale structure and illustrate the interaction between verbs and arguments in building scalar changes.

The semantics of existence

The notion of existence is a very puzzling one philosophically. Often philosophers have appealed to linguistic properties of sentences stating existence. However, the appeal to linguistic intuitions has generally not been systematic and without serious regard of relevant issues in linguistic semantics. This paper has two aims. On the one hand, it will look at statements of existence from a systematic linguistic point of view, in order to try to clarify what the actual semantics of such statements in fact is. On the other hand, it will explore what sort of ontology such statements reflect. The first aim is one of linguistic semantics; the second aim is one of descriptive metaphysics. Philosophically, existence statements appear to reflect the distinction between endurance and perdurance as well as particular notions of abstract states and of kinds. Linguistically, statements of existence involve a particular way of drawing the distinction between eventive and stative verbs and between individual-level and stage-level predicates as well as a particular approach to the semantics of bare plurals and mass nouns.

The expression and conceptualization of motion through space and manner of motion in Arabic and English: A comparative analysis

This paper is a comparative analysis of English and Arabic expressions of motion events using narratives of Chafe’s (1980) Pear Story elicited from native speakers of both languages. The native‐speaker English narratives were elicited by Feiz (2007). A discourse analytic approach is used to examine how speakers of Arabic and English indicate motion through path, manner, and ground. The data consist of 45 elicited oral narratives. The narratives are all based on Chafe’s (1990) Pear Film, which is a 6‐minute film with many characters, but no dialogue. Fifteen of these are in Arabic, fifteen in English by Arabic speakers, and fifteen in English by native English speakers. The findings of this study indicate that Arabic is a verb‐framed language (Talmy, 2007). It has a variety of path verbs such as yadheh “fall,” yamer “pass,” and yenzel “descend.” Furthermore, the stative verb is used frequently in Arabic by all the Arabic speakers to describe a static location (Feiz, 2007). The total number of uses of the stative verb in Arabic is 71 tokens. In addition, the verb yati “come” is used in Arabic to introduce newcomers, as it is in English (Feiz, 2007). However, the use of the manner verbs in Arabic, such as etkhardhaf “tumbles,” is rare. English is considered a typical satellite‐framed language. It has a large number of manner verbs (Slobin, 2003). Some deictic verbs are used with path satellites (e.g., comes along). Manner verbs are also used with path satellites (e.g., climb down and walk back). Multiple path satellites also appear in English (e.g., came down off and climbed back up in).

Analyzing stative dimensional verbs in frames

AbstractIn this paper we discuss the class of stative dimensional verbs. Stative verbs of this type such as German

A Grammar of Konso

Orkaydo’s grammar of the Lowland Cushitic language Konso is a comprehensive and richly examplified description of an important language of interest in a number of ways including absence of a voice contrast, marked nominative case, and an unusually distributed set of subject-person agreement clitics. Highlighted in this review are the subject clitics, adjectival notions expressed through a class of stative verbs, and a rule of glottal stop insertion argued here to result from an analogical not phonological rule.

Redefining Constructio Praegnans: On the Variation between Allative and Locative Expressions in Ancient Greek

In traditional Ancient Greek grammar, the term constructio praegnans refers to an apparent syntactic anomaly whereby the idea of motion is missing from either the verb or the prepositional phrase: a verb that does not express motion is combined with a directional prepositional phrase (e.g., ‘slaughter into a container’) or a motion verb combines with a static prepositional phrase describing a goal of motion (e.g., ‘throw in the fire’). This study explores such usages in the period from Archaic to Classical Greek and argues against treating constructio praegnans as a unitary phenomenon. The seemingly aberrant combinations of the verb’s meaning and the type of prepositional phrase are shown to be motivated by four independent factors: 1) lexical (some individual non-motion verbs select for a directional argument); 2) aspectual (static encoding of endpoints is allowed with perfect participles); 3) the encoding of results with change of state verbs; and 4) the archaic use of static prepositional phrases in directional contexts (the goal argument of a motion verb is described by a static prepositional phrase). The four types of “pregnant” use are paralleled by different phenomena in other languages. Based on statistical analysis, they are also argued to undergo different kinds of diachronic development. Some of these developments, nevertheless, fall into a more general pattern: Ancient Greek gradually moves toward a more consistent use of specialized directional expressions to mark goals of motion, conforming increasingly to the “satellite-framed” type of motion encoding.

How Useful Word Fluency Tasks Will be in the Case of Reduced Working Memory Capacity and Impaired Attention Functions

In the present study, we investigated the Word Fluency Functions when reduced Working Memory (WM) capacity and impaired Attention Functions are recognized. We imposed the Japanese version of the reading span test (RST) and 3 types (category, letter, and verb) of word fluency tasks (WFTs) on 14 patients with attention disorder recognized as reduced WM capacity and 28 normal subjects. In the WFTs, 4 trials with a time limit of 60 s were conducted in each condition. The numbers of words generated in the WFTs were compared between the groups, and the correlation coefficient between the proportion of correctly recalled words in the Japanese RST version and the number of words generated in each WFT was calculated. Comparison of the numbers of generated words between the groups resulted in significantly more words by the normal subjects in all 3 conditions. Regarding the correlation between the proportion of correctly recalled words and number of generated words, a positive correlation was observed in the 3 conditions for normal subjects and category and verb conditions for patients with attention disorder. These results reveal that difference in WM capacity exerts influences on word fluency functions of patients with attention disorder. They also indicate that when using the letter fluency task as an assessment battery for fluency functions of patients with attention disorder, we need to fully consider the relationship between fluency and WM functions.

국어에서의 ‘지금’과 상

In this paper, I attempt to define the semantics of cikum ``now`` in Korean. To define it precisely, we need to look at how it interacts with different aspectual classes of verbs and with the semantics of tenses and aspects. In doing this we need to define the semantics of tenses and aspects. Here we run into the question of whether ess is a tense marker or an aspect marker. I assume that it is ambiguous. There are still cases where it is not clear whether ess is used as a tense marker or an aspect marker in an actual sentence. I discuss two such cases: one in which it is used with verbs like tochakha ``arrive`` which have no salient resulting states, and one in which a state verb is used with cikum-kkaci ``until now``. The semantics of cikum can be defined differently depending on whether ess is a tense or an aspect. By discussing ko iss, which is an imperfect marker, I conclude that cikum means λPλi[u ⊆ i ∧ P(i)], that is, a relation between a set of times which include an utterance time and a set of properties of times.

On-line Changing of Thinking about Words: The Effect of Cognitive Context on Neural Responses to Verb Reading

Activity in frontocentral motor regions is routinely reported when individuals process action words and is often interpreted as the implicit simulation of the word content. We hypothesized that these neural responses are not invariant components of action word processing but are modulated by the context in which they are evoked. Using fMRI, we assessed the relative weight of stimulus features (i.e., the intrinsic semantics of words) and contextual factors, in eliciting word-related sensorimotor activity. Participants silently read action-related and state verbs after performing a mental rotation task engaging either a motor strategy (i.e., referring visual stimuli to their own bodily movements) or a visuospatial strategy. The mental rotation tasks were used to induce, respectively, a motor and a nonmotor "cognitive context" into the following silent reading. Irrespective of the verb category, reading in the motor context, compared with reading in the nonmotor context, increased the activity in the left primary motor cortex, the bilateral premotor cortex, and the right somatosensory cortex. Thus, the cognitive context induced by the preceding motor strategy-based mental rotation modulated word-related sensorimotor responses, possibly reflecting the strategy of referring a word meaning to one's own bodily activity. This pattern, common to action and state verbs, suggests that the context in which words are encountered prevails over the intrinsic semantics of the stimuli in mediating the recruitment of sensorimotor regions.