Transitive Clauses Research Articles

Learning to express motion events in English and Korean: The influence of language-specific lexicalization patterns

English and Korean differ in how they lexicalize the components of motion events. English characteristically conflates Motion with Manner, Cause, or Deixis, and expresses Path separately. Korean, in contrast, conflates Motion with Path and elements of Figure and Ground in transitive clauses for caused Motion, but conflates motion with Deixis and spells out Path and Manner separately in intransitive clauses for spontaneous motion. Children learning English and Korean show sensitivity to language-specific patterns in the way they talk about motion from as early as 17–20 months. For example, learners of English quickly generalize their earliest spatial words — Path particles like up, down, and in — to both spontaneous and caused changes of location and, for up and down, to posture changes, while learners of Korean keep words for spontaneous and caused motion strictly separate and use different words for vertical changes of location and posture changes. These findings challenge the widespread view that children initially map spatial words directly to nonlinguistic spatial concepts, and suggest that they are influenced by the semantic organization of their language virtually from the beginning. We discuss how input and cognition may interact in the early phases of learning to talk about space.

Distribution and function of word order variation in Brazilian Portuguese

The paper examines word order variation in spoken Brazilian Portuguese. It is first shown that arguments of transitive clauses have fixed word order. Attention is then paid to intransitive clauses, whose single arguments may alternate between pre-verbal and post-verbal position. The analysis demonstrates that Presentative/Existential clauses take categorically post-verbal arguments. This grammaticization seems to be highly functionally motivated, since these clauses introduce new information into the discourse. For other types of intransitive clauses, alternation between pre-verbal and post-verbal position could not only be related to information flow (new vs. given), but also to other discourse factors such as persistence, distance of previous mention, as well as to semantic factors (animacy vs. inanimacy, semantic frame).

Different-Level Tense Markers in Guaraní

Previous articleNext article No AccessThree Guarani LanguagesDifferent-Level Tense Markers in GuaraníHarry RosbottomHarry Rosbottom Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by International Journal of American Linguistics Volume 27, Number 4Oct., 1961 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/464656 Views: 4Total views on this site Citations: 1Citations are reported from Crossref PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:Joseph E. Grimes Descriptive Linguistics, (Jan 1977): 55–62.https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4757-1562-0_3