Transitive Sentences Research Articles

Why Are Verbs So Hard to Remember? Effects of Semantic Context on Memory for Verbs and Nouns.

Three experiments test the theory that verb meanings are more malleable than noun meanings in different semantic contexts, making a previously seen verb difficult to remember when it appears in a new semantic context. Experiment 1 revealed that changing the direct object noun in a transitive sentence reduced recognition of a previously seen verb, whereas changing the verb had little impact on noun recognition. Experiment 2 revealed that verbs exhibited context effects more similar to those shown by superordinate nouns rather than basic-level nouns. Experiment 3 demonstrated that the degree of meaning change in a target word resulting from changes in semantic context influenced the magnitude of context effects, but context effects remained larger for verbs than for nouns even when the degree of meaning change was similar for nouns and verbs. These results are discussed with respect to the imageability and grammatical roles played by nouns and verbs in a sentence.

Transitivity, Space, and Hand: The Spatial Grounding of Syntax.

Previous research has linked the concept of number and other ordinal series to space via a spatially oriented mental number line. In addition, it has been shown that in visual scene recognition and production, speakers of a language with a left-to-right orthography respond faster to and tend to draw images in which the agent of an action is located to the left of the patient. In this study, we aim to bridge these two lines of research by employing a novel method that measures the spatial bias produced by transitive sentences that use a wide variety of abstract and concrete verbs. Across four experiments, participants read sentences and then responded to probe words appearing on either the left or right sides of the screen. Probe words consisted of agents, patients, other words in the sentence, or newly encountered words. We found consistent lateral biases to responding to agents and patients, which appears to be independent of order of mention in the sentence but which does reflect a correspondence between position in the sentence and role in the causal sequence of the action. Our results also show that this spatial bias is driven by the use of the hands in two different ways: The left hand shows a greater sensitivity to the spatial effect than the right hand, and vocal responses produce no spatial effect.

The Plural Marker in Kove, an Oceanic Language of Papua New Guinea

Kove, an Oceanic language of Papua New Guinea, has a nominative-accusative case system: the subject pronoun in both intransitive and transitive sentences is the same in form, but the object pronoun is different. In a Kove verb phrase, the verb is obligatorily prefixed by a subject pronominal form. In addition, if a verb is transitive, the direct object appears after the verb.

Verbos aspectuais: alternância argumental

In the present research article we present an analysis of the syntactic argument alternation which occurs with the so-called aspectual verbs or aspectualizers. These items occur in two types of sentence, transitive or intransitive, which can be exemplified by pairs of sentences such as a professora comecou a aula ‘the teacher started the class’/ a aula comecou ‘the class started’. First of all, we argue that this alternation is not the causativeinchoative alternation, which occurs with change of state verbs, such as quebrar ‘break’ (o ladrao quebrou o vidro da porta ‘the thief broke the door glass’/o vidro da porta quebrou ‘the door glass broke’). We show how the analyzed phenomenon can be distinguished from the causative-inchoative alternation and we present pieces of evidence to support our claim. In what follows, we propose, following other authors, that aspectual verbs are operators and monoargumental predicators. In our analysis of the alternation of these items, we propose, then, that these verbs can have a derived transitive form, depending on the semantics of their only argument. As aspectualizers are operators over eventualities, their arguments must necessarily denote an eventuality. If such arguments are also predicates, their arguments will be able to appear in syntax in the subject position of the aspectual verbs, deriving a transitive sentence (just as happens with auxiliaries and raising verbs). Thus, we conclude that the argument alternation at stake is not an argument alternation of the aspectual verb per se, but an argument alternation of the embedded predicate, the argument of the aspectual verb.

Semantic Ambiguity and Syntactic Bootstrapping: The Case of Conjoined-Subject Intransitive Sentences

ABSTRACTWhen learning verb meanings, learners capitalize on universal linguistic correspondences between syntactic and semantic structure. For instance, upon hearing the transitive sentence “the boy is glorping the girl,” 2-year-olds prefer a two-participant event (e.g., a boy making a girl spin) over two simultaneous one-participant events (a boy and a girl separately spinning). However, 2- and 3-year-olds do not consistently show the opposite preference when hearing conjoined-subject intransitive sentences (“the boy and the girl are glorping”). We hypothesized that such difficulties arise in part from the indeterminacy of the mapping between intransitive syntax and events in the world: a conjoined-subject intransitive sentence can be matched by the one-participant event (if “glorp” means “spin”), both events (“play”), or even the two-participant event (“fight”). A preferential looking study provided evidence for this hypothesis: sentences that plausibly block most non-target interpretations for novel verbs (“the boy and the umbrella are glorping”) eliminated the asymmetric difficulty associated with conjoined-subject intransitives. Thus, while conjoined-subject intransitives clearly pose some special challenges for syntax-guided word learning (“syntactic bootstrapping”) by novices (Gertner & Fisher, 2012), children’s difficulties with this sentence type also reflect expected performance in situations of semantic ambiguity. In discussion, we consider the interacting effects of syntactic- and message-level indeterminacy.

Vezljivost glagolov s slovarsko oznako s širokim pomenskim obsegom

Prispevek predstavlja skupino glagolov s slovničnim kvalifikatorskim pojasnilom s širokim pomenskim obsegom (oznaka v SSKJ). Sodeč po označenih leksemih in po njihovem ponazar j alnem gradivu lahko trdimo, da je slovnično kvalifikatorsko pojasnilo s širokim pomenskim obsegom (kar potem velja tudi za pojasnilo z oslabljenim pomenom) izrazito vezljivostna oznaka, kar jo opravičuje ter hkrati opozarja na nujen natančnejši pregled vezljivostnih sposobnosti leksema pred njeno uporabo. Tovrstne širokepomensko-skladenjske vezljivostne zmožnosti, predvsem glagolov, pridevnikov in samostalnikov kot nosilcev vezljivosti ali kot vezljivostnih udeležencev oz. skladenjskih določil upravičijo tudi ločevanje med predlogi kot prostimi glagolskimi morfemi in predlogi kot /ne/obvezno vezavnimi udeleženskimi morfemi (ki v okviru istega leksema vezljivostno precizirajo določen glagolski pomen).

Study about transitive sentence of inanimate subject

Study about transitive sentence of inanimate subject

Word order and information structure in Czech 3- and 4-year-olds’ comprehension

This article reports on an experiment that examined the comprehension of transitive sentences in Czech children and its relationship to case marking, word order and information structure. A total of 107 Czech children aged 2;9–4;5 were tested for comprehension of noun-verb-noun sentences in which word order and given-new status of individual nouns were manipulated. The results confirmed that noncanonical, object-initial sentences are generally more difficult to comprehend than sentences with the standard word order, but that many children can interpret noncanonical sentences before 4 years of age. Information structure did not have any clear effect on sentence comprehension. Overall, the results indicate that children have some abstract knowledge of word order and case marking when they first show evidence of transitive sentence comprehension, but initially they cannot use this knowledge when word order and case marking signal conflicting interpretations. Information structure is not a major factor in early sentence comprehension.

Lexical activation effects on children's sentence planning and production

ABSTRACTWe investigated the relationship between lexical activation and syntactic planning in children's sentences. Four- and 7-year-old children described transitive scenes following patient-related prime pictures and control pictures. We examined syntactic choices, and compared onset latency, sentence length, and dysfluency rates for active transitive sentences in the two conditions. Early activation of the patient in the primed condition did not lead to the production of patient-subject sentences, but it did have consequences for active transitive sentence production. Namely, onset latencies were longer and sentences were shorter in the primed condition. Dysfluency rates did not differ between the two conditions. Correlation analyses revealed a stronger pattern of association between working memory scores and language variables in the patient-primed condition. The results indicate that conflicts between lexical activation order and syntactic plans are a source of processing difficulty during children's sentence production.

Animacy-based predictions in language comprehension are robust: Contextual cues modulate but do not nullify them

Couldn׳t a humble coconut hurt a gardener? At least in the first instance, the brain seems to assume that it should not: we perceive inanimate entities such as coconuts as poor event instigators (“Actors”). Ideally, entities causing a change in another entity should be animate and this assumption not only influences event perception but also carries over to language comprehension. We present three auditory event-related brain potential (ERP) studies on the processing of inanimate and animate subjects and objects in simple transitive sentences in Tamil. ERP responses were measured at the second argument (event participant) in all three studies. Experiment 1 employed all possible animacy combinations of Actors and Undergoers (affected participants) in Actor- and Undergoer-initial verb-final orders. Experiments 2 and 3 employed a fairly novel context design that enabled us to compare ERPs evoked by identical auditory material to differing contextual expectations: Experiment 2 focussed on constructions in which an inanimate Actor acts upon an inanimate Undergoer, whereas Experiment 3 examined whether and how a preceding context modulates the prediction for an ideal Actor. Results showed an N400 effect when the prediction for an ideal (animate) Actor following an Undergoer was not met, thus further supporting the cross-linguistically robust nature of animacy preferences. In addition, though specific contextual cues that are indicative of a forthcoming non-ideal Actor may reduce this negativity in comparison to when such cues are not available, they nevertheless do not nullify it, suggesting that animacy-based predictions are stronger than contextual cues in online language comprehension.

MAKING STUDENTS MORE ACTIVE IN LEARNING THE PASSIVE

Why are students of English so reluctant to use the passive voice? The answer to this question may lie in the fact that students find it artificial, even pretentious, partly because it really does tend to be overtly wordy and cumbersome. Moreover, a point often overlooked is that the Croatian language “favours” the active structure as more natural both in informal and formal discourse, which is why students often find it difficult to adopt the passive voice as characteristic of the English language. Also, both for learners of English and native speakers of the language, the passive structure may be felt as contrary to the more common subject-verb-object (or S-O-V) order of syntactic constituents in the transitive sentence, employed profusely in the majority of Indo-European languages. Nonetheless, not only is it expected of the students to appreciate the passive, but also to use it competently. A great deal of academic English courses focus on formal communication; which makes the passive of key importance to understanding the type of language prevalent in EAP. This type of discourse is essential to studying English at university level, in the authors’ case ESP in the field of international relations and diplomacy, where study materials abound with passive structures. The aim of the paper is to show that the passive is fairly simple and easy both to understand and apply in independent production since it follows a set of formulaic instructions with little or no exceptions to the rule. It will look into examples of texts such as newspaper articles, legislation, professional literature, etc., and provide various activities used as a springboard for the acquisition of passive structures.

Cisão morfológica em construções bitransitivas em Nheengatu

In Tupi-Guarani languages, referential hierarchies have proven valuable for analyzing differential patterns of marking objects in transitive sentences (Jensen, 1990) for a comparative view). Unlike other languages of the family, Nheengatu (Amazonian lingual geral) treats speech-acts participants and 3rd person in transitive sentences the same. Nheengatu further differentiates itself by its innovative use of referential hierarchies in the ditranstive constructions: referential effects lead to a split in the form of marking goals/recepients. Additionally, the marking of goals/recepients may also be associated with the expression of purposive modality. This paper describes the patterns used for indicating goals/recepients, and analyzes the syntactic, semantic and pragmatic factors correlated to each of the possible constructions.

Agent-patient similarity affects sentence structure in language production: evidence from subject omissions in Mandarin

Interference effects from semantically similar items are well-known in studies of single word production, where the presence of semantically similar distractor words slows picture naming. This article examines the consequences of this interference in sentence production and tests the hypothesis that in situations of high similarity-based interference, producers are more likely to omit one of the interfering elements than when there is low semantic similarity and thus low interference. This work investigated language production in Mandarin, which allows subject noun phrases to be omitted in discourse contexts in which the subject entity has been previously mentioned in the discourse. We hypothesize that Mandarin speakers omit the subject more often when the subject and the object entities are conceptually similar. A corpus analysis of simple transitive sentences found higher rates of subject omission when both the subject and object were animate (potentially yielding similarity-based interference) than when the subject was animate and object was inanimate. A second study manipulated subject-object animacy in a picture description task and replicated this result: participants omitted the animate subject more often when the object was also animate than when it was inanimate. These results suggest that similarity-based interference affects sentence forms, particularly when the agent of the action is mentioned in the sentence. Alternatives and mechanisms for this effect are discussed.

Syntactic Structures as Descriptions of Sensorimotor Processes

In this paper I propose a hypothesis linking elements of a model of theoretical syntax with neural mechanisms in the domain of sensorimotor processing. The syntactic framework I adopt to express this linking hypothesis is Chomsky’s Minimalism: I propose that the language-independent ’Logical Form’ (LF) of a sentence reporting a concrete episode in the world can be interpreted as a detailed description of the sensorimotor processes involved in apprehending that episode. The hypothesis is motivated by a detailed study of one particular episode, in which an agent grasps a target object. There are striking similarities between the LF structure of transitive sentences describing this episode and the structure of the sensorimotor processes through which it is apprehended by an observer. The neural interpretation of Minimalist LF structure allows it to incorporate insights from empiricist accounts of syntax, relating to sentence processing and to the learning of syntactic constructions.

Argument Structure of Transitive Sentence in Toba Batak Language*

The objective of the research is to describe the argument structure of transitive sentence (ASTS) in Toba Batak Language (TBL). The data is analyzed by distributional method as suggested by Soedaryanto (1993) and Mahsun (2011). With the use of the oral and written data, as well as the observation method, this research has found that the argument structure of indirect object is placed preceding the verb and argument structure of direct object which becomes the subject itself, is followed by the indirect object. In bi-transitive sentence, there is one oblique argument which is marked by preposition /tu-/. Each of the verb then forms the transitive and bitransitive sentence which are of course marked by different affixes.

Is She Patting Katie? Constraints on Pronominal Reference in 30-Month-Olds

In this study we investigate young children’s knowledge of syntactic constraints on Noun Phrase reference by testing 30-month-olds’ interpretation of two types of transitive sentences. In a preferential looking task, we find that children prefer different interpretations for transitive sentences whose object NP is a name (e.g., She’s patting Katie) as compared with those whose object NP is a reflexive pronoun (e.g., She’s patting herself). They map the former onto an other-directed event (one girl patting another) and the latter onto a self-directed event (one girl patting her own head). These preferences are carried by high-vocabulary children in the sample and suggest that 30-month-olds have begun to distinguish among different types of transitive sentences. Children’s adult-like interpretations are consistent with adherence to Principles A and C of Binding Theory and suggest that further research using the preferential looking procedure to investigate young children’s knowledge of syntactic constraints may be fruitful.

Agentive reflexive clitics and transitive 'se' constructions in Spanish

<p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-top: 0cm; margin-right: 25.15pt; margin-bottom: .0001pt; margin-left: 1.0cm; text-align: justify; text-justify: inter-ideograph;"><span style="font-size: 10.0pt; font-family: "Times New Roman","serif"; mso-fareast-font-family: "ＭＳ 明朝"; mso-fareast-theme-font: minor-fareast; mso-bidi-theme-font: minor-bidi; mso-ansi-language: EN-GB; mso-fareast-language: EN-US; mso-bidi-language: AR-SA;" lang="EN-GB">This paper investigates the structure of transitive sentences that contain a non-doubling reflexive clitic such as <em>Juan <strong>se </strong>lavó todos los platos</em> and <em>María <strong>se</strong> leyó un libro</em>. Though these are traditionally labelled unselected (non-core) agreeing datives or aspectual datives, I argue that this label obscures a relevant difference between two classes of constructions. <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">agentive reflexive clitic</span> (= ARC) constructions are characterized by a uniform set of effects on the external argument (= it must be an agent) and the aspectual interpretation of the VP (= it must be an accomplishment). On the other hand, <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">transitive se clitic</span> (= TSC) constructions do not impose any type of uniform restrictions on the kind of external argument they take or on the aspectual interpretation of the VP. I propose that the difference between these two constructions may be captured by treating <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">se </span>in the ARC construction as the realization of a special <em>v</em><sub>DO</sub> head, based on an idea in Folli & Harley (2005), while <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">se</span> in the TSC construction is generated in the complement position of the verb and incorporates into V, forming a complex predicate, following work by De Cuyper (2006), MacDonald (2004, 2008) and MacDonald & Huidobro (2010). It is shown that many of the empirical and theoretical disagreements that plague the literature on the role of non-doubling <span style="font-variant: small-caps;">se</span> in transitive sentences have a simple solution given the new division established here</span></p>

Word order, referential expression, and case cues to the acquisition of transitive sentences in Italian

In Study 1 we analyzed Italian child-directed-speech (CDS) and selected the three most frequent active transitive sentence frames used with overt subjects. In Study 2 we experimentally investigated how Italian-speaking children aged 2;6, 3;6, and 4;6 comprehended these orders with novel verbs when the cues of animacy, gender, and subject-verb agreement were neutralized. For each trial, children chose between two videos (e.g., horse acting on cat versus cat acting on horse), both involving the same action. The children aged 2;6 comprehended S + object-pronoun + V (soprov) significantly better than S + V + object-noun (svonoun ). We explain this in terms of cue collaboration between a low cost cue (case) and the first argument = agent cue which we found to be reliable 76% of the time. The most difficult word order for all age groups was the object-pronoun + V + S (oprovs). We ascribe this difficulty to cue conflict between the two most frequent transitive frames found in CDS, namely V + object-noun and object-pronoun + V.

It takes two to kiss, but does it take three to give a kiss? Categorization based on thematic roles

Language is characterised by broad and predictable mappings between meaning and syntactic form. Transitive sentences typically encode two-participant events while ditransitives typically encode three-participant events. Light-verb constructions, however, systematically violate these mappings; for example, some have ditransitive syntax (‘Romeo is giving Juliet a kiss’) but describe what appear to be agent–patient events (Romeo kissing Juliet). We used a conceptual sorting task to explore whether this non-canonical mapping influenced the interpretation of these sentences. Participants were trained to sort events by the number of thematic roles they encoded. After a training phase with only pictures, they sorted a mix of pictures and written sentences, including transitive agent–patient sentences, ditransitive source–theme–goal sentences and ditransitive light-verb constructions. Events described by light-verb constructions were most often grouped with agent–patient events but were sometimes grouped with source–theme–goal events. A control condition using the transitive/intransitive alternation for joint action verbs (e.g., ‘meet’) demonstrates that this is not attributable to misconstruing the task as syntactic sorting. We conclude that non-canonical mappings between meaning and form can affect event construal, but syntactic form does not solely determine the construal that is chosen.

Lexical activation during sentence comprehension in adolescents with history of Specific Language Impairment

One remarkable characteristic of speech comprehension in typically developing (TD) children and adults is the speed with which the listener can integrate information across multiple lexical items to anticipate upcoming referents. Although children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) show lexical deficits (Sheng & McGregor, 2010) and slower speed of processing (Leonard et al., 2007), relatively little is known about how these deficits manifest in real-time sentence comprehension. In this study, we examine lexical activation in the comprehension of simple transitive sentences in adolescents with a history of SLI and age-matched, TD peers. Participants listened to sentences that consisted of the form, Article-Agent-Action-Article-Theme, (e.g., The pirate chases the ship) while viewing pictures of four objects that varied in their relationship to the Agent and Action of the sentence (e.g., Target, Agent-Related, Action-Related, and Unrelated). Adolescents with SLI were as fast as their TD peers to fixate on the sentence's final item (the Target) but differed in their post-action onset visual fixations to the Action-Related item. Additional exploratory analyses of the spatial distribution of their visual fixations revealed that the SLI group had a qualitatively different pattern of fixations to object images than did the control group. The findings indicate that adolescents with SLI integrate lexical information across words to anticipate likely or expected meanings with the same relative fluency and speed as do their TD peers. However, the failure of the SLI group to show increased fixations to Action-Related items after the onset of the action suggests lexical integration deficits that result in failure to consider alternate sentence interpretations.Learning outcomes: As a result of this paper, the reader will be able to describe several benefits of using eye-tracking methods to study populations with language disorders. They should also recognize several potential explanations for lexical deficits in SLI, including possible reduced speed of processing, and degraded lexical representations. Finally, they should recall the main outcomes of this study, including that adolescents with SLI show different timing and location of eye-fixations while interpreting sentences than their age-matched peers.