Verb Types Research Articles

Alternation in the Mandarin disposal constructions: quantifying their evolutionary dynamics across twelve centuries

AbstractDespite extensive research on theba-construction in Chinese, the diachronic change in the alternation between thebaandjiangconstructions has received little attention. The present study takes a multifactorial approach to examine the factors that probabilistically condition the alternation based on diachronic data across twelve centuries. The results suggest two general trends. First, the odds of theba-construction have increased over time at the expense of thejiang-construction. Second, over time, the effect size of the significant preference for thejiang-construction in informal genres has reduced from the 10th to the 19th century, and this preference has disappeared in modern times; accordingly, both informal and formal genres have converged to favor theba-construction in modern times. Regression modeling also shows that there are both stable linguistic constraints (parallelism/syntactic priming, verb type, NP2 animacy, and NP2 length) and fluid constraints (adjunct semantics, and genre). This study advances our knowledge of the two disposal constructions and their evolution, sheds light on the Principle of No Synonymy (Bolinger, Dwight. 1977.Meaning and form. New York: Longman; Goldberg, Adele E. 1995.Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press; Goldberg, Adele E. 2002. Surface generalizations: An alternative to alternations.Cognitive Linguistics13(4). 327–356), and makes a methodological contribution to the empirical testing of hypotheses. It can also provide insight into grammatical alternations in Mandarin.

Exploring early syntactic generalisation: evidence from a growth curve analysis of Spanish "se" constructions.

Children's early grammatical constructions, e.g., SVO, exhibit a learning curve with cumulative verb types (CVT) increasing exponentially. According to Ninio (2006), the fact that learning curves, though nonlinear, can be modelled by a continuous regression suggests instant generalisation. Moreover, differences in initial verbs across children indicate minimal involvement of semantics. This study tested these claims on the Spanish "se" constructions (SSCs) in two children, Juan and Lucía (Aguado-Orea & Pine, 2015). Ninio's findings were replicated. Nonetheless, exploratory analyses indicated that curves are driven by the temporal distribution of tokens (instances of the SSC irrespective of verb type) and therefore may reflect non-productivity-related mechanisms, e.g., retrieval-based learning. Furthermore, hapax verbs were relatively late to emerge in the children's data, suggesting emergent generalisation. Analyses of raw lexical frequencies indicated relative semantic homogeneity across the two children's verb types, suggesting a semantic prototype. Nonetheless, ecological factors may also explain these lexical similarities.

Ce qui se cache derrière un nom de famille: les biais de genre en français

This article presents a sentence completion task in French, which allows us to measure speakers’ preferences regarding the interpretation of surnames. The results show the weight of a sociolinguistic factor, namely gender bias, which causes speakers to unconsciously transgress the biases imposed by the two semantic types of verb (subject bias and object bias). The participants use all the mechanisms at their disposal to associate a surname with a male rather than a female individual. This shows the existence of a real bias for the masculine in the use of different structures in a language, and more generally, the link that exists between language and social prejudice. As our study replicates the same results for French as those observed for English, we can put forward the hypothesis that this bias is not specific to one language, but rather a general trend that manifests itself across languages. This study should be continued in other languages to validate our hypothesis.

SINONIM DAN ANTONIM DALAM BAHASA NIAS UTARA DIALEK BARAT DI DESA ONOLIMBU YÖU KECAMATAN MANDREHE BARAT KABUPATEN NIAS BARAT

This research was motivated by the use of synonymous and antonymous word in the west dialect of the North Nias language in Onolimbu You village. This research aims to 1) describe the use of synonymous verbs (synonims with the same meaning and almost the same meaning) in the west dialect of the North Nias language in Onolimbu You village, West Mandrehe District, West Nias Regency and 2) describe of the use of the west dialect of the North Nias language verb antonymous in Onolimbu You village, West Mandrehe District, West Nias Regency. This type of research is descriptive qualitative research. The object of this research in the Onolimbu You village community. The research instrument was carried out by researchers. The data collection technique used by researchers is semi-structured interview techniques. The data analysis technique was carried out by following the data collection steps, namely the data reduction stage, the data presentation stage and the data verification stage. Checking the validity of the data used by researchers technique triangulation and source triangulation. The results of the research show that there are synonymous and antonymous verb in Onolimbu You village. There are two types of synonymous verb, namely synonymous with the same meaning and synonyms with almost the same meaning. The suggestions put forward by researchers are 1) for students to carry out further research both in the field studied and other fields to develop knowledge of the Nias language, 2) For parents to continue to implement policies for the younger generation so that they continue to preserve the Nias language.

The Use of Linguistic Signals in English Researches: Myanmar University Context

Researchers employ key interactional devices such as hedges and boostersexpressing their believability and degrees of commitment to opinions andclaims and adjusting the truth-value of the knowledge. The aim of theresearch was to explore the contributions of hedges and boosters, categoryof metadiscoursal markers in rhetorical sections (Findings, Discussion, andConclusion) of researches from the Journal of the Myanmar Academy ofArts and Science Vol. XVIII, No.7. The objectives intended to analyze thesignificant use of hedges and boosters in the selected English researches andto investigate what category of overall occurrences of hedge and booster isdominantly employed in the researches. The quantitative research design isused to uncover the writers’ attitude to the result of research articles withthe contribution of two linguistic signals- hedges and boosters- in academicresearch. The theoretical concept of Holmes’ (1988) classification, expression of doubt, and certainty focused on types of modal verbs, lexicalverbs, adverbs, adjectives, and nouns. Findings revealed that the occurrenceof hedges in rhetorical sections of researches 1, 2, 3, and 4 is significantlyhigher than the use of a booster. However, the occurrence of hedges used inRA 5 is the same number of boosters. The use of lexical verb and the modalverb is significantly higher than other devices of overall occurrences in theselected researches. This study makes a contribution to the use of linguisticsignals in writing academic papers in the Myanmar universities context.

Extending Heidinger’s corpus research of French and Spanish change-of-state verbs

Italian verbs participating in the causative/anticausative alternation encode the alternants in two ways. The causative and the anticausative alternant may have a marked or an unmarked variant depending on the verb type. The aim of this research is to extend to Italian Heidinger’s (2015) corpus study, which shows that the encoding of the alternants is related to the causalness of the verbs, i.e. the quantitative relation between the causative and the anticausative use. Heidinger’s research is based on a sample of 20 French and 20 Spanish verbs. The author states that, in both languages, verbs used more often as causatives than as anticausatives have a high degree of causalness, while verbs used more often as anticausatives than as causatives have a low degree of causalness. The present research assesses a sample of 22 Italian psych verbs which participate in the causative/anticausative alternation. I will show that Italian verbs with a high degree of causalness tend to form unmarked causatives and marked anticausatives,, while verbs with a low degree of causalness tend to form marked causatives and unmarked anticausatives.

Extending Heidinger’s corpus research of French and Spanish change-of-state verbs

Italian verbs participating in the causative/anticausative alternation encode the alternants in two ways. The causative and the anticausative alternant may have a marked or an unmarked variant depending on the verb type. The aim of this research is to extend to Italian Heidinger’s (2015) corpus study, which shows that the encoding of the alternants is related to the causalness of the verbs, i.e. the quantitative relation between the causative and the anticausative use. Heidinger’s research is based on a sample of 20 French and 20 Spanish verbs. The author states that, in both languages, verbs used more often as causatives than as anticausatives have a high degree of causalness, while verbs used more often as anticausatives than as causatives have a low degree of causalness. The present research assesses a sample of 22 Italian psych verbs which participate in the causative/anticausative alternation. I will show that Italian verbs with a high degree of causalness tend to form unmarked causatives and marked anticausatives,, while verbs with a low degree of causalness tend to form marked causatives and unmarked anticausatives.

Motion Verbs in Italian and the Manner/Direction Complementarity

This paper presents an empirical analysis of Italian directed motion verbs and manner of motion verbs; the research is based on a lexical resource of 234 verbs subdivided into six classes. Directed motion verbs are analysed according to their argument structure and to the type of path PP they take: both source and goal PPs, only source PPs or only goal PPs. Furthermore, I have highlighted how the morphological, distributional and semantic properties of these verbs have an impact on their argument structure.Manner of motion verbs are analysed according to their unaccusative/unergative structure and on the semantic components they entail: only Manner or Manner and Direction. Analysis of the data shows that the semantics of both types of motion verbs depends in many cases on the distributional context in which they occur. As a result, it is not always an easy task to generalize the semantic components the verbs lexicalize. The Italian data also show that, contrary to the hypothesis proposed by Rappaport Hovav & Levin (2010) and Levin & Rappaport Hovav (2013) on the opposition between manner and direction, a subset of Italian motion verbs encodes both manner and direction. Moreover, the Italian lexicon shows an abundance of manner of motion verbs that can resort to a satellite-framed strategy, suggesting that the clearcut opposition between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages claimed in Talmy (1985) boils down to a tendency.

Assessment of sentence sophistication in L2 spoken production: Expansion of verbs and argument structure constructions

Despite the vast body of literature concerning automatic analyses of L2 production, there is limited research on L2 spoken production. Furthermore, investigations into L2 sentence production abilities have predominantly been centered around sentence length. To provide more sophisticated descriptions of L2 syntactic sophistication, this study examines the validity of using the expansion of verbs and constructions as an index of L2 oral production abilities, drawing upon the principles of usage-based approaches to language development. Employing natural language processing tools, we analyzed 790 speech samples produced by L2 English learners using frequency-based and construction-focused indices to assess their predictive validity in relation to the learners’ speaking proficiency. Our findings revealed that advanced L2 learners tend to exhibit an increased use of diverse construction types and a wider range of verb types within each construction. Notably, among the individual construction types observed, the transitive and there-expletive constructions exerted the most substantial influence on the variance in speaking proficiency. These findings suggest a close relationship between the development of verbs and constructions in the spoken domain and factors related to language usage. The results provide an opportunity to evaluate L2 sentence production skills in speaking within the theoretical framework of usage-based approaches.

Non-Pronominal Intransitive Verb Variants with Property Interpretation: A Characterization

In this paper, we study a syntactic construction that has received little attention in the study of Spanish grammar (La masa de pizza congela perfectamente, ‘Pizza dough freezes perfectly’). It is characterized by the presence of a verb in a non-pronominal intransitive variant, with property interpretation. This construction is related to mediopassive sentences or generic middles (Las camisas de algodón se lavan fácilmente, ‘Cotton shirts wash easily’), as well as to the anticausative construction (La camisa se secó al sol, ‘The shirt dried in the sun’), a relationship that has not always been highlighted in previous studies, which are usually based on a short list of verbs. Taking as a point of departure both the verbal classification found in ADESSE and data from Corpus del Español: Web/Dialects, the construction under study is described, paying special attention to the types of verbs found in it in order to check if they coincide with the verbs found in mediopassive sentences or the anticausative construction. In addition, our study provides new data on the linguistic factors (presence of a manner adverb or other modifiers, negation), as well as on the extralinguistic factors (type of text, geographical distribution) involved in this phenomenon.

Algumas notas sobre a quantificação de Degree Achievements em Português Europeu

The present investigation addresses the quantification of Degree Achievements (DAs) in European Portuguese (EP). DAs have been extensively investigated, as they are mostly deadjectival verbs, which therefore inherit their structure from gradable adjectives. These verbs have the special feature of allowing ambiguous readings regarding the telicity of the event projected by the verb: either telic or atelic. Since they derive from gradable adjectives, DAs have typically been considered, in the literature, gradable predicates, which allows us to question whether or not this type of verb can be quantified. Thus, the present work intends to verify the compatibility of this type of verbs with the EP quantifiers muito (‘very’) and pouco (‘little’). Taking into consideration the research by Quadros Gomes (2011a, 2011b) on the modification of gradable adjectives by muito (‘much/very’) and bem (‘well’) in Brazilian Portuguese (BP), we aim to understand how these quantifiers will act on DAs particularly in what concerns their basic scalar structure (open-scale and closed-scale DAs) and the final readings available for each case: telic, atelic or both. The results show that the type of scale does not influence the final reading, since none of the analysed DAs induces a telic reading (i.e., the attaining of a maximum degree, contextually defined). In fact, in all the cases, even with closed-scale DAs, the final interpretation is atelic, denoting a process reading. Moreover, in EP, a second reading, concerning the degree of frequency of the eventualities denoted by these verbs (which denotes repetition of the events), seems to be available for most of the analysed examples.

The Reason for Omission of the First Letter of Verb (mitāl alwaw ī)

Objectives: This study aims to examine the opinions of Arab grammarians from the Basra and Kufa linguistic schools regarding the phenomenon of the omission of the first letter of verb (mitāl alwawī) in some patterns, and not deleting it in other patterns, and to interpret this variation by tracing such types of verbs in lingustiv dictionaries.
 Methods: The study employed an inductive approach in tracing the present tense verb with the ‘waw’ root consonant in linguistic dictionaries. In addation, a descriptive-analytical methodology was utilized to describe the forms of the mitāl verb, analyze them, and provide interpretations based on contemporary phonological principles.
 Results:. The deletion of the ‘waw’ from the present tense verb form (يَفْعِلُ) is caused by the heavy phonological sequencing, characterized by the juxtaposition of semi-vowel (y) with the short vowel (ɑ) in the first syllable, alongside the semi-vowel (w) in the first segment and the short vowel (i) in the second segment.
 Conclusions: The study concludes that grammarians' explanations for this issue are different, and that the rationale for the deletion of the ‘waw’ in certain patterns of the present tense (mitāl alwawī) verb is predominantly a phonological defect, stemming from the sonorous weight resulting from phonological sequences within the verb's segments.

The Error of Past Tense Expression in Jackie Chan’s Utterances on Jackie Chan in Conversation

This research aims to identify the incorrect use of past tense by Jackie Chan in giving his first public talk at the Sydney Opera House. In this qualitative research, the researchers applied an observational method that focuses on grammatical errors. In this study, the researchers use a non-participatory technique that focuses on grammatical errors. Meanwhile, in analyzing the data, the method was identification, and the technique was competence in comparing. The researchers took the source from a conversation from Jacky Chan in an interview in Australia on Youtube. Based on the, the errors uttered by the speaker are errors in using the past simple, errors in using clauses and verbs, specifying a particular point or period in the past, and the verb "be". The conclusion is the speaker incorrectly used the appropriate type of verb when speaking in the past tense, the speaker also often uses the wrong type of verb that should be used in telling the past tense, and the use of verb "be".

Expressive Language Profiles in a Clinical Screening Sample of Mandarin-Speaking Preschool Children With Autism Spectrum Disorder.

This cross-sectional study aimed to depict expressive language profiles and clarify lexical-grammatical interrelationships in Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) during the administration of the simplified Chinese Psychoeducational Profile-Third Edition screening. We collected naturalistic language samples from 81 (74 boys, seven girls) 2- to 7-year-old (Mage = 55.6 months, SD = 15.17) Mandarin-speaking children with ASD in clinician-child interactions. The child participants were divided into five age subgroups with 12-month intervals according to their chronological age. Computer-assisted part-of-speech tagging, constituency analysis, and dependency analysis addressed the developmental trajectories of early lexical and grammatical growth in each age subgroup. Significant within-ASD differences were observed in content words, function words, and lexical categories. Nouns and verbs were the predominant lexical categories, while noun types overwhelmed verb types in children over 3 years old. The grammatical development of 5- to 6-year-old Mandarin-speaking children with ASD was better than that of 3- to 4-year-old children. The trends of syntactic structures, grammatical relations, and grammatical complexity in each age group were similar. Mandarin-speaking preschoolers with ASD produce more lexicons with increasing age. They preserve the noun bias as a universal mechanism in early lexical learning. Moreover, their developmental trajectories of grammatical growth were comparable in each age subgroup. In addition, their lexicons and grammar were synchronically developed during early language acquisition.

Experiential constructions in Hindi: the encoding of perceptions and bodily sensations

Abstract In this paper, I offer a description of argument-structure constructions of experiential verbs in Hindi, analyzing their syntactic and semantic properties, with a focus on the encoding of two experiential subdomains: perceptions and bodily sensations, the two most semantically different experiential event types (Luraghi, Silvia. 2020. Experiential verbs in Homeric Greek, a constructional approach (Brill’s Studies in Language, Cognition and Culture 27). Boston: Brill; Malchukov, Andrej L. 2005. Case pattern splits, verb types and construction competition. In Mengistu Amberber & Helen de Hoop (eds.), Perspectives on cognitive science, competition and variation in natural languages, 73–117. Amsterdam: Elsevier; Tsunoda, Tasaku. 2015. The hierarchy of two-place predicates: Its limitations and uses. In Andrej L. Malchukov & Bernard Comrie (eds.), Valency classes in the world’s languages, vol. 2, 1597–1626. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton). I rely on data taken from a corpus consisting of Hindi literary texts of the 20th century, interrogated through Sketch Engine and I follow the approach of Cognitive Construction Grammar (Goldberg, Adele. 1995. Constructions: A construction grammar approach to argument structure. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press; Goldberg, Adele. 2006. Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Hilpert, Martin. 2014. Construction grammar and its applications to English. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press). The paper is structured as follows: Section 1 is an introduction giving the aim of the paper with some remarks on methodological and theoretical issues. Section 2 is a preliminary introduction on the domain of Experience and its encoding strategies. In Section 3, I give some remarks on case in Hindi, and I discuss the semantic–syntactic interplay in the language and the concept of iconicity, which is central in the paper. In Section 4, I present Hindi data and their analysis, focusing firstly on perception verbs (Section 4.1) and then on bodily sensation verbs (Section 4.2). In the last section (Section 5), I draw some conclusions trying to give an account of the type-frequency of each pattern, in order to evaluate the possible semantic constraints of each construction, and I propose a constructionist explanation of the distribution of Hindi argument-structure constructions across the highly variable range of experiential events.

Mapping action naming in patients with gliomas: The influence of transitivity

ObjectivePatients with left perisylvian gliomas might undergo language mapping with nTMS in preparation for awake brain surgery. Action naming is an important addition to the presurgical language mapping protocol. However, it has not yet been determined whether specific action stimuli can influence mapping outcomes in terms of number and/or localisation of induced errors. MethodsWe investigated this question by employing tractography-based nTMS language mapping of the left arcuate fasciculus (AF) with two types of verbs: transitive and intransitive. Data were collected from 22 patients with a left perisylvian glioma. ResultsOur results demonstrated that nTMS induced a higher error rate with transitive rather than intransitive verbs, specifically during stimulation of the posterior temporal terminations of the left AF (transitive error rate: 8.3%; intransitive error rate: 4.8%). The effect was absent when gliomas displaced the temporal terminations of the AF. Also, nTMS triggered a higher number of semantic errors with transitive (vs intransitive) actions during stimulation of the posterior temporal terminations of the AF (semantic error rate – transitives: 3.3%; semantic error rate – intransitives: 0%). ConclusionOur work highlights that clinical outcomes of language mapping with nTMS are affected by the choice of linguistic stimuli. Transitive verbs may be suited to achieve optimal nTMS mapping outcomes in posterior temporal areas of the left AF in this population. Displacement of white matter terminations due to the tumor can affect these results, and semantic errors may indicate core language processes that can be mapped when administering transitive verbs.

Comparative analysis of morphosyntactic rule learning among monolingual, bilingual, and trilingual speakers: a study on Spanish preterite forms

ABSTRACT The research on language acquisition and retention has primarily focused on monolinguals and bilinguals, with comparatively few studies including trilinguals. To address this gap, the current study compares the acquisition and retention of a novel morphosyntactic rule in Spanish in twelve monolinguals, twelve bilinguals, and twelve trilinguals. The participants underwent training on the preterite verb tense in Spanish, and their ability to correctly identify the rule was tested after two days of training. The study also investigated the effect of verb type on the acquisition of novel morphosyntactic rules in monolinguals and multilinguals. The results revealed that all participants performed better during the delayed retention phase than the other phases. However, bilingual participants demonstrated significantly better accuracy in identifying newly learned tense forms than their monolingual and trilingual counterparts. The study also revealed that regular past tense forms were easier to learn than irregular past tense forms. Overall, the findings from this study suggest that individuals who speak more than two languages may face challenges in acquiring additional languages.

La expresión de eventos de movimiento causativos mediante verbos de contacto por impacto en alemán y sus correspondencias en español

Abstract The subject of this article is the expression of causative movement events in German and Spanish. It is hypothesized that, being respectively a satellite frame language and a verbal frame language, it is likely that both differ in the syntactic order with which the semantic material of the aforementioned events is expressed, a question already studied for this pair of languages in the intransitive movement events. It is especially interesting to analyse this possible interlingual difference in statements with types of verbs that cannot necessarily be expected to develop the triargumental scheme of these causative events (agent subject, affected object and dynamic locative complement) due to their basic argument structure. This contribution specifically studies the possible development of these triargumental structures by the so-called verbs of contact by impact. To do this, a one-way contrastive analysis is carried out, from German to Spanish, of a corpus of pairs of statements extracted from the PaGeS corpus. The results certify the existence of the phenomenon in both languages, but also point to important interlingual differences in their productivity.

Linguistic Means of Expressing Epistemic Modality in an English-language Scientific Text

Modality is a complex grammatical and functional-semantic category which is reflected in various types of discourse. The relevance of studying epistemic modality, reflecting the author’s knowledge of the reported information and his/her attitude to it from the point of view of its reliability, is determined by the necessity to analyze the linguistic features of its expression in a scientific text. The aim of the paper is to study morphological, lexical-syntactical and lexical means of expressing modality and to identify their pragmatic functions in English-language texts concerned with engineering. The study of the linguistic component in a scientific text will help foreign researchers present their scientific works in accordance with the authentic features of English. This determines the theoretical significance of studying the author’s means of expressing epistemic modality as a method for reasoning their scientific propositions, interacting with the target reader and expressing academic responsibility. The study of theoretical works by foreign and Russian scientists has shown that epistemic modality of a scientific text implements mainly the properties of the author’s subjective approach. However, unlike other types of discourse, the modality of a scientific text identifies a certain degree of objectivity in the author’s approach since it is characterized by the assessment of the reported information in terms of its reliability/unreliability. The given study assumes that the category of modality of any text, including a scientific one, is difficult to analyze statistically. It is known that the expression of the English text modality is characterized by imperceptible “transitions” between different levels of its implementation. Therefore, the paper considers some linguistic means at the morphological, lexical-syntactical and lexical levels. They include the verbal category of the imperative, subjunctive and presumptive types of mood, infinitive constructions, modal verbs and modal words of various parts of speech with the seme “expectation/assumption”. The article underlines an additional pragmatic aspect of modality means in an English-language scientific text concerned with the need for soft persuasion of the professional community to accept the information presented.

Verbs denoting authorial position: A contrastive Bulgarian-English study of medical research articles

The article addresses the issue of a specific discourse category, that of verbs expressing authorial stance in the context of the medical research article. A contrastive study is performed based on two corpora comprising original medical research articles in Bulgarian and English languages, respectively. All the articles have been excerpted from journals with high impact factors covering almost every field of medicine. All data have been processed with the help of word processing programmes to achieve a high level of accuracy. The paper looks into the most frequently used verbs both in the Bulgarian articles and the English ones. The analysis rests on a division of three types of verbs – factive, non-factive and counterfactive ones. Each of the presented verbs is analyzed in the light of this division supported by a number of exemplar sentences extracted from the corpora. One corollary that could be drawn is the fact that Bulgarian authors refrain to a large extent from expressing categorical disagreements which is not so characteristic of the authors in the English-language medical research articles.