Verb Lexicon Research Articles

Diversity matters: parent input predicts toddler verb production.

The contribution of parent input to children's subsequent expressive verb diversity was explored in twenty typically developing toddlers with small verb lexicons. Child developmental factors and parent input measures (i.e. verb quantity, verb diversity, and verb-related structural cues) at age 1;9 were examined as potential predictors of children's verb production in spontaneous language samples at age 2;3. Parent verb input diversity, rather than input quantity, was the primary input factor contributing to children's subsequent verb diversity. Regression analysis showed that verb diversity in parent input at age 1;9 accounted for 30% of the variance in children's verb production six months later, with children's total vocabulary size at age 1;9 accounting for an additional 16% of the variance. These findings demonstrate the relative contributions of developmental and input factors to individual differences in toddlers' language development and establish the importance of input diversity to verb acquisition.

Effects of verb familiarity on finiteness marking in children with specific language impairment.

Children with specific language impairment (SLI) have known deficits in the verb lexicon and finiteness marking. This study investigated a potential relationship between these 2 variables in children with SLI and 2 control groups considering predictions from 2 different theoretical perspectives, morphosyntactic versus morphophonological. Children with SLI, age-equivalent, and language-equivalent (LE) control children (n=59) completed an experimental sentence imitation task that generated estimates of children's finiteness accuracy under 2 levels of verb familiarity--familiar real verbs versus unfamiliar real verbs--in clausal sites marked for finiteness. Imitations were coded and analyzed for overall accuracy as well as finiteness marking and verb root imitation accuracy. Statistical comparisons revealed that children with SLI did not differ from LE children and were less accurate than age-equivalent children on all dependent variables: overall imitation, finiteness marking imitation, and verb root imitation accuracy. A significant Group×Condition interaction for finiteness marking revealed lower levels of accuracy on unfamiliar verbs for the SLI and LE groups only. Findings indicate a relationship between verb familiarity and finiteness marking in children with SLI and younger controls and help clarify the roles of morphosyntax, verb lexicon, and morphophonology.

Where do all the motion verbs come from?

The last four decades have seen huge progress in the description and analysis of cross-linguistic diversity in the encoding of motion (Talmy 1985, 1991, Slobin 1996, 2004). Comparisons between satellite-framed and verb-framed languages suggest that satellite-framed languages typically have a larger manner of motion verb lexicon (swim, dash), while verb-framed languages typically have a larger path of motion verb lexicon (enter, cross) (Slobin 2004, Verkerk 2013, 2014b). This paper investigates how differences between the motion verb lexicons of satellite-framed and verb-framed languages emerge. Phylogenetic comparative methods adopted from biology and an etymological study are used to investigate manner verb lexicons and path verb lexicons in an Indo-European dataset. I show that manner verbs and path verbs typically have different types of etymological origins and that manner verbs emerge faster in satellite-framed subgroups, while path verbs emerge faster in verb-framed subgroups.

Where have all the verbs gone? On verb stretching and semi-words in Indo-Aryan Palula

The prevalence of complex predicates consisting of a verb component (verbalizer) and a non-verb component (host) is well-known from descriptions of languages in large parts of West and South Asia. Looking particularly at data from the hitherto less-studied Indo-Aryan Palula (Chitral Valley, Pakistan), we will explore their position within the total verb lexicon. Instead of regarding the verbalizers and hosts as building blocks that due to their respective properties license particular argument structures, as has been done in some previous descriptions, I propose that it is the construction as a whole, and its semantics, that assigns case and selects arguments. Rather than seeing a strict dichotomy between verbalizers (also called “light verbs”) used in complex predicates and the corresponding simple verbs, a few highly generic verbs (BECOME, DO, GIVE) seem to be exposed to a high degree of “stretching”. As such they stand as syntactic models – basic argument templates (BAT) – when forming novel complexes, sometimes involving host elements that lack a lexical identity of their own (hence semi-words) in the language as of today.

Verb Based Manipuri Sentiment Analysis

This paper deals about the sentiment analysis of the Manipuri article. The language is very highly agglutinative in Nature. The document files are the letters to the editor of few local daily newspapers. The text is processed for Part of Speech (POS) tagging using Conditional Random Field (CRF). The lexicon of verbs is modified with the sentiment polarity (Positive or Negative or Neutral) manually. With the POS tagger the verbs of each sentence are identified and the modified lexicon of verbs is used to notify the polarity of the sentiment in the sentence. The total number of polarity for each category that is positive, negative and neutral is counted separately. The highest total of the three is the deciding factor of the sentiment polarity of the document. The system shows a recall of 72.10%, a precision of 78.14% and a Fmeasure of 75.00%.

Lexikalizované alternace v češtině*

In this paper, we study specific relations between uses of the same verb lexeme that stem from changes in the linking of situational participants, valency complementations and surface syntactic positions – we refer to them as alternations. The focus is on the types that are expressed by lexical-semantic means and result in changes in valency frames of verbs. Lexicalized alternations can be exemplified by the well-known pair naložit seno na vůz – naložit vůz senem ‘to load hay on the truck – to load the truck with hay’. We present and analyze three basic types of lexicalized alternations in Czech. They may be characterized as either conversive, or non-conversive. The conversive lexicalized alternations represent central ones in the language system and are here referred to as (i) the lexical-semantic conversions (e.g., the locative alternation, the Bearer-Location alternation, Material-Product alternation, spread alternation etc.). On the other hand, the non-conversive alternations are rather peripheral; we can in64 troduce/mention? esp. (ii) different structural expressions of a single situational participant (e.g., vyjit na kopec – vyjit kopec ‘climb up the hill – climb the hill’) and (iii) the structural splitting of a situational participant (e.g., theme-dictum splitting for Czech verbs of communication and mental action). Furthermore, we propose a formal framework that allows us to represent different types of lexicalized alternations in the valency lexicon of Czech verbs, VALLEX. For this purpose, the lexicon is divided into the data component and the rule component. In the data part, each lexical unit of a given lexeme is characterized (primarily) by its valency frame; moreover, a list of applicable lexical alternations is attached to it. Presented in the rule part are general lexical rules specifying changes in the linking of situational participants and valency complementations typical of individual lexicalized alternations.

Semantic Categories in the Domain of Motion Verbs by Adult Speakers of Danish, German, and Turkish

Languages differ in the ways they divide the world. This study applies cluster analysis to understand how and why languages differ in the way they express motion events. It further lays out what the parameters of the structure of the semantic space of motion are, based on data collected from participants who were adult speakers of Danish, German, and Turkish. The participants described 37 video clips depicting a large variety of motion events. The results of the study show that the segmentation of the semantic space displays a great deal of variation across all three groups. Turkish differs from German and Danish with respect to the features used to segment the semantic space – namely by using vector orientation. German and Danish differ greatly with respect to (a) how fine-grained the distinctions made are, and (b) how motion verbs with a common Germanic root are distributed across the semantic space. Consequently, this study illustrates that the parameters applied for categorization by speakers are, to some degree, related to typological membership, in relation to Talmy's typological framework for the expression of motion events. Finally, the study shows that the features applied for categorization differ across languages and that typological membership is not necessarily a predictor of elaboration of the motion verb lexicon.

Infants use known verbs to learn novel nouns: Evidence from 15- and 19-month-olds

Fluent speakers’ representations of verbs include semantic knowledge about the nouns that can serve as their arguments. These “selectional restrictions” of a verb can in principle be recruited to learn the meaning of a novel noun. For example, the sentence He ate the carambola licenses the inference that carambola refers to something edible. We ask whether 15- and 19-month-old infants can recruit their nascent verb lexicon to identify the referents of novel nouns that appear as the verbs’ subjects. We compared infants’ interpretation of a novel noun (e.g., the dax) in two conditions: one in which dax is presented as the subject of animate-selecting construction (e.g., The dax is crying), and the other in which dax is the subject of an animacy-neutral construction (e.g., The dax is right here). Results indicate that by 19months, infants use their representations of known verbs to inform the meaning of a novel noun that appears as its argument.

The correlation between motion event encoding and path verb lexicon size in the Indo-European language family

AbstractThere have been opposing views on the possibility of a relationship between motion event encoding and the size of the path verb lexicon. Özçalışkan (2004) has proposed that verb-framed and satellite-framed languages should approximately have the same number of path verbs, whereas a review of some of the literature suggests that verb-framed languages typically have a bigger path verb lexicon than satelliteframed languages. In this article I demonstrate that evidence for this correlation can be found through phylogenetic comparative analysis of parallel corpus data from twenty Indo-European languages.

Optionality of finiteness: Evidence for a no-overlap stage in Dutch child language

This article addresses a child language stage that has figured prominently in the current debate on children’s early linguistic competence: the Optional Infinitive (OI) stage, a relatively extended period during which children freely alternate between finite and nonfinite structures in contexts where adults only use finite forms. The study examines the assumption of previous research that children’s utterances with finite or nonfinite forms are generated by productive morphological rules throughout the OI stage. Analyses of Dutch-speaking children’s utterances indicate that at the onset of the OI stage finite verbs are infrequent and lexically restricted, and that lexical overlap between the verbs used in finite sentences and in children’s nonfinite structures (root infinitives) grows. It is argued that these observations are not due to statistical properties of the corpus, the limited number of finite verbs, or a growing verb lexicon, but signal, instead, the morphological development of finiteness.

Comparing and harmonizing different verb classifications in light of a semantic annotation task

The verb lexicon can be classified in different and complementary ways; each approach faces challenges and limits. We focus on two large-scale lexical resources, WordNet (Miller et al. 1990; Fellbaum 1998) and FrameNet (Baker et al. 2003). WordNet is a semantic network where lexical meaning is represented in terms of relations among word forms. In contrast to WordNet's paradigmatically organized entries, FrameNet's Lexical Units are embedded in corpus-derived contexts, which serve as a basis for semantic distinctions. The classificatory perspective that each resource contributes to the analysis of the verb lexicon is illustrated with specific examples. Constructing verb typologies, even when based on attested data, requires the lexicographer's introspection and judgments, and no two classifications are completely alike. In a case-based approach to compare and harmonize WordNet and FrameNet, we ask human annotators to select the context-appropriate senses from each resources that best fit tokens in a corpus. A typology of alignments is proposed.

Scramble, Scurry and Dash: The Correlation between Motion Event Encoding and Manner Verb Lexicon Size in Indo-European

In recent decades, much has been discovered about the different ways in which people can talk about motion (Talmy, 1985, 1991; Slobin, 1996, 1997, 2004). Slobin (1997) has suggested that satellite-framed languages typically have a larger and more diverse lexicon of manner of motion verbs (such as run, fly, and scramble) when compared to verb-framed languages. Slobin (2004) has claimed that larger manner of motion verb lexicons originate over time because codability factors increase the accessibility of manner in satellite-framed languages. In this paper I investigate the dependency between the use of the satellite-framed encoding construction and the size of the manner verb lexicon. The data used come from 20 Indo-European languages. The methodology applied is a range of phylogenetic comparative methods adopted from biology, which allow for an investigation of this dependency while taking into account the shared history between these 20 languages. The results provide evidence that Slobin’s hypothesis was correct, and indeed there seems to be a relationship between the use of the satellite-framed construction and the size of the manner verb lexicon.

Mapping Semantic Information from FrameNet onto VALLEX

In this article, we introduce a project aimed at enhancing a valency lexicon of Czech verbs with semantic information. For this purpose, we make use of FrameNet, a semantically oriented lexical resource. At the present stage, semantic frames from FrameNet have been mapped to eight groups of verbs with various semantic and syntactic properties. The feasibility of this task has been verified by the achieved inter-annotator agreement measured on two semantically and syntactically different groups of verbs – verbs of communication and exchange (85.9% and 78.5%, respectively). Based on the upper level semantic frames from the relation of ‘Inheritance’ built in FrameNet, the verbs of these eight groups have been classified into more coherent semantic classes. Moreover, frame elements from these upper level semantic frames have been assigned to valency complementations of the verbs of the listed groups as semantic roles. As in case of semantic frames, the achieved interannotator agreement concerning assigning frame elements measured on verbs of communication and exchange has been promising (95.6% and 91.2%, respectively). As a result, 1 270 lexical units pertaining to the verbs of communication, mental action, psych verbs, social interaction, verbs of exchange, motion, transport and location (2 129 Czech verbs in total if perfective and imperfective verbs being counted separately) have been classified into syntactically and semantically coherent classes and their valency complementations have been characterized by semantic roles adopted from the FrameNet lexical database.

Motion events in English: the emergence and diachrony of manner salience from Old English to Late Modern English

English, a prototypical example of a Satellite-framed language (Talmy 1985, 2000), characteristically encodes manner of motion in the main verb and path in a satellite (John ran into the house). In this article I examine developments in the encoding of motion events from Old English to Late Modern English, in the light of Slobin’s (2004a) diachronic model for the emergence of manner salience; also discussed is the extent to which the shape and size of the English motion verb lexicon is a result of the specific properties of its morpholexical and morphosyntactic resources.

Zur hierarchischen Organisation des mentalen Lexikons bei Kindern mit spezifischer Sprachentwicklungsstörung

Die vorliegende Studie untersucht die Organisation und Ausdifferenzierung des Nomen- und Verblexikons in der Spontansprache bei sprachentwicklungsgestörten und sprachunauffälligen Kindern in 2 Altersstufen. Teilnehmer waren jeweils 5 Kinder mit spezifischen Sprachentwicklungsstörungen (SSES) im Alter von 4 bzw. 9 Jahren. Ihnen gegenüber standen 2 Kontrollgruppen mit jeweils 5 gleichaltrigen sprachunauffälligen Kindern. Aufnahmen von Spielsituationen wurden transkribiert und verschiedene Variablen bestimmt (z. B. Anzahl unterschiedlicher und insgesamt geäußerter Wörter, Äußerungsanzahl, Äußerungslänge). Zur Bewertung der Organisation des Lexikons wurde ein Klassifikationssystem entwickelt. Die Ergebnisse zeigen, dass SSES-Kinder im Vorschulalter über eine unzureichende Organisation ihres mentalen Lexikons verfügen: Das Nomenlexikon enthält kaum Begriffe über- und unterhalb der Basisebene, im Verblexikon sind nur wenige spezifische Verbkategorien vertreten. Kinder ohne Sprachauffälligkeiten haben bereits mit ca. 4 Jahren einen Stand der semantischen Organisation erreicht, der sich bis zum Alter von ca. 9 Jahren nicht mehr wesentlich ändert. SSES-Kinder vollziehen diese Entwicklung verspätet.

The semantics of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons

Talmy’s (e.g., 1985, 2000) seminal work has engendered a great deal of research and debate in the literature on motion event descriptions over the last decades. Despite the vast amount of research on the linguistic expression of motion events, the fact that motion verb roots might encode information apart from Path and Manner of motion is often overlooked. The present paper addresses the semantics of 376 English and 257 Spanish motion verbs by exploring the general conflations which are conveyed by these verbs. In this regard, both crosslinguistic similarities and differences will be pointed out. My research concludes that path-conflating and manner-conflating verbs amount to the largest part of their lexicons but that other minor patterns such as ground conflations, in contradiction to Talmy’s speculations on the lack of ground-conflating verbs, are present as well. Taken as a whole, this paper provides a rich and detailed account on the semantic nature of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons, and emerges as a helpful reference for researchers in this field.

The semantics of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons

The semantics of the English and the Spanish motion verb lexicons

A Contrastive Lexical Description of Basic Verbs

This paper aims at a lexical description of frequent uses of frequent lexical verbs in Swedish on the background of Czech, with some implications for the lexical description of such verb uses verbs in general. It results in a draft of a production lexicon of Swedish frequent verbs for advanced Czech learners of Swedish, with focus on their uses as light verbs. The introductory sections (1 and 2) discuss semantic shifts in highly frequent lexical verbs, whose most literal or ‘primary’ uses express motion, location, or physical control; e.g. stand, put, go, hold. These verbs are called basic verbs, which is a term coined by Viberg (Viberg, 1990) that suggests that they typically denote events belonging to basic level categories described by Lakoff (Lakoff, 1987). The ‘literalness’ of verb uses is judged according to how much they are the ones speakers pick first to illustrate the meaning of that given verb (cognitive salience, a term coined by Hanks in (Hanks, forthcoming). Hanks pointed out an interesting discrepancy between the cognitive salience and the actual frequency of a given verb usage in large corpora. This discrepancy is extremely significant in basic verbs. Some of their uses exhibit such a low cognitive salience, that they are not even noticed by native speakers. This has consequences in second-language acquisition. Foreign learners, even the advanced ones, often lack competence in using the most frequent lexical verbs of the second language in their most frequent patterns. Basic verbs often act as light verbs. Sections 3 to 7 are dedicated to light verbs and light verb constructions. Section 8 discusses the morphosyntactic variability in predicate nouns (i.e. the nominal components of light verb constructions) and their possible semantic impact on the entire light verb construction. Different aspects of polysemy of basic verbs are dealt with by contrasting Swedish examples to Czech in Section 9. Special attention is paid to uses of basic verbs that denote relations between abstract entities. Section 10 focuses on grammaticalizing uses of lexical verbs. It gives a Swedish example of context-induced reinterpretation – an interesting semantic shift that often leads to grammaticalization.

Event Structure in Russian: Semantic Roles, Aspect, Causation

This paper aims at a lexical description of frequent uses of frequent lexical verbs in Swedish on the background of Czech, with some implications for the lexical description of such verb uses verbs in general. It results in a draft of a production lexicon of Swedish frequent verbs for advanced Czech learners of Swedish, with focus on their uses as light verbs. The introductory sections (1 and 2) discuss semantic shifts in highly frequent lexical verbs, whose most literal or ‘primary’ uses express motion, location, or physical control; e.g. stand, put, go, hold. These verbs are called basic verbs, which is a term coined by Viberg (Viberg, 1990) that suggests that they typically denote events belonging to basic level categories described by Lakoff (Lakoff, 1987). The ‘literalness’ of verb uses is judged according to how much they are the ones speakers pick first to illustrate the meaning of that given verb (cognitive salience, a term coined by Hanks in (Hanks, forthcoming). Hanks pointed out an interesting discrepancy between the cognitive salience and the actual frequency of a given verb usage in large corpora. This discrepancy is extremely significant in basic verbs. Some of their uses exhibit such a low cognitive salience, that they are not even noticed by native speakers. This has consequences in second-language acquisition. Foreign learners, even the advanced ones, often lack competence in using the most frequent lexical verbs of the second language in their most frequent patterns. Basic verbs often act as light verbs. Sections 3 to 7 are dedicated to light verbs and light verb constructions. Section 8 discusses the morphosyntactic variability in predicate nouns (i.e. the nominal components of light verb constructions) and their possible semantic impact on the entire light verb construction. Different aspects of polysemy of basic verbs are dealt with by contrasting Swedish examples to Czech in Section 9. Special attention is paid to uses of basic verbs that denote relations between abstract entities. Section 10 focuses on grammaticalizing uses of lexical verbs. It gives a Swedish example of context-induced reinterpretation – an interesting semantic shift that often leads to grammaticalization. © 2009 PBML. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: Silvie Cinkova, A Contrastive Lexical Description of Basic Verbs: Examples from Swedish and Czech. The Prague Bulletin of Mathematical Linguistics No. 92, 2009, 21–61. PBML 92 DECEMBER 2009 All the aspects of basic verbs discussed in Sections 1–10 are integrated in a structure of a Swedish-Czech lexicon, which captures verbs and predicate nouns in two respective interlinked parts. Sections 11-14 give its detailed decription.

Associations between lexicon and grammar at the end of the second year in Finnish children

ABSTRACTThe emergence of grammar in relation to lexical growth was analyzed in a sample of Finnish children (N=181) at 2 ; 0. The Finnish version of the Communicative Development Inventory was used to gather information on both language domains. The onset of grammar occurred in close association with vocabulary growth. The acquisition of the nominal and verbal inflections of Finnish differed when analyzed in relation to the lexicon in which they are used: the strongest growth in the acquisition of case form types occurred when the nominal lexicon size was roughly between 50 and 250 words, whereas verb inflectional types were acquired actively from the beginning of the verb lexicon acquisition. The findings extend the previous findings of the close association between lexicon and grammar (e.g. Bates & Goodman, 1999). The results suggest that different grammatical structures display different degrees and types of lexical dependency.