Verb Frames Research Articles

Epistemic language in news headlines shapes readers’ perceptions of objectivity

How we reason about objectivity-whether an assertion has a ground truth-has implications for belief formation on wide-ranging topics. For example, if someone perceives climate change to be a matter of subjective opinion similar to the best movie genre, they may consider empirical claims about climate change as mere opinion and irrelevant to their beliefs. Here, we investigate whether the language employed by journalists might influence the perceived objectivity of news claims. Specifically, we ask whether factive verb framing (e.g., "Scientists know climate change is happening") increases perceived objectivity compared to nonfactive framing (e.g., "Scientists believe [...]"). Across eight studies (N = 2,785), participants read news headlines about unique, noncontroversial topics (studies 1a-b, 2a-b) or a familiar, controversial topic (climate change; studies 3a-b, 4a-b) and rated the truth and objectivity of the headlines' claims. Across all eight studies, when claims were presented as beliefs (e.g., "Tortoise breeders believe tortoises are becoming more popular pets"), people consistently judged those claims as more subjective than claims presented as knowledge (e.g., "Tortoise breeders know…"), as well as claims presented as unattributed generics (e.g., "Tortoises are becoming more popular pets"). Surprisingly, verb framing had relatively little, inconsistent influence over participants' judgments of the truth of claims. These results demonstrate how, apart from shaping whether we believe a claim is true or false, epistemic language in media can influence whether we believe a claim has an objective answer at all.

Распятая на кресте времён: парергональность интервизуальности рефлексии рубежа XX–XXI веков на национально-религиозную тематику. Иконографический этюд

This article studies intervisuality (Michael Camille, 1991) in the context of icono-graphic studies by the example of a Russian religious painting created at the turn of the 21st century. Our analysis of intervisuality is based on Derrida’s approach which makes use of the concept ‘parergon’. This is something that does not belong to the work (ergon) but is con-nected to it. The ergon without parergon lacks self-sufficiency. In the case of intervisuality, the interaction of the work (ergon) with its visual and verbal frames and sources (parerga), accompanied with the gaps and incongruities of perception, or “frame friction” in the words of Simone Heller-Andrist (2012), bring us to solutions of research problems of iconological interpretation and attribution. Thus, the impression of “fake” produced by parergon, such as the design of the reverse side of a painting, mimicking an icon board (if there is a confi-dence in intentionality), indicates author’s manifestation in which parergon and ergon inter-change similarly to the “manneristic inversion” noted by Max Dvořák (1922), while uninten-tional imperfection due to failures, lack of skill or limited resources would rather indicate the inept stylization or a plain imitation. Thus, the parergonality of intervisuality enriches the problem field of iconographic and visual research with meaning. The work is based on an art historical study of a painting by an unknown author, a visualization of thoughts on national and religious themes and visual exegesis of historical symbolism appreciated by the audience of the period of the work’s creation. It is rich in allusions to texts on the religious philoso-phy of freedom by Nikolai Berdyaev (1911) about the crucified truth of Christianity and to the historiosophical lectures and poems by Maximilian Voloshin (1920) thematizing the cruci-fied Russia–a metaphorical image which was popular during periods of social upheavals in national history.

Study on Word Formation and Coding of French and Romanian Table Separated Event Verbs

This article invites 10 native French and 10 Romanian speakers to describe 24 videos, and then compares the verbs representing separation events to conduct empirical research on separation events in French and Romanian. In the verb expression of separation events, both French and Romanian verbs use corresponding verb prefixes, indicating tension from "receiving" to "opening". However, when encoding the same separation event, the encoding focus of the two languages is different. Romanian focuses on the movement of a certain component after separation, while French focuses on the action itself. However, overall, both languages can be classified as dual frame languages with both satellite frame language and verb frame language features.

Persepolis: The Depiction of Childhood and Maturity Journeys Through Visual and Verbal Analysis

Marjane Satrapi's autobiographical series Persepolis is a set of comics written originally in the French language; and it recounts her life journey from childhood to early adulthood in Iran and Austria during and after the Islamic Revolution. The narrative is written in the form of graphic novel which is a sort of comics that combines both words and images. The Islamic Revolution was a critical moment in the history of Iran, overwhelmed every Iranian citizen, and ended up transforming the country from monarchal to Islamic governance. In the light of this upheaval, Marjane Satrapi visualizes her childhood and maturity through her graphic novel Persepolis. She utilizes the story to be her platform to open up about her challenges to break constraints that are imposed upon her as a woman in this newly shaped society and to call for reform and mercy for war victims. The current study aims at studying the figure of Marjane, the heroine of the story, her perceptions of certain events, her reactions in various moments and how she manages to save herself from all the obstacles that surround her . It will analyze the hidden lessons delivered by this narrative in the light of visual and verbal frames. The researcher attempts to answer how one may act in such hostile environment? what are the significance of writing autobiographical novel in the light of historical context? And how the form of graphic novel helps the author to deliver her message?

Verb frame distribution and text difficulty: A corpus‐based analysis of verb frames in Chinese textbooks

AbstractThis study aims to explore how verb frames can potentially influence text difficulty and shed new light on text evaluation. Different from previous works focusing mostly on lexical frequencies, this paper explores semantic categories of verbs and their correlation with the difficulty levels (DLs) of textbooks. Based on a corpus of nine sets of primary school Chinese textbooks, verb‐frame diversity and distribution trends by difficulty levels were examined. The results show that the diversity of verb frames has a strong positive correlation with difficulty levels. The distribution trends of the frames largely correspond with the three cognitive tiers proposed in the skill theory for language development: the sensory–motor, representational, and abstract tiers. This study introduces verb frames as a salient semantic factor in text analysis and proposes that verb‐frame‐related features have the potential to be utilized in the evaluation of leveled instructional materials and readability assessment.

Фреймовый анализ семантики немецких глаголов слуха

The aim of the research is to describe the extralinguistic content of the meaning of German verbs denoting auditory perception. The paper examines the difference between the cognitive approach in linguistics and the traditional one, substantiates the need to take into account the extralinguistic factor when considering the semantics of a word, describes additional features of meaning identified during the undertaken frame analysis of the studied corpus of vocabulary. The data obtained are presented in the form of tables representing frames of the main auditory verbs of the German language. A brief comparative characteristic of the identified slots acting as the smallest components of the frame semantics of the studied group of words is also given. The scientific novelty of the research lies in using a cognitive approach in the study of the semantics of German verbs of hearing, i.e. frame analysis, which has not previously been involved in the research of linguists considering this corpus of German lexicon. As a result, it has been proved that a cognitive description of verbs of hearing makes it possible to get a more complete picture of their semantics, to better navigate the issues of use and understanding of the vocabulary under study.

Subjects are not all alike: Eye-tracking the agent preference in Spanish.

Experimental research on argument structure has reported mixed results regarding the processing of unaccusative and unergative predicates. Using eye tracking in the visual world paradigm, this study seeks to fill a gap in the literature by presenting new evidence of the processing distinction between agent and theme subjects. We considered two hypotheses. First, the Unaccusative Hypothesis states that unaccusative (theme) subjects involve a more complex syntactic representation than unergative (agent) subjects. It predicts a delayed reactivation of unaccusative subjects compared to unergatives after the presentation of the verb. Second, the Agent First Hypothesis states that the first ambiguous NP of a sentence will preferably be interpreted as an agent due to an attentional preference to agents over themes. It predicts a larger reactivation of agent subjects than themes. We monitored the time course of gaze fixations of 44 native speakers across a visual display while processing sentences with unaccusative, unergative and transitive verbs. One of the pictures in the visual display was semantically related to the sentential subject. We analyzed fixation patterns in three different time frames: the verb frame, the post-verb frame, and the global post-verbal frame. Results indicated that sentential subjects across the three conditions were significantly activated when participants heard the verb; this is compatible with observing a post-verbal reactivation effect. Time course and magnitude of the gaze-fixation patterns are fully compatible with the predictions made by the Agent First Hypothesis. Thus, we report new evidence for (a) a processing distinction between unaccusative and unergative predicates in sentence comprehension, and (b) an attentional preference towards agents over themes, reflected by a larger reactivation effect in agent subjects.

Extended Classification of the Main Grammatical Frames for Speaking verbs

This paper explores further elaboration of grammatical frames of speaking verbs. All data are taken in Corpus of Contemporary American English. This paper aims to 1) To analyse the structure of sentences that refers to the main grammatical frames of Speaking verbs, 2) To extend the classification into the Tense and Aspect category. The research describes the potential category of grammatical frames in Speaking verbs by categorizing and interpreting the structure of the sentence. It is compulsory to use systemic description which adopts deepsyntactic analysis: matrix and complement clause, simple and complex sentence, and the use of Tense and Aspect. The extended classification resulted in some classification of grammatical frames; in frame I, ‘Describe’is allowed. In frame II, ‘Shout’ and ‘Call’ are allowed. In frame III, ‘Talk’, ‘Speak’, ‘Discuss’ and ‘Describe’ are allowed. In frame IV, ‘Talk’, ‘Discuss’, ‘Describe’ and ‘Shout’ are included. In frame V, ‘Discuss’, ‘Shout’ and ‘Call’ are included. All classified verbs are also marked in Irrealis, AP (present), PP (present), AP (present) and PP (past). By approaching the data in deep syntactic analysis at the level of clause and sentence, the extended classification of grammatical frames of Speaking verb is also constructed in simple and complex sentence.

MOTION VERBS IN PERSIAN AND ENGLISH: A FRAMENET-BASED CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS

The current research aims at exploring and comparing the semantic frames of motion verbs in English and Persian. In pursuit of this goal, the novel Animal farm by G. Orwell (1945) was selected and compared with its Persian translation, Qale heyvanat (Atefi, 2010). The sentences including motion verbs were primarily extracted from the novel and then a comparison was made between each English sentence and its Persian counterpart. Afterwards, the semantic frames of the English and Persian motion verbs were obtained from the FrameNet database. It should be noted that when the motion verbs in English had an equivalent which could be interpreted in a different way in Persian, the Persian verb was searched for in one of the most reliable Persian to English dictionaries—Persian to English Dictionary (Aryanpur and Aryanpur, 2007). We searched for its English equivalent and then the newly obtained English verb was searched in FrameNet for the semantic frame. When comparing the semantic frames of the motion verbs in the two languages examined, we concluded that motion events in English and Persian were expressed through miscellaneous motion verbs each of which involves a semantic frame peculiar to it. Likewise, the frames may be similar or different cross-linguistically in case of semantic differences, or they might be pragmatically similar.

Motion verb constructions, frames, and profiling

Abstract This paper offers a frame-semantic account of some of the manifold phenomena that can be observed in motion expressions in typologically diverse languages. The core of the proposed approach is a basic locomotion frame complemented with a mechanism of profiling that operates on this frame. The locomotion frame provides a rich structure which features the pivotal elements beneficial for the semantic representation of different types of motion descriptions. The profiling mechanism allows one to select, deselect and augment elements of this frame structure, as well as to specify significant relations between distinct parts of the frame. With these means, the profiling mechanism facilitates fine-grained differentiations among motion verbs that considerably exceed the classic dichotomy of path and manner-of-motion verbs. The proposed theory is applied to different kinds of path and manner-of-motion verbs, including those typically found in path-dominant and manner-dominant languages, as well as in languages which exhibit a pronounced diversity of motion verbs lined up in serial verb constructions. The suggested frame-semantic analyses thus reveal intricate differentiations in a multifaceted linguistic domain.

Particle Placement in Learner Language

AbstractThis study presents the first multifactorial corpus‐based analysis of verb–particle constructions in a data sample comprising spoken and written productions by intermediate‐level learners of English as a second language from 17 language backgrounds. We annotated 4,911 attestations retrieved from native speaker and language learner corpora for 14 predictors, including syntactic complexity, rhythmic and segment alternation, and the verb framing of the speaker's native language. A multifactorial prediction and deviation analysis using regression (Gries & Deshors, 2014), which stacks multiple regression analyses to compare native speaker and learner productions in identical contexts, revealed a complex picture in which processing demands, input effects, and native language typology jointly shape the degree to which learners’ choices of constructions are nativelike or not.

Verb-based vs. schema-based constructions and their variability: On the Spanish transitive directed-motion construction in a contrastive perspective

AbstractIn comparison to English, Spanish constructions of argument structure are highly verb-constrained (e.g., Goldberg, Adele E. 2006.Constructions at work: The nature of generalization in language. Oxford: Oxford University Press; Narasimhan, Bhuvana. 2003. Motion events and the lexicon: A case study of Hindi.Lingua113(2). 123–160):Pedro bajó/*bailó a la playa‘Pedro went down/danced to the beach’. In some cases, the dominant role of the verbal meaning combines with a mismatching construction (e.g., an intransitive verb in a transitive construction:Pedro bajó las escaleras‘Pedro went down the stairs’). To account for this evidence from a usage-based point of view, this study examines the Spanish transitive directed-motion construction combining verb lexeme analysis with collexeme corpus analysis (Stefanowitsch, Anatol & Stefan Th. Gries. 2003. Collostructions: Investigating the interaction beween words and constructions.International Journal of Corpus Linguistics8(2). 209–243). The analysis shows that in spite of frequent verb-construction mismatches, core components of the verbal meaning correlate closely with the usage of the verb in the transitive construction. The same patterns were not observed in comparable English constructions. Conceptualized in a constructionist framework, this study suggests that verb framing and learned constructional patterns have different roles in the encoding of argument structure in the two languages. This contrastive analysis has a broader application: to other construction types, to other semantic domains, and to other languages. It is argued that compared to the typological distinction between Verb-framed and Satellite-framed languages (Talmy, Leonard. 2000.Toward a cognitive semantics, vol. 1 and 2. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press), the proposed framework is better suited to account for the crosslinguistic differences and the intra-linguistic variation.

Framing Climate Uncertainty: Frame Choices Reveal and Influence Climate Change Beliefs

AbstractThe public debate around climate change is increasingly polarized. At the same time, the scientific consensus about the causes and consequences of climate change is strong. This inconsistency poses challenges for mitigation and adaptation efforts. The translation of uncertain numerical climate projections into simpler but ambiguous verbal frames may contribute to this polarization. In two experimental studies, we investigated 1) how “communicators” verbally frame a confidence interval regarding projected change in winter precipitation due to climate change (N = 512) and 2) how “listeners” interpret these verbal frames (N = 385). Both studies were preregistered at the Open Science Framework. Communicators who perceived the change as more severe chose a concerned rather than an unconcerned verbal frame. Furthermore, communicators’ verbal frames were associated with their more general beliefs, like political affiliation and environmental values. Listeners exposed to the concerned frame perceived climate change–induced precipitation change to be more severe than those receiving the unconcerned frame. These results are in line with two pilot studies (N = 298 and N = 393, respectively). Underlying general beliefs about climate and the environment likely shape public communication about climate in subtle ways, and thus verbal framing by the media, policymakers, and peers may contribute to public polarization on climate change.

Initial acquisition of tense-aspect morphology in an artificial language

Various explanations have been put forth for the asymmetrical acquisition of tense and aspect morphology across categories of lexical aspect. This experiment tested the adequacy of a subset of such accounts by examining English native speakers’ ( n = 40) use of progressive and past tense morphology within activity and accomplishment verb frames during their early acquisition of a miniature artificial language. Participants completed a lesson in which types and tokens of lexical aspect and past and present morphology were balanced. Although significant effects at p < .05 were found for lexical aspect and morphological marking, the interaction between these factors, expected by the aspect hypothesis, was non-significant. The experiment suggests that the effects of lexical aspect may be absent during the earliest phases of second language acquisition or may be due to factors methodologically excluded in this study such as distributional biases in second language input.

Discourse production of mandarin-speaking children with high-functioning autism: The effect of mental and action verbs’ semantic-pragmatic features

The present study investigated the syntactic and pragmatic performance of children with high-functioning autism (HFA) during a discourse production task with mental verbs. Children with HFA and typically developing (TD) children were matched by chronological age, verbal IQ (VIQ) and full-scale IQ (FIQ). We found that children with HFA tended to select a nominal object given a mental verb with either a nominal or clausal object. They committed few syntactic errors but generated syntactic stereotypes with mental verbs. However, this behavior was not observed with action verbs. Thus, children with HFA were specifically impaired in the argument structures of mental verbs. In pragmatic performance, children with HFA produced significantly fewer clauses or sentences with lower syntactic complexity for mental verbs than TD controls. This result might be due to the semantic-pragmatic impairment of children with HFA in the use of mental verbs. This study concludes that children with HFA were able to acquire the syntactic frames of mental verbs but were nevertheless impaired in the acquisition of pragmatic information inherent in those verbs.

Development and Analysis of Verb Frame Lexicon for Hindi

Development and Analysis of Verb Frame Lexicon for Hindi

Over werkwoordalternanties in de Syntax of Dutch

Abstract On verb frame alternations in the Syntax of Dutch This review article offers a critical discussion of the extensive treatment of verb frame alternations in the first volume on Verbs and Verb Phrases of the Syntax of Dutch (SoD). The article takes a usage-based perspective and focuses on a number of aspects of the grammatical description in the SoD that are too exclusively rooted in the theoretical framework of formal syntax.

Frames, polarity and causation

A polarity-sensitive item (PSI), as traditionally defined, is an expression that is restricted to either an affirmative or negative context. PSIs like ‘lift a finger’ and ‘all the time in the world’ sub-serve discourse routines like understatement and emphasis. Lexical–semantic classes are increasingly invoked in descriptions of the properties of PSIs. Here, we use English corpus data and the tools of Frame Semantics ( Fillmore, 1982 , 1985 ) to explore Israel's (2011) observation that the semantic role of a PSI determines how the expression fits into a contextually constructed scalar model. We focus on a class of exceptions implied by Israel's model: cases in which a given PSI displays two countervailing patterns of polarity sensitivity, with attendant differences in scalar entailments. We offer a set of case studies of polarity-sensitive expressions – including verbs of attraction and aversion like ‘can live without’, monetary units like ‘a red cent’, comparative adjectives and time-span adverbials – that demonstrate that the interpretation of a given PSI in a given polar context is based on multiple factors. These factors include the speaker's perspective on and affective stance towards the described event, available inferences about causality and, perhaps most critically, particulars of the predication, including the verb or adjective's frame membership, the presence or absence of an ability modal like can, the grammatical construction used and the range of contingencies evoked by the utterance.

La Influencia del Número de Objetos y las Claves Verbales en la Distinción Temprana del Plural

<p>The linguistic distinction of plurals in early developmental stages is dependent on the verbal cues provided and on the number of members in a set. More than two objects in a set facilitate plural production. Also, multiple verbal cues help understand plurals in contrast to single verbal cues such as the noun morphology alone. It remains unknown whether in a comprehension task a set with only 2 objects is associated to a plural frame, and whether the verbal cues provided play a fundamental role on the aforesaid association.</p><p>Two preferential looking experiments were carried out with 24-month-old toddlers. Their ability to associate multiple plural verbal cues (E1) and morphology noun alone to a set of 2 objects (E2) was evaluated.</p><p>Toddlers associated a set of 2 objects to verbal frames containing multiple cues of plurality, but not to the noun morphology alone. These findings show that, as in production, there is a certain difficulty in linguistically distinguishing a set with few objects as a representation of plural during early childhood. Nonetheless, this difficulty is diminished when multiple verbal cues are provided. This demonstrates toddlers’ ability to retrieve information from enriched syntactical frames. </p>

Aspect in Malay Verbs: Realigning Time and Volition to Malay Events

This article examines existing studies of Malay verbs by major local Malay scholars. An interesting finding from the review is that there is a lack of emphasis on aspect as a semantic category in Malay verbs. The lack of overt tense marking in Malay verbs suggests that the verbs operate according to an internal temporal framework. Hence, it is necessary to highlight aspect as the underlying semantico-syntactic operator in Malay syntax guided with verb. To illuminate the point, verbal frames are incorporated as the necessary semantic template for the operation of Malay verbal prefixes in Malay phrases. The explication, based on existing linguistic notions of syntax and semantics, offers different interpretations of verb structures from previous studies to pave the way for a more detailed analysis of Malay verbs that factors in aspect as part of the phrasal construction.