Verb Constructions Research Articles

A Study on Pivot Sentences Acquisition of International Students based on Natural Language Processing Technologies

In the context of the rapid development of globalized education, the demand for Chinese language learning among international students continues to rise. As a special and complex sentence structure in Chinese, the acquisition of "pivot sentences" is of great importance. Traditional acquisition research methods often rely on manual annotation and empirical analysis, which are difficult to handle large-scale data and are subject to a high degree of subjectivity. With the rapid advancement of natural language processing (NLP) technologies, new opportunities have emerged for research in this field. This paper utilizes various techniques from NLP, such as pre-trained language models (e.g., BERT, GPT) and grammar error detection methods based on Bayesian classification algorithms, to automatically analyze the production of pivot sentences by international students. These technologies enable precise identification of grammatical errors, syntactic structure anomalies, and inappropriate word usage in serial verb constructions. By deeply exploring the underlying causes of error patterns, this research provides a comprehensive and systematic understanding of the acquisition process of pivot sentences by international students, offering strong support for targeted teaching and promoting the advancement of Chinese as a second language education to a new level.

English loan verbs in Jordanian Arabic: morphological integration and speaker acceptability judgments

PurposeThe present study examines how Jordanian Arabic (JA) speakers perceive the borrowing of English verbs in JA. These borrowings occur by two main strategies: morphological integration into the JA verb forms by direct insertion or pairing of loan words with a light verb such as ʕamal “do” to facilitate the borrowing, e.g. ʕamal diliit “delete” (literally “do a delete”).Design/methodology/approachSpeaker perceptions were gathered through interviews with native JA-speaking university students. Each interview consisted of two parts. First, speakers rated the acceptability of integrated verbs, in both their base form and their reflexive alternate. Second, after being presented with proposed integrated forms of verbs most used in the light verb construction (LVC), speakers answered questions about the potential integrability of these unintegrated verbs and the factors that affect it.FindingsResults of the interviews show that JA speakers prefer integrated loan verbs in their base forms over their reflexive alternates. Most speakers were unwilling to accept proposed integrated forms of the verbs they use in the LVC, citing concerns such as infrequency of use in the community and perceived phonological clashes between the English words and JA.Originality/valueThe integration of loan verbs in Arabic has received limited attention. This study aims to expand our understanding of how loan verbs are integrated in JA and adds a new angle by exploring how speakers perceive the integration process.

Gaps That Do Not Sprout

Abstract This squib investigates a prohibition on sprouted remnants in cases of verbal Gapping with an implicit argument in the antecedent. We explore both ellipsis derivations and Across-The-Board-movement derivations for the Gapping structure to determine the underlying cause of this restriction. We find that the ellipsis derivations of verbal Gapping do not block the presence of a sprouted remnant or predict differences in the acceptability of sprouted remnants in verbal Gapping and Pseudogapping. On the other hand, we show that the restriction against sprouting in verbal Gapping constructions is captured as a consequence of issues faced in trace-binding in Across-The-Board-movement.

Light verb constructions with deverbal nouns BITE and SNACK in native English varieties: a corpus-based study

Light verb constructions with deverbal nouns BITE and SNACK in native English varieties: a corpus-based study

The interplay of verbs and argument structure constructions in second language processing: roles of verb’s lexical properties and verb–construction association

Abstract While verbs and argument structure constructions are essential for deriving sentence meaning, their roles in sentence processing remains less known. To address this issue, the present study explored how a verb’s lexical properties and the strength of verb–construction associations influence second language (L2) sentence processing. In two self-paced reading experiments, Korean-speaking learners of English and native English speakers read English argument structure constructions containing verbs with varying lexical properties and association strength. In both Experiment 1 (involving the prepositional dative construction) and Experiment 2 (involving the caused-motion construction), only the L2-English learners, and not the native speakers, spent more time integrating the target constructions with verbs of weaker associations than those with stronger associations. Furthermore, the learners exhibited greater difficulty with verb–construction integration when the verbs were less frequent and less concrete; L2 proficiency did not modulate these effects. Our findings support the constructionist approach, suggesting that both verbs and verb–construction associations play an instrumental role in sentence comprehension.

Middle voice in Cháoyáng Mǐn

Abstract Cháoyáng Mǐn, a dialect originating from Southeast China, exemplifies a unique instance of an isolating language featuring a middle voice. Historically, the middle voice in Cháoyáng Mǐn emerged as the culmination of a sequential transformation involving causative, passive, and anticausative constructions as intermediate stages. This unexpected alternation between valency-increasing and valency-decreasing constructions can be attributed to the grammaticalization of pro-drop (zero-anaphora) within serial verb constructions. The formal marker of all these constructions is the coverb khiɁ ‘give’ which is further merged with the expletive human pronoun i ‘s/he’ into khiɁi as a marker of the last two constructions: anticausative and middle voice. We claim that khiɁi serves as a genuine synthetical middle voice marker, whereas khiɁ fails one crucial set of data to qualify for an analytical middle voice marker.

Gaplessness in Chinese relative clauses

This study posits the existence of a covert gap in Chinese gapless relative clauses, seeking to elucidate how this gap, created by the omission of certain sentential elements, can be recovered via coercion from the relative head noun. This mechanism is elucidated by analyzing the relativization process in prepositional phrases and serial verb constructions. Within prepositional phrases, two subtypes are discerned. The first subtype involves the omission of the preposition, a process termed Preposition Ghosting, which occurs to avoid a violation of the Edge Constraint. Conversely, in the second subtype, the preposition remains in situ without undergoing direct relativization, attributable to its less straightforwardly inferable thematic relationship with the head noun. In serial verb constructions, the process of relativization may lead to the omission of either the first or second verb, with the omitted verb subsequently recoverable through coercion from the relative head noun. The findings suggest that ‘gapless’ relative clauses in Chinese are, in fact, ‘gapped’, which highlight syntactic universals that transcend surface-level forms and meanings.

The use of agarrar ‘grab, take’ verb constructions in Belizean Spanish

The use of agarrar ‘grab, take’ verb constructions in Belizean Spanish

Serial Verbs Constructions as Double-headed Syntactic Structures: Evidence from Igbo

Although serial verb constructions (SVCs) are widely observed across languages, there is ongoing debate regarding their syntactic representation, particularly in cases involving shared arguments. Two prominent approaches to SVCs with argument sharing are the double-headed structure proposed by Baker (1989) and the control structure suggested by Collins (1997). This paper presents novel data from Igbo to evaluate these differing approaches. First, we disentangle the confound between covert coordination and SVCs through syntactic and semantic tests, demonstrating that SVCs do exist in Igbo. We then conduct a comprehensive comparison between SVCs and corresponding verb-verb (V-V) compounds. The absence of a systematic derivational relationship between SVCs and V-V compounds raises doubts about the verb incorporation mechanism posited by Collins. Furthermore, the lack of resultative SVCs in Igbo challenges the existence of an empty category, further undermining the control structure for SVCs. In contrast, we illustrate that the endocentric property of Igbo SVCs aligns naturally with Baker's double-headed syntactic structure. Building on this, we propose a double-headed structure for SVCs in Igbo, both with and without shared arguments. Our findings thus provide a novel argument for a permissible structure of SVCs with argument sharing and for the availability of double-headedness in Universal Grammar.

Auxiliaries in Old Dutch

Abstract This study explores the use of auxiliaries in the oldest text available for Old Dutch, the Wachtendonck Psalter, dating from the 10th century. Our aim is to understand why there are so few different auxiliaries in this text in comparison to other texts in Old Dutch. We tackle this question by taking a historical comparative perspective, using methodological insights and techniques from corpus-based contrastive linguistics and typology. More specifically, we build a diachronic parallel corpus of psalm translations and compare the contexts in which auxiliaries and inflectional alternatives are used in these parallel texts by means of multidimensional scaling. Our historical comparative method results in five proximity maps which allow us to explore and compare the inventory of verb constructions of the Wachtendonck Psalter both retrospectively, with its source text in Latin, and prospectively, with later translations in Dutch. Our analysis examines the role of grammaticalization as well as the specific nature of the text as an interlinear translation as possible motivations for the presence and absence of auxiliaries in the Wachtendonck Psalter.

Argument Coreference Between Content Verbs and Predicative Nouns in Brazilian Portuguese

The literature on complement clauses and support/light verb constructions provides most of the available information on coreference between arguments of matrix and subordinate syntactic predicates. However, this phenomenon is largely unexplored when it comes to verb phrases consisting of a content verb and a predicative noun in object position, such as declarar paixão (“declare passion”), cumprir a promessa (“fulfill the promise”), responder perguntas (“answer questions”), or resistir à tentação (“resist temptation”). The notions of obligatory and non-obligatory coreference do not fully explain this phenomenon, since non-coreferential usage of these phrases leads to different types of coercion, which are relevant properties to classify these phrases. This paper proposes a pilot study of verb phrases of this kind, extracting them from a Brazilian Portuguese newspaper corpus aiming at their syntactic-semantic classification. This procedure revealed a total of 75 such verb phrases. Based on semantic coercion and distributional properties, four major classes divided into seven subclasses are proposed to cover two-thirds of the data. There is also a fifth class with 17 items in which coreference appears to be a contextual property, i.e., unrelated to lexical semantics, and eight hapax legomena. The results provide a new perspective on this understudied topic, identifying also irregular aspects deserving further studies

Escape from Noun Complement Clauses in Avatime

This paper discusses the status of island phenomena in Avatime, an endangered Kwa language of Ghana. We focus on clausal adjuncts, specifically noun complement clauses (NCCs). We show that while standard adjuncts are strong islands in Avatime, NCCs allow argument extraction. We suggest that this is related to the fact that NCCs in Avatime are not a type of relative clause. Instead, NCCs involve a kind of serial verb construction, which independently allows for extraction.

Rising datives: tomar ‘take’ expressions with nouns of ‘emotion’ and constructional network reconfiguration in Spanish

Abstract This diachronic, corpus-based study examines Spanish constructions formed with the verb tomar ‘take’ and nouns of ‘emotion’, including endogenous nouns with a target participant (e.g. cariño ‘affection’), exogenous nouns with a source or cause participant (e.g. tristeza ‘sadness’), and hybrid nouns allowing both options (e.g. miedo ‘fear’). Such constructions involve three different inchoative (‘begin to feel’) subschemas. The first one, the Prepositional-Stimulus subschema (e.g. tomar tristeza de algo ‘grow sad over something’), included exogenous and hybrid nouns and predominated in the Middle Ages, but disappeared by the 1800s. The other two subschemas, formed with endogenous and hybrid nouns, have survived until today. They include the Prepositional-Goal subschema (e.g. tomar cariño por alguien ‘grow fond of someone’), the most frequent of the two in the Middle Ages, and the Dative-Goal subschema (e.g. tomarle cariño a alguien ‘grow fond of someone’, lit. ‘take fondness to someone’), which presumably arose through analogy in the 1400s and subsequently marginalized its prepositional counterpart, becoming the default realization in present-day Spanish. Using the framework of Diachronic Construction Grammar, these changes are analyzed as involving the reconfiguration of a broader network of inchoative light verb constructions with nouns of emotion in Spanish.

Negative scope ambiguity in serial verb constructions in Jordanian Arabic: an experimental investigation

Negative scope ambiguity in serial verb constructions in Jordanian Arabic: an experimental investigation

Towards an Empirical Understanding of membawa ‘bring’: Corpus Insights into Indonesian Light Verb Constructions

This study analyzes the usage of the verb membawa (lit. bring) in Indonesian light verb constructions (LVCs). LVCs are ubiquitous in many agglutinative languages, including Indonesian. These constructions offer a unique way of combining a semantically light verb, which lacks inherent meaning, with another element to convey a specific concept. For instance, membawa pesan (lit. bring a message), membawa kemenangan (lit. bring a victory), membawa perasaan (lit. bring the feeling), membawa perubahan (lit. bring the change), amongst others. This study utilized corpus-based techniques to conduct a quantitative and qualitative analysis of 150 LVCs from the Indonesian-Leipzig Corpora Collection (ILCC) corpus. The findings of the study revealed three key points. Firstly, LVCs demonstrated a wide range of morphological and semantic usage, including primary and advanced areas, synonymic pair, and noun core proposition areas. Secondly, the morphosemantic relationships between core nouns in LVCs could be identified in the relations between base-abstract (0.15), base-concrete (0.37), affixed-abstract (0.36), and affixed-concrete (0.13). Thirdly, constructions with synonymic pairs dominated the total LVCs (0.75). However, all LVCs demonstrated the core proposition of the noun, which varied between ‘peoples’ (0.23), ‘materials’ (0.19), ‘objects’ (0.13), ‘qualities’ (0.17), ‘actions’ (0.11), and ‘processes’ (0.17). The findings suggest that LVCs in Indonesian are not merely syntactic constructions but rather reflect the intricate relationships between the verb and the noun, which can be analyzed in terms of their semantic and morphological properties. These findings can be applied to areas such as machine translation and computational linguistics, where a comprehensive understanding of LVCs is essential for accurate and effective language processing. Further corpus-based study could focus on analyzing the syntax and discourse functions of LVCs membawa.

Analyzing Interaction Patterns on Dating Sites: A Generic Structure Potential Approach

Online dating has become a popular stage to find a romantic partner. In such context, interlocutors must employ language carefully to reveal their intentions, attract attention and as well sustain intimacy with their potential partners. While previous studies have explored aspects such as self-disclosure and linguistic strategies in impression formation, there remains a gap in understanding the structured interactions that occur between potential partners on dating sites. This study, therefore, investigated the linguistic elements and interactional structures characterizing online dating discourse, focusing on two popular platforms, Tinder and Tagged. Adopting Halliday and Hasan’s Generic Structure Potential framework, the study examined conversations of thirty participants (potential partners) whose relationship ranges between two weeks to three months. Findings revealed seven key stages: Discourse Initiation (DI), Introduction (INTR), Question and Response (QAR), Request (RQ), Admiration (AD), Declaration of Dating Intention (DDI), and Topic Formation for Conversation (TF). Each stage is marked by specific linguistic features and serves unique functions within the communication process. DI involves friendly greetings and endearments to initiate conversation and signal interest. INTR often includes declarative statements that provide personal information, establishing familiarity and a good first impression. QAR facilitates information exchange through questions and responses. RQ, predominantly by males, involves polite modal verb constructions to move the conversation to more personal platforms or obtain further information. AD includes compliments and positive affirmations to express appreciation and create a positive interaction tone. DDI features direct and indirect questions about relationship status to clarify the intent behind the interaction and define the nature of the potential relationship. Finally, TF sustains conversation with statements and questions about daily activities and interests. This study contributes to the broader understanding of professional discourse by analyzing the structured linguistic strategies and interactional patterns employed in online dating, demonstrating how individuals strategically use language to manage impressions, negotiate intentions, and build relationships – skills also crucial in professional communication.

Voice, impersonal construction, and zero lexeme: formalization of crucial notions

Abstract The paper considers a relatively rare verbal syntactic construction found in East Sakhalin Ainu and in Lingala: an active form of a transitive verb governs simultaneously a direct object and an agentive complement, has no overt syntactic subject and is in the 3rd person plural. In order to characterize this verb form, three sets of formal linguistic notions are introduced and described: voice (with a calculus of logically possible voice grammemes), impersonal construction, and zero lexeme; many illustrations come from Lingala and Kinyarwanda, as well as several other languages. The verb forms under analysis are shown to be the partial demotional passive.

English-to-Hindi translation divergence study of English phrasal verbs

English phrasal verbs pose complex semantic interpretations and cause significant problems in their translation into the target language. The paper selects some frequent and highly polysemous English phrasal verbs listed with 10 or more senses in the English WordNet, collects sample English sentences from the British National Corpus and examines their Hindi translation equivalents in terms of the morpho-syntactic structure of Hindi verbs and the representation of semantic information. This study attempts to present the semantic equivalence in rendering the identical semantics in the verbal system of both languages under consideration. The study found that the most frequent and common way of realising the concepts represented by English phrasal verbs in Hindi is by incorporating the compound verb constructions in the Hindi language. Besides that, we observe multiple mapping patterns of English phrasal verbs in Hindi, including the simple Hindi verb (v), compound verb (v1-v2), and conjunct verb (noun/adjective/adverb-verb) constructions.

Frequency effects in acquisition and processing of complex verbal constructions in Romance: Experimental and corpus perspectives on Spanish as well as potential implications for foreign language acquisition

Frequency effects in acquisition and processing of complex verbal constructions in Romance: Experimental and corpus perspectives on Spanish as well as potential implications for foreign language acquisition

Salgo de casa? Salgo a casa? Salgo la casa? Analysis of the crosslinguistic influence on preposition use in motion verb constructions by multilingual German learners of Spanish

The use of prepositions is one of the most difficult grammar topics for Spanish learners. The high frequency prepositions ‘a’ (‘to, at, on’), ‘de’ (‘from, of’) and ‘en’ (‘in, on, into’) are often confused or omitted, especially in motion verb constructions (e.g., Campillos Llanos, 2014). This can be due to their polysemous character and the low salience. In addition, crosslinguistic influence (Jarvis and Pavlenko, 2008) from the first language as well as additional acquired foreign language(s) play a significant role.In order to analyse the complexity of interlanguage phenomena in the construction [motion verb + a/de/en + noun] to improve acquisition in Spanish classes, it is necessary to study authentic learner data. In this paper, I will discuss the results of an explorative pilot study on crosslinguistic influence carried out at a German grammar school in the federal state Baden-Württemberg in order to find out after which verbs of motion these prepositions are omitted or confused, how often this occurs, and which languages might influence it. The results of two groups of pupils at beginner level with the mean age of 14,03 are compared: The first group (n = 21) learns Spanish as the third foreign language, in addition to English and French, while the second group (n = 16) learns Spanish as the second foreign language after English. Both groups learn the named foreign languages in an instructed setting at school.The pilot study reveals that the prepositions ‘a’ and ‘de’ are much more often confused or omitted in the construction types [llegar/volver/venir + a + noun] (‘arrive/come back/come + to/in + noun’) and [salir/ir + de + noun] (‘leave/go + noun’) compared to [ir + a + noun] (‘go to + noun’). A possible explanation is positive and negative intra- and interlingual transfer of equivalent constructions from different languages. These results form a hypothesis basis that a systematic application of Pedagogical Construction Grammar (Boas, 2022; De Knop and Gilquin, 2016) and multilingual didactics (Fäcke and Meiβner, 2019; García et al., 2020) in Spanish classes to teach these polysemous prepositions could probably be helpful to avoid errors.