Individual Verbs Research Articles

When complementation gets specific: A study of collocational preferences in verb–object combinations in Norwegian

AbstractThis study investigates to what extent there are collocational preferences in the verb–object combinations of a large corpus of Norwegian and how important recurrent combinations are in usage. The material has been extracted from a large web-corpus of 700 million tokens and consists of dependency-based verb–object combinations. The overall importance of collocational preferences is demonstrated by the fact that the most frequent 5% of the verb–object combinations account for as much as 64% of the verb–object tokens in the material. The database of verb–object combinations contains measures of collocational strength and thereby allows us to model the mutual strength between the exemplars in the clusters found with individual verbs. Based on some studies of individual verbs and verb pairs, it seems safe to assume that speakers do distinguish between and prefer certain conventional verb–object combinations to other equally grammatical, equally transparent and equally understandable alternatives, and that speakers have access to complementation information at the level of exemplars.

日本語の[‐e‐]型自動詞と[‐ar‐]型自動詞

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the meanings of ‘-e-’ type intransitive verbs and ‘-ar-’ type intransitive verbs and to clarify the problems in Kageyama(1996) and to redescribe the meanings of the two types. This paper also argues that, through the analysis of the timing of individual verb’s derivation and their meanings, it is possible to notice the semantic tendency of the derivation of the two types. ‘-E-’ type intransitive verbs denote the externally caused events that can take place without volitional agent and, there are many ‘-ar-’ type intransitive verbs that denote the events that presuppose the existence of agent. There have been many ‘-e-’ type intransitive verbs from ancient times, which mainly denote unvolitional events, and such a tendency has been reflected in subsequent derivation as well. ‘-E-’ types have taken up unvolitional events and consequently, ‘-ar-’ types have taken up the events that presuppose the existence of agent.

Seeing Iconic Gesture Promotes First- and Second-Order Verb Generalization in Preschoolers.

This study investigated whether seeing iconic gestures depicting verb referents promotes two types of generalization. We taught 3- to 4-year-olds novel locomotion verbs. Children who saw iconic manner gestures during training generalized more verbs to novel events (first-order generalization) than children who saw interactive gestures (Experiment 1, N=48; Experiment 2, N=48) and path-tracing gestures (Experiment 3, N=48). Furthermore, immediately (Experiments 1 and 3) and after 1week (Experiment 2), the iconic manner gesture group outperformed the control groups in subsequent generalization trials with different novel verbs (second-order generalization), although all groups saw interactive gestures. Thus, seeing iconic gestures that depict verb referents helps children (a) generalize individual verb meanings to novel events and (b) learn more verbs from the same subcategory.

Relative Strength of Influence of Five Factors Involved in Korean Learners’ Choice of English Ditransitive Constructions

This study aims to examine the relative strength of influence of the five factors that are known to be involved in Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners’ choice between the two English ditransitive constructions. The five factors include animacy of theme (T), definiteness of T, pronominality of recipient (R), length difference between T and R, and semantic class of individual verb. In order to explore how differently the five factors influence Korean EFL learners’ choice between the adpositional construction (AC) and the double object construction (DC), the study used the Korean section of the TOEFL 11 corpus and conducted three correlation tests: ϕ, V, and rpbis. From the results, the following were observed: (1) the length difference between R and T had the strongest effect on the Korean EFL learners’ choice between AC and DC and (2) the relative strength of influence of the five factors examined in the Korean data set was different from those examined in a native English speaker data set. The study ends with a discussion of pedagogical implications of the findings.

Recent change in stative progressives: a collostructional investigation of British English in 1994 and 2014

The spread of the progressive from dynamic to stative verbs started in the seventeenth century, and slowed down in the late twentieth century. The present study investigates recent change in the use of stative progressives in conversational British English from the early 1990s to the early 2010s. The analysis focuses on a total of 100 stative verb lemmata in the spoken, demographic sections of the original and newBritish National Corpus, restricted to a variable context where a progressive could potentially occur. Results indicate that overall, stative progressives have not become more frequent in the last twenty years, and that the group of stative verbs is highly heterogeneous. However, particular verbs, such asexpectandthink,do indeed combine more frequently with the progressive now, which could be the cause of the popular impression of the continuing spread of stative progressives. In addition to a frequency-based analysis, a distinctive collexeme analysis offers a more fine-grained analysis of the collostructional preferences of individual verb lemmata and semantic classes of stative verbs. This analysis reveals that the stative verbs are heterogenous and that the lemmata most distinctly associated with the progressive belong to the group of stance verbs.

The Instrumental Case in the Diachrony of Russian Reflexive Verbs of Emotion: From Cause to Content

ABSTRACTRussian experiencer-subject reflexive verbs of emotion vary greatly in the syntactic encoding of their stimuli: poražatʹsja ‘be astonished’ takes the dative case, while obižat’sja ‘feel offended’ takes na ‘on’ + the accusative case, etc. Based on data from the Russian National Corpus, we show that, despite synchronic variegation, many reflexive verbs have been undergoing a unidirectional drift during the last three centuries: the instrumental encoding of the stimulus has gradually been giving way to lexically determined patterns. The use of the instrumental was motivated by its semantic profile: it was closely associated with the meaning of cause. This syntactic change echoes changes in the construal of the stimulus, whereby its cause-like components weaken and its content-like components come to the fore. The evidence in favour of this hypothesis includes the semantic differences between the instrumental case and the relevant encoding devices, a gradual decrease in the proportion of stimuli that are inanimate, the development of emotive meanings on the basis of physical meanings in individual verbs and lexicalization by which reflexive verbs become emancipated from their transitive counterparts. Semantic and syntactic scenarios in the development of reflexive verbs are later partially replicated by corresponding periphrastic participial constructions.

Towards a valency and argument structure constructicon of English: Turning the valency patternbank into a constructicon

Abstract This article describes the project of a Valency Constructicon, i. e. a constructicon that covers low level valency constructions of individual verbs and links them to more general argument structure constructions. It will be shown how the Erlangen Valency Patternbank can be converted into a constructicon. The project is intended to develop a new type of reference work, but at the same time it can be seen as a test case for constructionist theory with respect to the generalizability of constructions.

Integration of Verb Subcategorization Information in L2 English Sentence Processing by Korean Learners : An Eye-Tracking Study

The present study tested whether adult Korean learners of English are able to immediately integrate verb-specific structural information (i.e. subcategorization restrictions imposed by individual verbs) as they read sentences in English. Seventeen native speakers of English and 22 Korean learners of English participated in an eye-tracking experiment, in which they read English sentences that contained a wh-dependency between the head NP and the verb of a relative clause. The relative clause verbs consisted of three types that varied in terms of subcategorization properties: transitive verbs that take an NP complement more often than a PP complement, transitive verbs that take a PP complement more often than an NP complement, and unaccusative verbs that are strictly intransitive. The results suggest that whereas native speakers use verb subcategorization information in making initial parsing decisions regarding wh-dependency formation, Korean learners are only able to integrate the information in later stages of sentence processing. Possible accounts of this discrepancy in the time course of verb information integration are discussed.

Development of Verb Morphology: From Item-Specificity to Proficient Use

The initial phase of linguistic production by children is char- acterized by rote-learned, lexically restricted forms and con- structions. Only during later phases of language acquisition do they develop flexibility across a paradigm and mix lexical and grammatical material more freely. In the development of verb morphology, a correlation between the use of tense and aspect has been observed in many languages. It has been sug- gested that this leads to an intermediary state of paradigm cat- egorization based on temporal categories. So far the flexibility of individual verbs occurring in different tense-aspect combi- nations has not been examined in detail. Here we evaluate the flexibility of verb use in a large longitudinal corpus of 4 Rus- sian children. We compute the Shannon entropy of verb stems distributed over individual grammatical forms. Results show that children do not pass through a stage of paradigm cate- gorization based on aspecto-temporal categories. After a brief item-specific phase of rote learned forms, they quickly become flexible users of verbs in both aspects.

Discerning cyber threatening incidents from ordinary events using sentiment analysis and logistic regression

Many organizations allow incident reports from the general public. Some of these reports may contain information about threatening incidents, while others may describe ordinary events. Incident classification is the process of distinguishing between incidents and events. We describe an automated incident classification system, which uses logistic regression and sentiment analysis to estimate the likelihood that an event is an incident using its textual description. We trained and validated two different models on one dataset and used a different dataset for testing purposes. The model that performed better utilized sentiment analysis at the sentence level as well as at the level of individual verbs, nouns, and adjectives. It achieved 99% accuracy on the validation set and 100% accuracy on the test set over 50% baseline. Overall, we found that using sentiment score increased the model's accuracy, precision, and recall by at least 10% especially when it is applied on several levels of the text. The difference between our approach and the typical human approach is that in our approach we train the system to recognize incidents before any incident actually takes place and our system can recognize incidents even if their descriptions do not include keywords the system previously encountered.

Reduced Lexical Access to Verbs in Individuals With Subjective Cognitive Decline.

The detection of cognitive impairment in individuals with subjective cognitive decline (SCD) may improve detection of the emergence of Alzheimer's disease (AD) pathology. This detection is challenging, however, given the lack of sensitive assessment tools. The main objective of this study was to determine the potential contribution of word production tasks to the detection of cognitive impairment in SCD. The performances of 20 individuals with SCD, healthy controls (HCs), and individuals with mild cognitive impairment (MCI) were compared on object and action naming and free fluency tasks. Participants with SCD performed similarly to HCs, while both groups differed significantly from participants with MCI in object naming and object fluency. Results showed that participants with SCD were at the midpoint between HCs and participants with MCI in action naming. They also revealed a HCs > SCD = MCI pattern in action fluency. This study provides evidence that verb production is impaired in SCD and that SCD is a pre-MCI condition.

Präfixlose partizipien ii im Westmitteldeutschen: Phonologie oder Perfektivität?

The following paper presents an analysis of the use of ge -Prefix in dialects of German for the formation of the past participle. In order to address the issue of prefixation in West Central German, I have compared two sources of dialect data. First, I have consulted Wenker surveys from the late 19th century and secondly, I have consulted the “Mittelrheinischer Sprachatlas”, which collected a variety of dialect data from around 1980. The pattern of prefixation that emerges from these data shows that West Central German prefixation has preserved the historical German system of not using a prefix in the past participial forms of inherently “perfective” verbs such as finden, kommen, treffen, werden and bringen , though the numbers differ for individual verbs into the 19th century. In the 20th century in these varieties, the pattern appears to be moving away from the “perfective” system towards a new system of prefixation, whereby all past participles get a prefix, except velar-initial verbal roots. Thus, forms such as the participle of geben are majority prefixless, but the participle of bringen is majority prefixed. Furthermore, these prefixation patterns can be seen to define differences between Ripuarian, which mostly retains the old prefixless past participles without much addition, Moselle Franconian, which adds more velar-initial roots to the prefixless group and Rhine Franconian, which generally removes the category of prefixless past participles from the language.

Finding a model for contrastive lexical semantics: A look at verbal communication verbs

A basic problem for contrastive lexical studies in general is to find a model for the semantic analysis. This paper is one in a series of corpus-based contrastive studies of the field of Verbal Communication Verbs (VCVs) in English and Swedish. Searle’s classification of speech acts serves as an important starting point but is not directly concerned with lexical structure, which is a major concern for the two theories that are compared in this study. FrameNet based on Fillmore’s theory of semantic frames and Wierzbicka’s theory of semantic primitives (or “primes”). The theories are applied and tested on data from the English Swedish Parallel Corpus (ESPC) containing English and Swedish original texts together with their translations into the other language. Primarily two groups of English verbs and their Swedish correspondents will be analyzed: (1) Information verbs such as tell, inform, notify, report, narrate and describe and (2) Speech activity verbs such as talk, speak, chat, converse, gossip, discuss, debate, negotiate and bargain. There is also an analysis of Swedish berätta ‘tell, narrate’ based on the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (MPC) as an example of multilingual contrastive analysis. Frames relate in a clear way the conceptual structure and the syntactic argument structure, which is very useful in a contrastive study. However, the definition of the meaning of individual verbs is incomplete and needs to be complemented with some kind of decompositional analysis such as the theory of semantic primes. A special section is devoted to an analysis of a large number of compound and derived forms of the Swedish verb tala ‘speak’ and a discussion of how contrasts in morphological structure can affect the lexical contrasts between two languages.

Verb biases are shaped through lifelong learning.

Verbs often participate in more than 1 syntactic structure, but individual verbs can be biased in terms of whether they are used more often with 1 structure or the other. For instance, in a sentence such as "Bop the bunny with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate an instrument with which to "bop," rather than which "bunny" to bop. Conversely, in a sentence such as "Choose the cow with the flower," the phrase "with the flower" is more likely to indicate which "cow" to choose. An open question is where these biases come from and whether they continue to be shaped in adulthood in a way that has lasting consequences for real-time processing of language. In Experiment 1 we replicated previous findings that these language-wide biases guide online syntactic processing in a computer-based visual-world paradigm. In Experiment 2, we tested the malleability of these biases by exposing adults to initially unbiased verbs situated in unambiguous contexts that led to either instrument or modifier interpretations. During test, participants interpreted sentences containing either modifier- or instrument-trained verbs in ambiguous contexts. Eye-movement and action data show that participants' considerations of the candidate interpretations of the ambiguous with-phrases were guided by the newly learned verb biases. These results suggest that co-occurrence information about specific verbs and syntactic structures embedded in language experiences plays a role in forming, and continuously shaping, the verb biases that constitute a part of the broader representation of the language. (PsycINFO Database Record

Corpus-based transitivity biases in individuals with aphasia

ABSTRACTBackground: This study investigated whether individuals with aphasia (IWA) retain verb biases in expressive language. Verb biases refer to the likelihood that a given verb will occur in different sentence structures. We focused on the likelihood of verbs occurring in transitive and intransitive structures.Aims: The main goal of this study was to determine whether IWA and controls show similar verb biases or whether IWA show a preference for transitive or intransitive structures that supersedes individual verb biases. We also investigated whether IWA show a preference for intransitively or transitively biased verbs, whether verb biases differ as a function of aphasia type, and how verb bias affects errors in IWA’s speech production.Methods & Procedures: The current study analysed 236 transcribed interviews of IWA from AphasiaBank. All uses of 54 verbs were coded based on the sentence structure and the presence of errors. We report data from 11 transitively biased and 11 intransitively biased verbs.Outcomes & Results: IWA’s transitivity biases were indistinguishable from controls’ biases. In addition, IWA produced more intransitively biased verbs than transitively biased verbs overall. In ungrammatical productions, IWA’s error rates were higher in sentence structures that conflicted with verb bias and highest when an intransitively biased verb was attempted in a transitive structure.Conclusions: These findings indicate that IWA are sensitive to verb bias and verb complexity within expressive language. The effects are consistent with previous literature concerning IWA’s sensitivity to verb bias in receptive language tasks and to verb complexity in verb retrieval tasks.

Using VARBRUL for Studying Modal Auxiliary Verbs?

No abstract.

Developmental aspects of English argument structure constructions for Korean-speaking second language learners: Usage-based constructional approaches to language development

This study investigates developmental aspects of English Argument Structure Constructions (ASCs) for Korean-speaking second language (L2) learners, providing evidence of how they manifest human domain-general cognitive systems during language acquisition via usage-based constructional approaches to language development. Participants were instructed on six English ASC types with their representative verbs for three months. The data from grammaticality preference tasks, writing tests, and free-writing tasks were analysed. Comprehension data from the grammaticality preference tasks showed significant improvement in understanding ASCs after instruction, supporting sentence-level generalisations for language comprehension independent of individual verbs. The production data from the writing tests demonstrated more frequent use of two-argument constructions than three-argument ones, which indicates the internal complexity between ASC types. The results of the writing tests also displayed skewed exploitation of verbs representative of the target ASCs, implying a frequency-sensitive nature of language acquisition. All production data further revealed active use of prefabricated chunks and incorporation of new and old language items. Taken all together, these observations suggest language learners’ merging narrowly stabilised L2 routines with other (non-)linguistic resources as necessary, sustaining efficiency in a sentence-building process, under the superintendence of cognitive factors when satisfying communicative intents.

Terminological problems of sia-verbs usage in Ukrainian special texts

In next years, it is necessary to draft and adopt thousands of standards and other normative documents identical to the European ones. This makes it important to formulate and adopt clear and unambiguous rules for drafting these documents. These rules should fully meet the norms of the modern Ukrainian language. One of the problems is related to the usage rules for verbs with affixes -sia (hereinafter referred to as the sia-verbs), which represent about a third (33%) of the total number of Ukrainian verbs. The essence of the problem with these verbs is that under the influence of the Russian language sia-verbs are widely used in passive constructions, which, according to leading Ukrainian linguists, don’t meet the norms of the modern Ukrainian language. The problem with these verbs is that under the influence of the Russian language sia-verbs are still widely used in passive constructions, which, according to leading Ukrainian linguists, don’t meet the norms of the modern Ukrainian language. The purpose of this article is to suggest consistent terms and definitions of basic concepts, which are needed to draft these rules, and clear criteria that would allow clearly distinguish inherent Ukrainian constructions from intruded ones. In the article, the terms for denoting verbs with affixes –sia are analysed and the advantages of the term “sia-verb” over other terms are shown. The confusion behind the usage of the terms “process” and “action”, which are very important for the formulation of rules, is investigated. It is suggested to use the term “process” as a generic term denoting the categorical meaning of the verb as parts of speech, regardless of the specific lexical meanings of an individual verb, and to use the term “action” as specific term denoting the kind of process, which is generated and directly stimulated by a logical subject. It is noted that using these terms for denotation of other concepts is inappropriate, because it can lead to confusion. The difference is shown between the transitivity/intransitivity of a process as a semantic concept and the transitivity/intransitivity of verbs that name these processes. In semantics, the criterion of process transitivity is the direction of the process and its extension to a logical object other that the logical subject. Classification of verbs by transitivity is solely based on a formally morphological criterion associated with a grammatical object, which may or may not be required by the verb used in a certain meaning. Examples are given, which demonstrate that the semantic and grammatical approaches to transitivity do not always match. It is shown that for sia-verbs, the main and primary meaning is the reflexive one (broadly speaking, this is the meaning of an intransitive process, which is focused, looped within the realm of the logical subject that, at the same time, can be the logical object). There have been selected nine sub-meanings of the reflexive meaning, that convey different shades of reflexivety – from processes focused on the logical subject to the processes having a very wide general relation to it, including ones that convey permanent and defining intransitive possessive abilities (properties). The names for these sub-meanings present in the literature have been analyzed and a consistent system of Ukrainian terms is suggested for them. These terms are built based on a pattern, which, on the one hand, makes these specific concepts’ relation with the generic concept “reverse meaning” obvious thanks to the generic characteristic, and, on the other hand, explicitly shows the difference of every specific concept from other subordinate concepts via their delimiting characteristics. Five of these terms are generally accepted, one is chosen from the options available in the literature, but three more terms are suggested from the scratch to meet the requirement of being systematic. Thereby, the Ukrainian language naturally uses the sia-verb in the situations, where the speaker treats the process as intransitive one, i.e. there is no logical subject separated from the logical object. Therefore intransitivity / transitivity of processes is the criterion that makes it possible to distinguish inherent Ukrainian reflexive and impersonal constructions from intruded ones.

Chinese as satellite-framed

This article defends the position taken by Talmy that Mandarin Chinese is satellite-framed, and thus argues against Slobin and Chen and Guo that Mandarin is ‘equipollently-framed’. The approach we take is constructional and cognitive in that we draw insights from Construction Grammar and Cognitive Grammar, though it is not restricted to either of them. A more unconventional view of the clause structure in Chinese is first presented, examining the so-called ‘complex sentences’ from a cognitive perspective. The consequence of this view is that the notion of ‘equipollent-framed language’ for Chinese can be abandoned and thus tidying up Talmy’s original typology. It is further argued that the constructional-cognitive view of Chinese captures the structural intuitions more appropriately than a traditional generative account, and that the motion-directional structure in Chinese has been constructionalized to the extent that individual verbs in the construction merge but produce a structure with more than their total properties.

A Study on Properties Description of the Individual Verb “teol-da” for Building Semantic Network of Korean

A Study on Properties Description of the Individual Verb “teol-da” for Building Semantic Network of Korean