In Cognitive Linguistics, meaning resides in conceptual-ization and grammar is seen as being meaningful. Cog-nitive semantics provides an array of well-motivated de-scriptive constructs allowing a revealing description ofsemantic and grammatical structure. The linguist ev-idence sheds light on human conceptual abilities thatneed to be accommodated in models of cognitive ...

In this paper we explore the role of verb frequencies and the number of clusters in soft-clustering approaches as a tool for automatic semantic classification. Relying on a large-scale setup including 4,871 base verb types and 3,173 complex verb types, and focusing on synonymy as a taskindependent goal in semantic classification, we demonstrate that low-frequency German verbs are clustered sign...

In this paper, we address the automatic induction of synonym paraphrases for the empirically challenging class of German particle verbs. Similarly to Cocos and Callison-Burch (2016), we incorporate a graph-based clustering approach for word sense discrimination into an existing paraphrase extraction system, (i) to improve the precision of synonym identification and ranking, and (ii) to enlarge ...

In this study we investigate the prosody of Italian Particle Verbs (henceforth, PrtV's). After comparing two alternative hypotheses about the prosodic constituent PrtV's correspond to, we concentrate on three rules of Italian phonology that differ in their domain of application: the phonological word (ω) vs. the phonological phrase (φ). We then report on a production experiment carried out with...

The translation of English phrasal verbs (PVs) into French is a challenge, specially when the verb occurs apart from the particle. Our goal is to quantify how well current SMT paradigms can translate split PVs into French. We compare two inhouse SMT systems, phrase-based and hierarchical, in translating a test set of PVs. Our analysis is based on a carefully designed evaluation protocol for ass...

The acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (Atay, 2010; Can, 2009; Chay, 2006, & Kras, 2007, among others). In the present study, ‘Predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. There are three English verb-types which seem to be more problematic for Persian EFL learners: (a)...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

Scope and semimodal verbs: two approaches In this paper I focus on scope phenomena connected with semimodal (and modal) verbs and mainly on the syntactic behaviour of these groups of verbs. One important question is: why can semimodal verbs (and modal verbs in epistemic use) not have perfect and future tense forms? Taking among other things Reichenbach’s tense system as a starting point I try t...

Particles in German have the capacity to introduce new arguments when they combine with a verb. Based on this observation, I argue that the internal arguments of a particle verb are always introduced by the particle. I suggest that this follows from the fact that syntactically, the particle is the head of a maximal projection that occupies the single complement position of the verb; therefore, ...

This paper presents experiments on using VerbNet as a resource for understanding unknown verbs encountered by a spoken dialog system. Coverage of unknown verbs in a corpus of spoken dialogs about computer purchasing is assessed, and two methods for automatically integrating representations of verbs found in VerbNet are explored. The first identifies VerbNet classes containing verbs already defi...