The creativity of natural language poses a significant theoretical problem. One example of this is denominal verbs (those derived from nouns) such as spoon in “She spooned me some sugar”. Traditional generative approaches typically posit a unique entry in the lexicon for this usage, though this approach has difficulty scaling. Construction Grammar has evolved as a competing theory which instead...

Can regular and irregular verb forms be accommodated by a single representational mechanism or is a dual mechanism account required? In a first experiment, we used a cross-modal repetition priming paradigm to investigate the mental representation of regular and irregular verb forms in French. Participants heard a spoken prime (such as aimons, ‘we love’) immediately followed by lexical decision ...

This paper deals with a well-known problem in the discussion of argument linking, the flexibility that we find with particular verbs, and the constraints governing the integration of verbs with so-called argument structure constructions. We will show that traditional approaches as well as construction grammar need additional machinery to deal with variable argument linking. I will present an op...

I consider two semantic issues concerning will-sentences: Stalnaker’s Asymmetry and modal subordination in Karttunen-type discourses. The former prima facie points to drawing a distinction between will and modal verbs, as it seems to show that will does not license non-specific indefinites. The latter points in the opposite direction, suggesting that will-sentences involve some kind of modality...

Due to Brexit, the UK has been involved in a continuous political debate between Boris Johnson, Prime Minister, and Jeremy Corbyn, leader of opposition. This paper compares analyses modality used corpus consisting their speeches until Brexit day. Modal verbs are express ability, possibility, willingness, certainty, obligation necessity. Politicians’ choice certain words can be useful tool affec...

Universal Dependencies (UD) is a project that is developing crosslinguistically consistent treebank annotation for many languages, with the goal of facilitating multilingual parser development, cross-lingual learning and linguistic research from a language typology perspective. It is a merger and extension of several previous efforts aimed at finding unified approaches to parts of speech, morph...

Spanish and other Romance languages inherited from Latin the seeds of a new construction that is common to the syntax of some verbs belonging to the field of emotions, feelings, pain or modality. The semantic values of this construction are strange to prototypical transitivity and are coupled with a marked argument structure, compared with the more common transitive sentence. In the early centu...