How does language influence the emotions and actions of large audiences? Functionally, emotions help address environmental uncertainty by constraining the body to support adaptive responses and social coordination. We propose emotions provide a similar function in language processing by constraining the mental simulation of language content to facilitate comprehension, and to foster alignment o...

Much work has demonstrated that speakers of verb-final languages are able to construct rich syntactic representations in advance of verb information. This may reflect general architectural properties of the language processor, or it may only reflect a language-specific adaptation to the demands of verb-finality. The present study addresses this issue by examining whether speakers of a verb-medi...

This paper describes a framework for an agent to learn verbphrase meanings from human teachers and combine these models with environmental dynamics so the agent can enact verb commands from the human teacher. This style of human/agent interaction allows the human teacher to issue natural-language commands and demonstrate ground actions, thereby alleviating the need for advanced teaching interfa...

Standard Dutch and German have two reflexive forms: a weak form (zich in Dutch and sich in German) and a strong form (zichzelf in Dutch and sich selbst in German). The choice between the two reflexive forms in Dutch has been explained by the selectional restrictions of the verb, distinguishing between three verb classes: inherently reflexive verbs, accidentally reflexive verbs and transitive ve...

This paper proposes a method to correct English verb form errors made by non-native speakers. A basic approach is template matching on parse trees. The proposed method improves on this approach in two ways. To improve recall, irregularities in parse trees caused by verb form errors are taken into account; to improve precision, n-gram counts are utilized to filter proposed corrections. Evaluatio...

This paper addresses some problems about the semantics of two groups of transitive verbs that are intensional in certain ways. One group is that of creation verbs, such as ‘assemble’, ‘bake’, ‘build’, and ‘manufacture’. The other is that of depiction verbs, such as ‘draw’, ‘sketch’, ‘caricature’, ‘sculpt’, ‘write (about)’, ‘imagine’, and ‘fantasize’. Depiction verbs, and creation verbs in the p...

Prepositional phrase attachment was investigated in temporarily ambiguous sentences. Both attachment site (noun phrase or verb phrase) and argument status (argument or adjunct) were manipulated to test the hypothesis that arguments are processed differently than adjuncts. Contrary to this hypothesis, some previous research suggested that arguments and adjuncts are initially processed in the sam...

To establish links between a large number of reviews and events, we propose a web reviews and events matching approach by event feature segments and semi-Markov conditional random fields (CRFs). We extract named entities and verb phrases from reviews as event feature segments. We use semi-Markov CRFs to label the reviews and to recognize event feature segments at the segment level. This approac...

Abstract This study examines how tone sandhi domains (TSDs) are determined in Fuzhou. The data include: (i) regular verb-object phrases (VOs) where the verb takes a direct bare noun object; and (ii) non-canonical VOs an adverbial expression as surface object. Several observations made. First, three-way exists within every TSD. All antepenultimate syllables neutralize to low tones. A penultimate...

Depiction Verbs and the Definiteness E ff ect  Introduction This paper is part of a longer project on the semantics of depiction verbs and their associated relational nouns. Depiction verbs include verbs for physical acts, such as ' draw' (with relational noun ' drawing'), 'sketch', 'caricature', 'sculpt', 'write (about)', and verbs for mental ones, such as 'visualize', 'imagine', and 'fantasi...