1.1 General introduction One of the most challenging areas for infants acquiring English as their native language are multi-word verbs: There many different kinds of such verbs – e.g., prepositional verbs, phrasal verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations, in Quirk, Greenbaum, Leech, and Svartvik’s (1985) terminology – and they come with different kinds of semantics and sy...

Let ďc be computable reducibility on ceers. We show that for every computably enumerable equivalence relation (or ceer) R with infinitely many equivalence classes, the index sets ti : Ri ďc Ru (with R non-universal), ti : Ri ěc Ru, and ti : Ri ”c Ru are Σ3 complete, whereas in case R has only finitely many equivalence classes, we have that ti : Ri ďc Ru is Π2 complete, and ti : Ri ěc Ru (with R...

Many studies show a developmental advantage for transitive sentences with familiar verbs over those with novel verbs. It might be that once familiar verbs become entrenched in particular constructions, they would be more difficult to understand (than would novel verbs) in non-prototypical constructions. We provide support for this hypothesis investigating German children using a forced-choice p...

this study aims to investigate the semantic and syntactic features of verbs used in the introduction section of applied linguistics research articles published in iranian and international journals. a corpus of 20 research article introductions (10 from each journal) was used. the corpus was analysed for the syntactic features (tense, aspect and voice) and semantic meaning of verbs. the finding...

We introduce a project to enhance a valency lexicon of Czech verbs with semantic roles. For this purpose, we make use of FrameNet. At the present stage, frame elements from FrameNet have been mapped to valency complementations of verbs of communication and verbs of exchange. The feasibility of this task has been proven by the achieved inter-annotator agreement – 95.6% for the verbs of communica...

Motion verbs in languages convey the meanings of spatiotemporal change. Ontologies that deal with spatial actions can benefit from the study of such verbs and their usage. This paper explores semantic components of motion related verbs and verb complexes. Such semantics components assume certain spatial primitives and intuitions which need to be considered in the context of ontologies derived f...

We prove that every disjoint NP-pair is polynomial-time, many-one equivalent to the canonical disjoint NP-pair of some propositional proof system. Therefore, the degree structure of the class of disjoint NP-pairs and of all canonical pairs is identical. Secondly, we show that this degree structure is not superficial: Assuming there exist P-inseparable disjoint pairs, there exist intermediate di...

Agrammatic aphasics do not exhibit a normal pattern of verb production; their spontaneous speech is said to lack verbs, and the verbs that are produced lack inflection. The current article focuses on the lexical, morphological, and syntactic aspects of verbs in spontaneous speech of a group of Dutch agrammatic speakers. Dutch is a so-called verb-second language in which the finite verb in the m...