The Embodied Cognition Framework maintains that understanding actions requires motor simulations subserved in part by premotor and primary motor regions. This hypothesis predicts that disturbances to these regions should impair comprehension of action verbs but not non-action verbs. We evaluated the performances of 10 patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) and 10 normal comparison (NC) particip...

Understanding which verb argument structure (VAS) features (if any) are part of verbs' lexical entries and under which conditions they are accessed provides information on the nature of lexical representations and sentence construction. We investigated neural and behavioral effects of three understudied VAS characteristics (number of subcategorization options, number of thematic options and ove...

The resulting denominal verb (DV) has the full syntactic and morphological distribution of any verb in West Greenlandic. It also retains some of the properties of the incorporated nominal, which has led some researchers to analyze this construction as a kind of NI. However, as Sapir (1911), Mithun (1986) and others have argued, it has little in common with NI constructions in languages like Moh...

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 theory-of-mind (ToM) network refers to a specific group of brain regions implicated in the thinking of people's mental states. It remains unclear how this network contributes to verb comprehension. In the present study, we compared brain activations evoked by verbs that refer to social actions, private actions, and nonhuman events. All classic regions of the ToM network, including the poste...

I provide a unified account of a constraint on adjunction observed in three complex predicate constructions in Japanese: (i) restructuring motion verb constructions, (ii) light verb constructions, (iii) infinitives with wasure‘forget’. It is shown that adjunction (i.e. adverbial modification, adjectival modification, and quantifier raising) in the lower projections are impossible in these const...