Coercion verbs have been taken to include not only aspectual verbs like begin, start, and finish but also psychological verbs such as enjoy, endure, and savor and control verbs like try and attempt. Their unifying property has been assumed to be that they select for eventive complements (e.g. John began/enjoyed reading the book/the meeting). On this view, the composition of an entity-denoting e...

Patients with probable Alzheimer's disease (AD) have difficulty understanding verbs. To investigate the neural basis for this deficit, the authors used functional magnetic resonance imaging to examine patterns of neural activation during verb processing in 11 AD patients compared with 16 healthy seniors. Subjects judged the pleasantness of verbs, including MOTION verbs and COGNITION verbs. Heal...

The paper describes an attempt of identifying Urdu verb classes on the basis of the distribution of light verbs with different main verbs. We started with a frequency analysis of main + light verb sequences. The analysis of that data lead us to a thorough manual analysis of main + light verb sequences by using native speaker judgments. We focused on the three most frequent light verbs dE 'give'...

A novel analysis of aspectual verbs is proposed according to which aspectual verbs are heads of functional projections rather than main verbs taking clausal complements. As a case study, four Japanese aspectual verbs are analyzed: those that express inception (hajime‘begin’), continuation (tsuzuke‘continue’), and termination (oe‘finish’, and owar‘end’). Employing data from previous studies, Jap...

Light verbs pose an a challenge in linguistics because of its syntactic and semantic versatility and its unique distribution different from regular verbs with higher semantic content and selectional resrictions. Due to its light grammatical content, earlier natural language processing studies typically put light verbs in a stop word list and ignore them. Recently, however, classification and id...

A subset of German function verbs can be used either in a full, concrete, 'heavy' ("take a computer") or in a more metaphorical, abstract or 'light' meaning ("take a shower", no actual 'taking' involved). The present magnetoencephalographic (MEG) study explored whether this subset of 'light' verbs is represented in distinct cortical processes. A random sequence of German 'heavy', 'light', and p...