We discuss the characteristics and behaviour of two parallel classes of verbs in two Romance languages, French and Portuguese. Examples of these verbs are Port. abater [gado] and Fr. abattre [bétail], both meaning ‘slaughter [cattle]’. Such collocations are intermediate cases between verbal idioms and largely free verb phrases. Precise knowledge of these verbs would aid recognition of verb sens...

Although the age of acquisition of a language has an effect when learning a second language, the similarity between languages may also have a crucial role. The aim of the present study is to understand the influence of this latter factor in the acquisition of morphosyntactic information. With this purpose, two groups of highly proficient early Catalan-Spanish bilinguals were presented with a re...

This study investigates semantic constraints affecting the order of motion morphemes in Mandarin multi-morpheme motion constructions (e.g., tui-hui recede-return). It classifies Chinese motion morphemes into three major types and proposes a “Scalar Specificity Constraint” to account for the order in multi-morpheme motion constructions. The constraint not only provides a better coverage of the d...

In this paper we address the question of which transitive verbs allow there-insertion in Danish. We propose that two constraints have to be met in order for verbs to appear in Danish there-constructions. Firstly, as have been noted by others, an empty direct object position must be available. This constraint is not sufficient for restricting the set of verbs in there-constructions. We further p...

The paper presents a procedure for generating prefixed verbs in Croatian comprising combinations of one, two or three prefixes. The result of this generation process is a pool of derivationally valid prefixed verbs, although not necessarily occuring in corpora. The statistics of occurences of generated verbs in Croatian National Corpus has been calculated. Further usage of such language resourc...

We discuss the characteristics and behaviour of two parallel classes of verbs in two Romance languages, French and Portuguese. Examples of these verbs are Port. abater [gado] and Fr. abattre [bétail], both meaning ‘slaughter [cattle]’. Such collocations are intermediate cases between verbal idioms and largely free verb phrases. Precise knowledge of these verbs would aid recognition of verb sens...

The presentation summarizes the results of a recent (2002) corpus-based study on the syntactic argument structure of German separable verbs, in particular the question of its predictability from the argument structure of their bases. The study shows that the argument structure effects of verb formation with separable preverbs are astonishingly regular, even if the meaning of the resulting compl...

The present paper focuses on the Mandarin Intransitive keflexive Verbs. These verbs, such as zi-sha 'to commit suicide', and zi fen 'to burn oneself, are formed with a reflexive morpheme zi-'self' and a root verb. Take the verb zi-sha 'to commit suicide' for example, the reflexive morpheme contributes the reflexive meaning and the root verb sha 'to kill' contributes the meaning`to kill'; hence,...