The authors assessed comprehension of carefully matched classes of words, manipulating grammatical subcategory (noun and verb) and semantic (concrete and abstract) characteristics for participants with semantic dementia (SD) or probable Alzheimer's disease (AD). Participants selected the best of four words that matched a verbal description. Participants with AD or SD were significantly impaired...

The current study addresses the extent of phonological planning during spontaneous sentence production. Previous work shows that at articulation, phonological encoding occurs for entire phrases, but encoding beyond the initial phrase may be due to the syntactic relevance of the verb in planning the utterance. I conducted three experiments to investigate whether phonological planning crosses mul...

English was long considered the only language to possess Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), a process in which a verb phrase, identified in many standard accounts with the vP, goes missing under identity with the vP of an antecedent clause. An example of VPE in English is given in (1), where the elements struck through are not pronounced. A schematization of the relevant part of the structure is given...

This study examined the relationship between verb retrieval and verb-argument-structure properties in seven agrammatic aphasic patients using tasks requiring access to the verb's lexicon for both comprehension- and productionlike processes. Results showed intact comprehension of both nouns and verbs and noun naming, but impaired naming of verbs. Subjects also demonstrated near-normal performanc...

This paper presents the automatic extraction of Complex Predicates (CPs) in Bengali with a special focus on compound verbs (Verb + Verb) and conjunct verbs (Noun /Adjective + Verb). The lexical patterns of compound and conjunct verbs are extracted based on the information of shallow morphology and available seed lists of verbs. Lexical scopes of compound and conjunct verbs in consecutive sequen...

This paper investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of counterfactual attitude verbs in Taiwanese Southern Min, showing the differences between this type of attitude verbs and those discussed by Anand and Hacquard (2013). I propose that the semantics of counterfactual attitude verbs is composed of two components, a doxastic assertion and a counterfactual felicity condition, the former...

A verb particle construction (VPC) classification scheme gleaned from linguistic sources has been used to assess its usefulness for identifying issues in decomposability. Linguistic sources have also been used to inform the features suitable for use in building an automatic classifier for the scheme with a series of good performance results. The notions of how to define the task of computing ph...

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...