Abstract This paper provides new evidence in support of the hypothesis that syntax–prosody mapping Intonational Phrases is flexible (Hamlaoui and Szendr?i 2015). In traditional ‘rigid’ approaches, are taken to map onto particular syntactic projections. contrast, ‘flexible’ approach, Phrase corresponds highest projection verb (HVP). Accordingly, approach predicts HVP should also determine size a...

This article aims at contrasting aspectual oppositions in English and Persian in the context of the novel The Old Man and the Sea, and its translation by Daryabandari (1983) as the data. Unlike English, in Persian perfective and imperfective forms are morphologically marked. While the vast majority of English simple past forms are translated into Persian by past perfective forms, only less than...

Patients with Parkinson's disease (PD) are impaired in verb production. Interpretations range from grammatical deficits to semantic-conceptual decay of action representation. The verb production deficit in PD can also be considered a dysexecutive disorder, specifically, a deficit of selection processing during word production, due to corticostriatal damage. Producing verbs is "more difficult" t...

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...

We conduct a cross-modal priming experiment to determine the mental representation and access strategies for compound verbs (CV) in Bangla. Analysis of reaction time indicates that compositionality among CVs triggers priming effects for both the constituent verbs. On the other hand non-compositional CVs exhibit priming only for the polar verb. Thus, compositional CVs are decomposed into their c...

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...

We present conditions under which verb phrases are elided based on a corpus of positive and negative examples. Factor that affect verb phrase ellipsis include: the distance between antecedent and ellipsis site, the syntactic relation between antecedent and ellipsis site, and the presence or absence of adjuncts. Building on these results, we examine where in the generation architecture a trainab...

Given the restrictions on the subjects and objects that any given verb may take, it seems likely that children might learn verbs partly by exploiting statistical regularities in cooccurrences between verbs and noun phrases. Pronouns are the most common NPs in the speech that children hear. We demonstrate that pronouns systematically partition several important classes of verbs, and that a simpl...