Certain verbs (e.g. bend, break) can undergo the causative alternation, appearing both in a transitive form (John bent the lever) and an intransitive form (The lever bent). To explain this alternation, linguists have proposed that the transitive form of the alternation conveys an action with an explicitly causative structure— for example that John bent the lever indirectly conveys the propositi...

Children use syntax to guide verb learning. We asked whether the syntactic structure in which a novel verb occurs is meaningful to children even without a concurrent scene from which to infer the verb's semantic content. In two experiments, 2-year-olds observed dialogues in which interlocutors used a new verb in transitive ("Jane blicked the baby!") or intransitive ("Jane blicked!") sentences. ...

PREFACE 1. CONVERGENT. Does the set of cyclic operators have a non-empty interior?... 2. WEIGHTED. Is every part of a weighted shift similar to a weighted shift?. . . . 3. INVARIANT. If an intransitive operator has an inverse, is its inverse also intransitive? 4. TRIANGULAR. Is every normal operator the sum of a diagonal operator and a compact one? 5. DILATED. Is every subnormal Toeplitz operat...

Abstract This paper concerns clausal embedding in Washo (also spelled Washoe, Wáˑšiw), a highly endangered Hokan/isolate language spoken around Lake Tahoe the United States. We argue that offers evidence both complementation and modification are available strategies for subordination, doing so contribute more generally to ongoing debate about how clauses embedded by attitude verbs. observe of c...

The applicative construction in Barupu (Macro-Skou family from northern New Guinea) performs all the functions expected of an applicative: it is a valencyincreasing construction that adds an object to a verb, similar to the relationship between the intransitive ‘be afraid’ and the transitive ‘fear’ in English. The applicative object behaves the same as the base object of a transitive verb with ...

This paper is about the impersonal passive construction of which modern Irish, a VSO language, has two forms. The impersonal passive form occurs with all verbs of Irish, across all tenses, whether intransitive or transitive. In the second form, the impersonal passive form is to be found productively with the substantive verb (one of the two verbs of ‘to be’ in Irish) across all tenses. It does ...

This paper makes a study of the derivation non-canonical object construction in Mandarin Chinese. In light transitivity verbs, two cases NOC are discussed: a) with transitive verbs and b) unergative verbs. Based on theory phase extension, mixture direct properties PP can be explained that is licensed by both preposition verb.

Knowledge of mechanisms is critical for causal reasoning. We contrasted two possible organizations of causal knowledge—an interconnected causal network, where events are causally connected without any boundaries delineating discrete mechanisms; or a set of disparate mechanisms—causal islands—such that events in different mechanisms are not thought to be related even when they belong to the same...

This paper proposes that the set of frequencies that the human language processor keeps track of are those that are useful to it in learning. In a computational experimental setting, we investigate four linguistically motivated features which distinguish subclasses of intransitive verbs, and suggest that those features that are the most useful to automatically classify verbs into lexical semant...

In Cognitive Linguistics, meaning resides in conceptual-ization and grammar is seen as being meaningful. Cog-nitive semantics provides an array of well-motivated de-scriptive constructs allowing a revealing description ofsemantic and grammatical structure. The linguist ev-idence sheds light on human conceptual abilities thatneed to be accommodated in models of cognitive ...