The acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (Atay, 2010; Can, 2009; Chay, 2006, & Kras, 2007, among others). In the present study, ‘Predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. There are three English verb-types which seem to be more problematic for Persian EFL learners: (a)...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

Natural language can be easily understood by everyone irrespective of their differences in age or region or qualification. The existence of a conceptual base that underlies all natural languages is an accepted claim as pointed out by Schank in his Conceptual Dependency (CD) theory. Inspired by the CD theory and theories in Indian grammatical tradition, we propose a new set of meaning primitives...