It has been noted repeatedly that although many verbs do occur in both syntactic patterns, some verbs only occur in one of the two patterns. For example, verbs such as cost and deny are widely described as occurring only with the DO construction whereas verbs such as drag and yell only with the PO construction. In addition, although certain verbs have been observed in both syntactic patterns, t...

In this paper, we intend to describe and discuss the grammatical status of V1-V2 (Cy/vy) constructions found in Mbya Guarani which can express simultaneous events, among other meanings, involve a single clause. We suggest here that verbal complex be treated as case asymmetrical serialization because it contains verbs from major lexical class, occupying V1 slot, followed by more restricted intra...

Inference about whether a word in one text has similar meaning to another word in the other text is an essential task in order to understand whether two texts have similar meaning. However, this inference becomes difficult especially when two words do not share a lexical root, do not have the same argument structure, or do not have the same part-of-speech. This paper presents an unsupervised ap...

This paper describes an approach to detect the organization of semantic subclasses of Japanese verbs. First, we classify verbs along two dimensions: thematic and aspectual. In the thematic dimension, we exploit the pattern of case marking particles which are attached to arguments of verbs. In the aspectual dimension, we exploit the classi cation of adverbs which modify verbs in a corpus. By com...

Tracking groups of people is a challenging problem. Groups may grow or shrink dynamically with merging and splitting of individuals and conventional trackers are not designed to handle such cases. In this study, the authors present a conjoint individual and group tracking (CIGT) framework based on particle filter and online learning. CIGT has four complementary phases: two-phase association, fa...

This paper shows that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e. the verbs meaning ‘kill’ in English, Chinese and Thai. Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dea...

In this thesis, I have investigated the properties of simple and complex verbs in Jaminjung and Ngaliwurru, two varieties of a typologically unusual Australian language. Its unusual characteristic is that two distinct lexical categories take over the functions that verbs have in most other languages. One of these is a closed class consisting of only 30 members or so. Since these roots take verb...

Coercion verbs have been taken to include not only aspectual verbs like begin, start, and finish but also psychological verbs such as enjoy, endure, and savor and control verbs like try and attempt. Their unifying property has been assumed to be that they select for eventive complements (e.g. John began/enjoyed reading the book/the meeting). On this view, the composition of an entity-denoting e...

We use children's noun learning as a probe into the nature of their syntactic prediction mechanism and statistical knowledge on which that is based. focus verb-based predictions, considering two possibilities: predictions might rely distributional about specific verbs–i.e. they be lexicalized–or general to all verbs. In an intermodal preferential looking experiment, we establish are lexicalized...