meaning. As Lehmann (1995[1982]:129) puts it, “[g]rammaticalization rips off the lexical features until only the grammatical features are left”. The original meaning of a grammaticalizing item plays an important role in its further development (Hopper & Traugott 1993:3). That is, the etymology of a grammaticalizing item constrains its subsequent grammatical functions. This property is called pe...

Modal verbs in English are challenging to learn by speakers of other languages. The purpose of thiswas to shed light on the use of gesture in learning English modal verbs by Persian-speaking children.To achieve this, 60 elementary Iranian learners, studying at some institutes in Karaj took part in thisstudy. The participants were randomly put into one experimental group and one control group. T...

In this paper, we try the classification of adverbs. The method for classifying adverbs is not known well, compared with nouns or verbs. The difficulty comes from vagueness of the relation between adverbs and other words. Using a corpus and an existing thesaurus, we investigate the elements which play an important role in the classification of adverbs. We got experimental results which showed t...

In languages like German or Dutch, the distinction between unergative and unaccusative verbs is borne out by a number of syntactic tests. Unergative verbs appear in impersonal passives while unaccusative verbs do not (cf. Perlmutter (1978)). Unergative verbs select the perfect auxiliary haben/hebben (to have) while unaccusative verbs select sein/zijn (to be) (cf. Hoekstra (1984)). Unaccusative ...

Romanian auxiliary verbs exhibit certain peculiar properties that set them aside from other Romance counterparts. It will be suggested that the di erences between Romanian auxiliaries and French and Italian auxiliaries can be accounted for in terms of di erent syntactic structures. While in French and in Italian the auxiliary verb, the non nite one and the complements combine in a at structure,...

During the Root Infinitive (RI) stage children produce both stative and eventive finite verbs, but their non-finite verbs are restricted to eventive predicates (Hoekstra & Hyams, 1998; Wijnen, 1997). This Eventivity Constraint (EC) holds cross-linguistically – for RIs in Dutch, German, French, and Russian, ‘bare perfectives’ in Greek, bare participles (participles without an auxiliary) in Itali...