Objectives: Nouns and verbs are the central conceptual linguistic units of language acquisition in all human languages. While the noun-bias hypothesis claims that nouns have a privilege in children’s lexical development across languages, studies on Mandarin and Korean and other languages have challenged this view. More recent cross-linguistic naming studies on children in German, Turkish,...

We directly compare children learning argument expressing and argument dropping languages on the use of verb meaning and syntactic cues, by examining enactments of transitive and intransitive verbs given in transitive and intransitive syntactic frames. Our results show similarities in the children's knowledge: (1) Children were somewhat less likely to perform an action when the core meaning of ...

We report a study that explored the mechanisms used in hypothesizing meanings for novel motion predicates (verbs and prepositions) cross-linguistically. Motion stimuli were presented to English- and Greek-speaking adults and preschoolers accompanied by (a) a novel intransitive verb, (b) a novel transitive verb, (c) a novel transitive preposition, or (d) no novel predicate. Our study provides ev...

The current paper focuses on a descriptive approach to valency decreasing in five SESL (Amharic, Kɨstane, Məsqan, Harari and Endəgaɲ). As result, simple viewpoint does not compel the data analysis comply with an explicitly theorized framework. By using elicitation method, native speakers were consulted access data. It has been debated whether value is semantic or syntactic concept. concept, it ...

Current syntactic accounts of English resultatives are based on the assumption that result XPs are predicated of underlying direct objects. This assumption has helped to explain the presence of reflexive pronouns with some intransitive verbs but not others and the apparent lack of result XPs predicated of subjects of transitive verbs. We present problems for and counterexamples to some of the b...

Languages group verbs in different ways. Because of the ergative feature Zazaki, it plays a big role whether are transitive or intransitive. Zaza Language introduces some pronouns to distinguish double-transitive from and intransitive verbs. In linguistic works, terms used synonymously. This article aims scrutinize ditransitive constructions language, which has interesting syntactic elements th...

How do children map linguistic representations onto the conceptual structures that they encode? In the present studies, we provided 3–4-year-old children with minimal-pair scene contrasts in order to determine the effect of particular event properties on novel verb learning. Specifically, we tested whether spatiotemporal cues to causation also inform children’s interpretation of transitive verb...

As far as the transitivity of AF verbs is concerned, there are two conflicting hypotheses in the Austronesian literature. In the ergative hypothesis (Starosta 1997), AF verbs are uniformly identified as antipassive/intransitive; in the symmetrical-voice hypothesis (Kroeger 1993), AF verbs are claimed to be able to occur as transitive on a par with NAF verbs. In this paper, we address the issue ...

“Noun phrase number is a privileged source of information as to the semantic structure of predicates.” So concludes a recent article by Lidz, Gleitman, and Gleitman (2003: 169), which purports to demonstrate the viability of a “universalist” mapping between syntax and semantics as opposed to an “emergentist” view of the mapping, attributed to Goldberg (1999) and Tomasello (2000). Lidz et al. (2...