This paper explores the nature of thematic information made available when a verb is accessed during sentence comprehension. Following Shapiro, Zurif, and Grimshaw (1987), a cross-modal lexical decision (interference) task was employed to examine whether either the number of argument structures or the number of participant (thematic) roles inherent in a verb cause an increase in processing load...

In a serial verb construction (SVC), two or more verbs combine in single clause without any morphosyntactic marking of linking subordination. However, the way which different linguists interpret and diagnose this description is continual source controversy. There are assumptions about nature verbhood clausehood as well disagreements over how to particular languages. Despite fuzzy category, SVCs...

Existing treebanks of Mandarin Chinese such as the Sinica Treebank, the Harbin Institute of Technology Treebank, and the Penn Chinese Treebank, parse Chinese serial verb constructions incorrectly or inconsistently in terms of headedness, i.e. which verb to be assigned with the label of syntactic and/or semantic “head”. Aspectual markers in serial verb constructions can help determine the head o...

Verbs are important in semantic understanding of natural language. Traditional verb representations, such as FrameNet, PropBank, VerbNet, focus on verbs’ roles. These roles are too coarse to represent verbs’ semantics. In this paper, we introduce verb patterns to represent verbs’ semantics, such that each pattern corresponds to a single semantic of the verb. First we analyze the principles for ...

background and aims: considering the fact that different components of linguistic knowledge are not equally vulnerable, this study investigated the knowledge of argument structure of verbs in a group of deaf persian speakers, as people who have been deprived of linguistic data during the early years of their childhood that is the critical period of language acquisition. methods: in this study, ...

This paper examines issues related to transitivity in Chinese, looking in particular at verb use in non-referential contexts. Four variants of non-referential verb use involving generic bare nouns and postverbal manner adverbs are analyzed. It is suggested that in these cases of non-referential verb use, the verb is first merged with an adverbial complement, and then copied to yield the verb co...