The current endeavour focuses on the notion of positive versus negative polarity preference of verbs for their direct objects. This preference has to be distinguished from a verb’s own prior polarity for the same verb, these two properties might even be inverse. Polarity preferences of verbs are extracted on the basis of a large and dependencyparsed corpus by means of statistical measures. We o...

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:...

This paper addresses some problems about the semantics of two groups of transitive verbs that are intensional in certain ways. One group is that of creation verbs, such as ‘assemble’, ‘bake’, ‘build’, and ‘manufacture’. The other is that of depiction verbs, such as ‘draw’, ‘sketch’, ‘caricature’, ‘sculpt’, ‘write (about)’, ‘imagine’, and ‘fantasize’. Depiction verbs, and creation verbs in the p...

What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easie...

Lexically based learning and semantic analogy may both play a role in the learning of grammar. To investigate this, 5-year-old German children were trained on a miniature language (nominally English) involving two grammatical constructions, each of which was associated with a different semantic verb class. Training was followed by elicited production and grammaticality judgement tests with ‘tra...

This paper aims at a lexical description of frequent uses of frequent lexical verbs in Swedish on the background of Czech, with some implications for the lexical description of such verb uses verbs in general. It results in a draft of a production lexicon of Swedish frequent verbs for advanced Czech learners of Swedish, with focus on their uses as light verbs. The introductory sections (1 and 2...

A focused constituent contains the most prominent stress of the clause (Selkirk 1984, Reinhart 1995). Reinhart accounts for this by a PF/LF mapping rule. I extend this view to Hungarian, a language with contrastive focus movement, and show that a range of data, some of which pose a problem for a featuredriven approach, can be accounted for straightforwardly. Among these are the uniqueness of fo...

El presente artĂ­culo tiene como objetivo presentar y analizar una recopilaciĂłn propia de verbos sintagmĂĄticos en español e italiano, demostrar con ello que este tipo estructuras sintagmĂĄticas, propias las denominadas lenguas marco satĂŠlite, estĂĄn tambiĂŠn presentes estas dos mayor o menor medida. La metodologĂ­a trabajo se ha basado un estudio previo principales caracterĂ­sticas los ...

What makes some words easy for infants to recognize, and other words difficult? We addressed this issue in the context of prior results suggesting that infants have difficulty recognizing verbs relative to nouns. In this work, we highlight the role played by the distributional contexts in which nouns and verbs occur. Distributional statistics predict that English nouns should generally be easie...

This study examined the role of the native language (L1) transfer in a non-native language (L2) acquisition of the there-insertion construction at the syntax-semantics interface. Specifically, the study investigated if Mandarin EFL learners would make overgeneralization errors in the situation where an L1 argument structure constitutes a superset of its L2 counterpart. Verbs of existence and ap...