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, engli...

Anticipation plays a role in language comprehension. In this article, we explore the extent to which verb sense influences expectations about upcoming structure. We focus on change of state verbs like shatter, which have different senses that are expressed in either transitive or intransitive structures, depending on the sense that is used. In two experiments we influence the interpretation of ...

This book is a long-needed study of certain verbal collocations in English which – on the basis of semantic and syntactic similarities – Claudia Claridge groups together as 'multi-word verbs', including: phrasal verbs (burn N down [transitive], fly away [intransitive]), prepositional verbs (agree to N), phrasal prepositional verbs (look down on N [transitive], put N down to N [ditransitive]), v...

Children demonstrate a clear understanding of transitivity by the time they are four years old, if not earlier (Pye 1983, Berman 1993, Brooks and Tomasello 1999). However, exactly how they achieve such a state is far from clear. First of all, there is a question of how they start the process of acquiring transitivity. One might think that intransitive verbs would be the first to be acquired, si...

This article proposes that verbs in Matlatzinca (Otomian; Oto-Pamean; Oto-Manguean) fall into five inflectional classes, which the authors call ‘conjugations’. The focuses on forms make up paradigms of these classes. conjugations are based constructs largely periphrastic composition, means exponents constructions not prefixes but behave like prosodic words, independent from lexical stem verb be...

Reinvestigation of Modern Hebrew verb formation strategies suggests that assignment of recent as well as potential innovations to canonical morphological forms in the verb system is essentially semantic, and is based on the notions "causation," "agency" and "activity." It is claimed that the basic division is not between transitive and intransitive verbs, but rather into agentive and nonagentiv...

1 Current approaches Over the last fteen years, following Perlmutter and Postal's work (1983), there has been constant interest in the problem raised by transitivity alternations. In their work Perlmutter and Postal argued that the single argument of intransitive verbs may either be generated as an object of the verb (unaccusative verbs) or as a subject (unergative verbs) (cf. Bassac, 1997). A ...

Two experiments investigated how readers comprehend noun phrase (NP) arguments and adjuncts. Previous research suggested that argument phrases are processed more quickly than adjunct phrases (Clifton, Speer, & Abney, 1991; Kennison, 1999; Schütze & Gibson, 1999; Speer & Clifton, 1998). The present experiments investigated whether the type of verb in the sentence context could influence how NP a...