Abstract In this article, we first show that the Bribri (Chibchan) middle voice suffix - r derives passive from active transitive and agentive intransitive verbs, as well anticausative verbs nominal adjectival roots. Second, focus on five media tantum i.e., forms synchronically carry have no counterpart without . Unlike most other these are labile, they can occur in syntactically constructions ...

The analysis of basic clause structures shows that clauses in Bahasa Siladang consist verbal and non-verbal predication. predicate can be filled by an adjective, noun, numeral or prepositional phrase. the argument structure intransitive requires one NP as only functioning grammatical subject, which agent a patient. Meanwhile, transitive verb two more arguments. presence these arguments sentence...

This study investigates the role of performance limitations in children's early acquisition of verb-argument structure. Valian (1991) claims that intransitive frames are easier for children to produce early in development than transitive frames because they do not require a direct object argument. Children who understand this distinction are expected to produce a lower proportion of transitive ...

Abstract We used a multi-method approach to investigate how children avoid (or retreat from) argument structure overgeneralisation errors (e.g., * You giggled me ). Experiment 1 investigated semantic and statistical constraints (preemption entrenchment) influence children’s adults’ judgments of the grammatical acceptability 120 verbs in transitive intransitive sentences. 2 syntactic priming eli...

As children hear a novel verb in a NOUN-VERB-NOUN (i.e., NVN) structure, they generally infer that the verb is transitive, like the verb “hit” (Naigles, 1990; Yuan, Fisher, & Snedeker, 2012). However, the relationship between sentence structure and a verb’s transitivity status is not straightforward. Particularly, in typologically pro-drop languages, such as Mandarin Chinese, the object in a se...

Two-year-olds assign appropriate interpretations to verbs presented in two English transitivity alternations, the causal and unspecified-object alternations (Naigles, 1996). Here we explored how they might do so. Causal and unspecified-object verbs are syntactically similar. They can be either transitive or intransitive, but differ in the semantic roles they assign to the subjects of intransiti...

This paper presents the lexical component of the STAttT Question Answering system developed at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory. START is able to interpret correctly a wide range of semantic relationships associated with alternate expressions of the arguments of verbs. The design of the system takes advantage of the results of recent linguistic research into the structure of the lexic...

We consider the representation and processing of the English verb features tense, aspect and voice, within a computational cognitive model of human language processing. We assume that a collection of features is associated with each verbal element and that these features may project to the clauses in which they occur. When multiple verbal elements occur, it is possible for the features to confl...

With respect to the first question, the perceived additional semantic complexity of the transitive or ‘causative’ variant—its explicit association with a notion of cause—may suggest that the transitive variant is derived from the intransitive or ‘anticausative’ variant1 by the addition of a CAUSE operator (e.g., Dowty 1979: 91; Härtl 2003; Lakoff 1966; Parsons 1990). This position is reinforced...