We present an experimental study making use of a machine learning approach to identify the factors that affect the aspectual value that characterises polysemous verbs under each of their readings. The study is based on various morpho-syntactic and semantic features collected from a French lexical resource and on a gold standard aspectual classification of verb readings designed by an expert. Ou...

The encoding of letter position is a key aspect in all recently proposed models of visual-word recognition. We analyzed the impact of lexical frequency on letter position assignment by examining the temporal dynamics of lexical activation induced by pseudowords extracted from words of different frequencies. For each word (e.g., BRIDGE), we created two pseudowords: A transposed-letter (TL: BRIGD...

In this paper we will extend Smith’s (1997) two-component aspect theory to develop a two-level model of situation aspect in which situation aspect is modelled as verb classes at the lexical level and as situation types at the sentential level. Situation types are the composite result of the rule-based interaction between verb classes and complements, arguments, peripheral adjuncts and viewpoint...

Aspect contributes important temporal information for the construction of situation models in the human mind. Previous studies examining the effect of grammatical aspect on accomplishment verbs (e.g. bake a cake) show that perfective sentences/utterances are processed faster than imperfective ones (Madden & Zwaan, 2003; Chan et al., 2004; Yap et al., 2004, in press). The present study, however,...

Over the last twenty years aspectual notions have been increasingly appealed to in structuring verbal lexical semantic representations and, concomitantly, in formulating principles of argument expression. This move has been further fueled by the significant insights that have emerged from this line of research. Yet, despite the enthusiasm for aspectual notions that their proliferation demonstra...

Affectedness — usually construed as a persistent change in an event participant — has been implicated in argument realization, lexical aspect, transitivity, and various syntactic operations. However, it is rarely given a precise, independentlymotivated definition. Rather, it is often defined intuitively or diacritically, or reduced to the properties it is meant to explain, especially lexical as...

Abstract The interaction of lexical actionality with grammatical aspect is explained in a comprehensive system, based on the “degree temporal dynamics” simple and complex actional classes various functions, expressed by grammemes (extended ILA model, focus aspect). Then new conceptualization less frequent phenomena presented. A novelty differentiation from status aspect, characterized habituali...