Two or more are sometimes found to co-occur in both Taiwan and Mainland Mandarin Chinese, e.g., jiāyǐ and jìnxíng in duì xuéshēng jiāyǐ jìnxíng yǐndǎo ‘to guide students’, and a particular ordering is often preferred, e.g., jiāyǐ jìnxíng over jìnxíng jiāyǐ. This study argues that the order of the light verbs is closely associated to two kinds of information that the verbs specify, i.e. aspectua...

In order to identify the basic properties of PoRs and the theoretical questions that follow, consider the German active-passive pair in (3a, b) involving the reflexive use of the verb ‘waschen’ (to wash). As in ordinary passives, the lexical verb in (3b) appears as passive participle and the passive auxiliary werden (to become) is used. The external argument disappears (but it can reappear in a...

The resulting denominal verb (dv) has the full syntactic and morphological distribution of any verb in West Greenlandic. It also retains some of the properties of the incorporated nominal (in), which has led some researchers to analyze this construction as a kind of ni and to argue that it represents a structural mismatch between syntax and morphology. In this paper, I will present an alternati...

Basing himself largely on areal and typological arguments, Güldemann (2010) claims that neither Proto-Niger-Congo nor Proto-Bantu had more than a “moderate” system of derivational verb suffixes (“extensions”), and that both proto languages lacked inflectional verb prefixes. Although drawing largely on the same materials as Hyman (2004, 2007a,b), he arrives at the opposite conclusion that Niger-...

A verb paradigm is a set of inflectional categories for a single verb lemma. To obtain verb paradigms we extracted left and right bigrams for the 400 most frequent verbs from over 100 million words of text, calculated the Kullback Leibler distance for each pair of verbs for left and right contexts separately, and ran a hierarchical clustering algorithm for each context. Our new method for findi...

Light verbs pose an a challenge in linguistics because of its syntactic and semantic versatility and its unique distribution different from regular verbs with higher semantic content and selectional resrictions. Due to its light grammatical content, earlier natural language processing studies typically put light verbs in a stop word list and ignore them. Recently, however, classification and id...

Obtaining semantic or functional word categories from data in an unsupervised manner is a problem motivated both from the linguistic point of view and from that of construing language models for various language processing tasks. In this work, we use the Self-Organizing Map algorithm to visualize and cluster common Finnish verbs based on their immediate morphological contexts. Based on a data s...

We present a new method for automatic classification of Chinese unknown verbs. The method employs the instance-based categorization using the k-nearest neighbor method for the classification. The accuracy of the classifier is about 70.92%.