In Mwotlap (north Vanuatu), most verb phrases consist of two or more verb roots chained together 〈V1-V2...〉, acting like a single verb. Although a clear case of verb serialization, such phrases reveal a strong asymmetry between their free verb head (V1), and what appears to be little more than a post-head modifier (V2). Because the resulting “macro-verb” can only refer to a single action, its i...

Inflectional affixes are sensitive to morphological properties of the elements they attach to. Therefore Bierwisch (1987) suggested that the inflectional material is combined with both the verbal stem of simplex verbs and the verbal stem of particle verbs. He argued that this leads to the bracketing paradox in the case of particle verbs since the semantic contribution of the inflectional inform...

Verbs are important in semantic understanding of natural language. Traditional verb representations, such as FrameNet, PropBank, VerbNet, focus on verbs’ roles. These roles are too coarse to represent verbs’ semantics. In this paper, we introduce verb patterns to represent verbs’ semantics, such that each pattern corresponds to a single semantic of the verb. First we analyze the principles for ...

Complex Predicates or CPs are multiword complexes functioning as single verbal units. CPs are particularly pervasive in Hindi and other IndoAryan languages, but an usage account driven by corpus-based identification of these constructs has not been possible since single-language systems based on rules and statistical approaches require reliable tools (POS taggers, parsers, etc.) that are unavai...

Within the Uralic language family, preverbal particles generally only occur within the Ugric branch of the Finno-Ugric languages, a fact known for some time (cf. Zsirai, 1933). Most Uralic scholars (who assume the existence of proto-Uralic) assume that preverbal particles are not a Uralic feature, that is, the existence of these particles in a handful of Uralic languages is due to innovations i...