This study asked whether contextual abstractness would affect productive locative case marking in 3to 6year-old Hungarian-speaking children. A narrative elicitation task examined locative case production in both concrete (e.g., IN the garden) and abstract (e.g., IN trouble) contexts. We found that 3-year-olds were less accurate in the abstract condition than controls. By contrast, there was no ...

We suggest that data from American Sign Language (ASL) provide overt evidence for Partee’s and Stone’s claim that natural language has anaphoric constructions in the temporal and modal domains (Partee 1973, Stone 1997). We provide four arguments. (i) Like nominal and locative expressions, temporal and modal constructions can establish loci which can then be indexed by later pronouns. (ii) As is...

The ways in which different languages encode motion events has been the topic of intense analysis and dissection in recent years, especially with regard to Talmy’s (1991, 2000) verb/satellite-framed typology. This chapter shifts course by moving away from motion event typologies and the encoding of canonical motion events. Instead, it shows that English speakers can conceptualise space in terms...

I.I Sketch of Proposal We propose a semantics for locative expressions such as near Jones or west of Denver, an important subsystem for NLP applications. Locative expressions denote regions of space, and serve as arguments to predicates, locating objects and events spatially. Since simple locatives occupy argument positions, they do NOT participate in scope ambiguities m pace one common view, w...

Existential constructions play an important role in the development of Generative Grammar. Their special natures urge linguists to pay painstaking effort to give them a unified account. At first we have a brief review of the relevant study of these constructions and examine their strong points and weakness. On the basis of their study, we assume that in existential constructions of SVO language...

The present study investigated how children learn that some verbs may appear in the figure-locative but not the ground-locative construction (e.g., Lisa poured water into the cup; *Lisa poured the cup with water), with some showing the opposite pattern (e.g., *Bart filled water into the cup; Bart filled the cup with water), and others appearing in both (Lisa sprayed water onto the flowers; Lisa...

Following Fillmore’s (1968) discussion of verbs exhibiting different argument realization patterns, a number of syntactic studies have analyzed the spray-load alternation (e.g., Pinker 1989, Levin 1993, Dowty 2000) in different ways. One account that differs from primarily syntactically oriented analyses is Goldberg’s (1995) Construction Grammar approach. It proposes that multiple argument real...