Linguists have long sought to understand the tie between verb meaning and the number and types of arguments the verb projects to the syntax (see 1). While subcategorization frames and selectional restrictions describe the constraints on the range of arguments that may appear with verbs, these devices are obvious bandaid solutions that call for deeper explanation. 1. English verb argument struct...

Words in an utterance are not placed in their respective slots randomly from a uniform distribution. In English, for example, a verb will rarely, if ever, follow a determiner. This is a syntactic restriction. From another perspective, one would not expect to find a word such as defenestration as the object of eat. This is what is known as the selectional preference of a word for another word in...

Words differ in the subcategorisation frames in which they occur, and there is a strong correlation between the semantic arguments of a given word and its subcategorisation frame, so that all its arguments should be included in its subcategorisation frame. One problem is posed by the ambiguity between locative prepositional phrases as arguments of a verb or adjuncts. As the semantics for the ve...

In this paper we present solutions for the crucial task of extracting structured information from massive free-text resources, such as Wikipedia, for the sake of semantic databases serving upcoming Semantic Web technologies. We demonstrate both a verb frame-based approach using deep natural language processing techniques with extraction patterns developed by human knowledge experts and machine ...

In the paper, we present the current state of the development of the Czech valency dictionary called VerbaLex. It contains a list of the most frequented Czech verbs and their valency frames in the form of the complex valency frames. VerbaLex includes information about verb case and adverbial links (morphosyntactic properties) and senses captured by an inventory of two-layer semantic roles that ...

This study examined whether processing ambiguous sentences containing relative clauses (RCs) following a complex determiner phrase (DP) by Persian-speaking learners of L2 English with different proficiency and working memory capacities (WMCs) is affected by semantic priming. The semantic relationship studied was one between the subject/verb of the main clause and one of the DPs in the complex D...

Three experiments revealed that memory for verbs is more dependent on semantic context than is memory for nouns. The participants in Experiment 1 were asked to remember either nouns or verbs from intransitive sentences. A recognition test included verbatim sentences, sentences with an old noun and a new verb, sentences with an old verb and a new noun, and entirely new sentences. Memory for verb...