Some individuals with aphasia preferably use semantically general light verbs, whereas others prefer semantically specific heavy verbs. This study aimed to test Gordon and Dell's "division of labor" hypothesis that light versus heavy verb usage depends on syntactic and semantic processes, respectively. In a retrospective analysis of data from the AphasiaBank corpus, narrative language of neurol...

This paper presents the mappings between the syntactic information of our broad-coverage domain-independent verb lexicon, VerbNet, to Xtag trees. This mapping between complementary resources allowed us to increase the syntactic coverage of our verb lexicon by capturing transformations of the basic syntactic description of the verbs present in VerbNet. In addition, having these two resources map...

This paper describes the process of integrating into a rule-based parser a set of approximately 1,000 nominal predicates forming support verb constructions (SVC) with the verb dar ‘give’ in Brazilian Portuguese. The system was evaluated on a sample of 580 sentences containing verb-noun combinations candidates to SVC, manually and independently annotated. Best results yield 85% precision, 79% re...

The paper describes an attempt of identifying Urdu verb classes on the basis of the distribution of light verbs with different main verbs. We started with a frequency analysis of main + light verb sequences. The analysis of that data lead us to a thorough manual analysis of main + light verb sequences by using native speaker judgments. We focused on the three most frequent light verbs dE 'give'...

We present a class-based approach to building a verb lexicon that makes explicit the close association between syntax and semantics for Levin classes. We have used Lexicalized Tree Adjoining Grammars to capture the syntax associated with each verb class and have augmented the trees to include selectional restrictions. In addition, semantic predicates are associated with each tree, which allow f...

Some particular classes of lexical paraphrases such as verb alteration and compound noun decomposition can be handled by a handful of general rules and lexical semantic knowledge. In this paper, we attempt to capture the regularity underlying these classes of paraphrases, focusing on the paraphrasing of Japanese light-verb constructions (LVCs). We propose a paraphrasing model for LVCs that is b...

I provide a unified account of a constraint on adjunction observed in three complex predicate constructions in Japanese: (i) restructuring motion verb constructions, (ii) light verb constructions, (iii) infinitives with wasure‘forget’. It is shown that adjunction (i.e. adverbial modification, adjectival modification, and quantifier raising) in the lower projections are impossible in these const...

the acquisition of argument structures has been studied by a variety of second language acquisition scholars within the past two decades (atay, 2010; can, 2009; chay, 2006, & kras, 2007, among others). in the present study, ‘predicate’ as the most substantial element of a sentence is investigated. there are three english verb-types which seem to be more problematic for persian efl learners:...