This paper argues that the distribution of the two Chinese aspectual auxiliaries -Ie and -zhe in the locative inversion construction is determined by the semantics of the event, in particular the interaction of lexical aspect (telicity and stativity) and agentivity. The -le/-zhe alternation shows a gradient effect similar to the selection of perfective auxiliaries in Romance and Germanic (Sorac...

We introduce a pilot study for the Taggin‘ Tallinn framework of virtual community concepts of meaning-building, based on locative [1] content. The latter refers to concepts in which individuals tag locations with their own content, such as images, comments, audio, and video clips or game contents. This association is implemented in terms of a database, accessible for upload and download via the...

I argue that the so-called psychological predicates like komapta 'thankful,' mwusepta 'fearful,' silhta `loathsome,' or kulipta 'missing' require a nominative subject and a locative or dative complement, challenging the claim, a conventional wisdom originated from Kuno(1973), that they are two-place "transitive adjectives" requiring a nominative direct object. I also show that those adjectives ...

Here I presuppose that the reader is familiar with Collins’s (1997) argument for local economy and against global economy on the basis of Locative Inversion (LI). I consider the following three questions concerning LI. (A) Are a sentence involving LI (LI sentence) and the corresponding sentence with an ordinary word order (non-LI sentence) based on the same Numeration (N)? (B) If the answer to ...

In this paper we address the question of which transitive verbs allow there-insertion in Danish. We propose that two constraints have to be met in order for verbs to appear in Danish there-constructions. Firstly, as have been noted by others, an empty direct object position must be available. This constraint is not sufficient for restricting the set of verbs in there-constructions. We further p...

This paper proposes two syntax-semantics correspondence rules which consistently account for the distribution of Japanese locative postpositions ni and de. We demonstrate how to adapt the machinery of the occurrence of the postpositions based on the assumption of Conceptual Semantics (Jackendoff, 1983; 1990; 1991) to fit the organization of Japanese grammar. The correspondence rules correlate w...

Early in acquisition children overgeneralize verbs to ungrammatical structures. The retreat from overgeneralization is linked to the acquisition of verb classes, the semantics of which constrain the structures in which a verb can appear (e.g., Pinker 1989; Ambridge, Pine & Rowland, 2012). How children learn these classes remains unclear. Some argue that distributional regularities in linguistic...