The present study examines English patent documents extracted from LexisNexis. We compiled a reference corpus of independent claim texts and lay the focus specifically on their collocation features. The findings suggest the functional development of independent claim involves verb-noun collocation and semantic prosody. Verb-noun collocations happen to function as semantic trigger affected by se...

The notion of catena was introduced originally to represent the syntactic structure of multiword expressions with idiosyncratic semantics and non-constituent structure. Later on, several other phenomena (such as ellipsis, verbal complexes, etc.) were formalized as catenae. This naturally led to the suggestion that a catena can be considered a basic unit of syntax. In this paper we present a for...

Nicholas and Joseph (this volume) identify a class of previously unnoticed compounds of the form V+V in modern Greek, and establish some significant descriptive generalizations about them. They argue that V+V compounds are true morphological compound words, the verbal analogs of nominal dvandva compounds, and not syntactic phrases or verb clusters. The existence of such compounds in Greek is in...

English verbal gerunds have long been of interest to syntacticians. Verbal gerund phrases display a mix of nominal and verbal properties which provide a challenge to any syntactic framework that assumes a strict version of X-bar theory. Various approaches have been proposed to get around these problems, but they all involve abandoning a fundamentally desirable theoretic assumption or adopting a...

This paper presents results of an experiment integrating information from valency dictionary of Polish into a mention detection system. Two types of information is acquired: positions of syntactic schemata for nominal and verbal constructs and secondary prepositions present in schemata. The syntactic schemata are used to prevent (for verbal realizations) or encourage (for nominal groups) constr...

Abstract This study investigated whether cross-linguistic differences in causal expressions influence the mapping of language on events three- to four-year-old Swiss-German learners and Turkish learners. In Swiss-German, causality is mainly expressed syntactically with lexical causatives (e.g., ässe ‘to eat’ vs. füettere feed’). Turkish, both morphologically – a verbal suffix yemek yeDIRmek Mor...

In this paper, we provide a well-founded description of Czech deverbal nouns in both nominal and verbal structures (light verb constructions), based on a complex interaction between the lexicon and the grammar. We show that light verb constructions result from a regular syntactic operation. We introduce two interlinked valency lexicons, NomVallex and VALLEX , demonstrating how to minimize the s...

This squib investigates parallels between nominal and verbal comparatives. Building on key insights of Hackl (2001) and Bale and Barner (2009), we show that more behaves uniformly when it combines with nominal and verbal predicates: (i) it cannot combine with singular count NPs or perfective telic VPs; (ii) grammatical properties of the predicates determine the scale of comparison–plural marked...

This paper defends the hypothesis that number and classifiers behave differently in nominal and in verbal structures. When numerals are used in order to ‘count’ a number of objects or events, they interact differently with nouns and verbs (compare three visits with to visit three *(times)). Degree modifiers, on the other hand, behave rather similarly in the nominal and in the verbal domains (co...

In this paper, we propose an alternative to Sarkar and Joshi’s (1996) Conjoin Operation approach to clausal coordination with shared arguments. The Conjoin Operation applies across elementary trees, identifying and merging arguments from each clause, yielding a derivation tree in which the shared arguments are combined with multiple elementary trees, and a derived tree in which the shared argum...