“Noun phrase number is a privileged source of information as to the semantic structure of predicates.” So concludes a recent article by Lidz, Gleitman, and Gleitman (2003: 169), which purports to demonstrate the viability of a “universalist” mapping between syntax and semantics as opposed to an “emergentist” view of the mapping, attributed to Goldberg (1999) and Tomasello (2000). Lidz et al. (2...

Syntactic constructions roughly correspond to sentence meanings. Previous research has shown that Chinese children can associate an SVO construction with a causative event at age 2, but do not always map an SV construction to a noncausative event even after reaching 5 years of age. The latter results may be attributed to the fact that Chinese allows argument-dropping (Jiang & Haryu, 2010). This...

the definition and typological description of the category of voice can be provided in two ways: i) at the level of semantic arguments (or semantic roles), ii) at the level of grammatical relations (or syntactic functions). the most important theoretical concept that is determined in terms of these two levels of representations and enables one to capture the rich variety of voices is that of di...

With respect to the first question, the perceived additional semantic complexity of the transitive or ‘causative’ variant—its explicit association with a notion of cause—may suggest that the transitive variant is derived from the intransitive or ‘anticausative’ variant1 by the addition of a CAUSE operator (e.g., Dowty 1979: 91; Härtl 2003; Lakoff 1966; Parsons 1990). This position is reinforced...

When toddlers view an event while hearing a novel verb, the verb's syntactic context has been shown to help them identify its meaning. The current work takes this finding one step further to reveal that even in the absence of an accompanying event, syntactic information supports toddlers' identification of verb meaning. Two-year-olds were first introduced to dialogues incorporating novel verbs ...

Reinvestigation of Modern Hebrew verb formation strategies suggests that assignment of recent as well as potential innovations to canonical morphological forms in the verb system is essentially semantic, and is based on the notions "causation," "agency" and "activity." It is claimed that the basic division is not between transitive and intransitive verbs, but rather into agentive and nonagentiv...

When presented with a novel verb in a transitive frame (X is Ving Y), young children typically select a causative event referent, rather than one in which agents engage in parallel, non-causative synchronous events. However, when presented with a conjoined-subject intransitive frame (X and Y are Ving), participants (even adults, as we show) are at chance. Although in some instances, children ol...

Participants (aged 5-6 yrs, 9-10 yrs and adults) rated (using a five-point scale) grammatical (intransitive) and overgeneralized (transitive causative)(1) uses of a high frequency, low frequency and novel intransitive verb from each of three semantic classes [Pinker, S. (1989a). Learnability and cognition: The acquisition of argument structure. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press]: "directed motion" (fall...

It has previously been shown that transitive verbs are more difficult to recall than intransitive. Experiment I replicated this finding. Experiment II examined the associations to, and response latencies of, transitive and intransitive verbs. Latencies of responses did not differ, but the form class of responses was significantly different. Transitive verbs elicited more noun responses. It is s...

The title of this study is the syntactic behavior second verb (V2) in Balinese serial verbs and it aims at investigating types composing analyzing V2. theory applied identifying typology by Van Staden Ger Reesink (Senft, ed., 2008), complement adjunct Kroeger (2005) used This research classified as a descriptive-qualitative study. data supporting analysis was collected from written texts short ...