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Copyright of Bohemistyka is the property of Instytut Filologii Slowianskiej Uniwersytetu im. Adama Mickiewicza w Poznaniu and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

In this paper, we propose a comprehensive account of the paradigms of Frisian verb-classes. Verb-classes in Frisian are an example of a more general phenomenon of inflectional classes that we encounter in many natural languages across the major word classes. Members of different inflectional classes show different paradigms. Traditionally, inflectional classes have been analyzed using class-features (see e.g., Marzi et al. 2020). However, such features suffer from being ad hoc devices that seem to have no other function in the grammar than to code this difference. In the present analysis we propose that the verb stems from different classes show a difference in size. Using phrasal spell-out, we will show that these stems differ in the amount of morpho-syntactic structure that they may realize, rendering class-features superfluous. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with the syntax and semantics of Old English End verbs on the basis of the framework of verb classes and alternations and the theory of Role and Reference Grammar. The analysis focuses on class membership and includes meaning components and argument realisation—linking in simplex and complex constructions and alternations. The inventory of verbs under analysis comprises a¯blinnan, ætstandan, blinnan, for(e)sacan, geblinnan, linnan, ofersittan, oflinnan, oðstillan and (ge)trucian. The main conclusion is that the morphologically related verbs a¯blinnan and blinnan are the strongest candidates for End verbs, given the syntactic constructions and morphosyntactic alternations in which they are found.

An alternation is defined as a pair of sentences with more or less identical structures and the same meaning. These alternations are sensitive to the meaning component of verbs. Therefore, it can be used as a criterion for classifying verbs in an effective way. Levin classified English verbs into 49 broad semantic classes and 192 subclasses, introducing 79 argument alternations. She believes that various aspects of the syntactic behavior of verbs are tied to their meaning. Moreover, verbs that fall into classes according to shared behavior would be expected to show shared meaning components. The present study aimed to examine a type of alternations introduced by Levin called “Reciprocal Alternation”, which itself includes several types of alternations. One of these alternations, known as “Understood Reciprocal Object Alternation”, is a type of “Transitive Alternations”. Transitive alternations include alternations involving a change in a verb’s transitivity. The other types of Reciprocal Alternation are the alternations that occur without a change in a verb’s transitivity. These alternations include “Simple Reciprocal Alternation”, “Together Reciprocal Alternation”, and “Apart Reciprocal Alternation”. A corpus-based study of 3070 Persian verbs revealed that all these alternations are also found in Persian. Furthermore, two new types of these alternation named “Reciprocal Chaining Alternation” and “Reciprocal Collective Alternation” were introduced in the present study.

This paper investigates the effect of the high frequency of occurrence of a verb in a syntactic frame on speakers' selection of that syntactic frame for other verbs. We hypothesize that the frequent co-occurrence of a syntactic frame and a particular verb (what we call an anchor verb) leads to a strong association between the verb and the frame analogous to the relationship between a category and its best exemplar. Our Verb Anchor Hypothesis claims that verbs that are more semantically similar to the anchor are more likely to occur in that syntactic frame than verbs that are less semantically similar to the anchor. We tested the Verb Anchor Hypothesis on the dative alternation which involves the meaning-preserving ditransitive and prepositional frames. A corpus study determined that give was the anchor verb for the ditransitive frame. We then examined whether high semantic similarity to give increases the likelihood of an alternating verb (e.g. to hand) occurring in the ditransitive frame (Mary handed the boy a book) rather than in the prepositional frame (Mary handed a book to the boy). The results of several logistic regression analyses show that semantic similarity to give makes a unique contribution to predicting the choice of the ditransitive frame aside from other factors known to affect syntactic frame selection. Additional analyses suggest that the Verb Anchor Hypothesis might also hold for more narrowly-defined subclasses of alternating verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We report an eye-tracking experiment that examined argument linking and the role of prominence in Spanish sentence comprehension by testing the interplay between word order and verb type. Previous evidence from a self-paced reading study (Gattei, Dickey, Wainselboim, & París, 2015). showed that comprehenders use morphosyntactic information to form predictions about the thematic structure of the upcoming verb. In this study we focussed on the time course of this process. Results showed an interaction between verb type and word order for late eye movement measures but not for early eye movement measures. Participants regressed more and for longer time when word order did not match the canonical order for each verb class. This interaction is observed from the verb region onwards, independently of word order. We interpret that these effects take place due to the misinterpretation of the prominence status of the preverbal argument, leading to differential reading strategies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blackfoot nominals are singular, plural or general in number. The existence of languages with either a singular-plural opposition or a plural-general opposition is well-attested in the literature. Following Bliss (2013), we argue that Blackfoot has both systems, albeit in different contexts. We propose that the co-existence of these two systems in Blackfoot is due to the exceptional nature of plural specification in this language – it is alternatively realized as a head or modifying feature in the syntactic representation (in the sense of Wiltschko 2008). We show that regardless of whether plural is syntactically a head or a modifying feature, the semantic interpretation is the same. This is consistent with Rullmann & You’s (2006) finding that plural marking has the same denotation no matter whether it contrasts with singular or with general number.

This paper investigates the argument structure and alternations of the communicative verbs of Bangla. The paper is based on the model of English verb alternations as proposed by Levin (1993). Levin's work is guided by the assumption that the behavior of a verb, particularly in respect to the expression and interpretation of its arguments, is majorly determined by its meaning. Verbs as argument-taking elements show especially complex sets of properties. Levin has shown that native speakers can make extremely perceptive judgments concerning the occurrence of various syntactic expressions. She also mentions that any particular description of verb classes must include a discussion on sentential complements and dative alternation. We have also tried to examine these issues following here. The study of the verbs of communication in Bangla provides a concise treatment of some of the classes of verbs pertaining to communication and transfer of ideas. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates whether a lexical variance caused by verbs influences the choice and frequency of instrument with-PPs. The corpus data shows that observations grouped by verb class demonstrate systematically different behaviors and this individual variance of verb classes can be captured by means of a random effect of a mixed-effects model. Building up on Choi's (2012) research that identifies the syntactic, semantic, and morphological factors that influence the presence of instrument with-PPs as fixed effects, the current study classifies the instrument-taking verbs into verb classes, based on Levin's (1993) study, and builds a mixed-effects model taking verb class as a random variable. The new statistical technique of hierarchical, multi-level, mixed-effects modeling (Baayen 2008; Bresnan et al. 2007; Gelman and Hill 2007; Johnson 2008; Kuperman 2009; Pinheiro and Bates 2000) can process across-word fixed effects and by-word random effects together. By taking into consideration the subtle syntactic and semantic characteristics of verbs, this new modeling analysis provides a way to incorporate native speakers' lexical knowledge into grammar. ( [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Moenia: Revista Lucense de Lingüística & Literatura is the property of Universidad de Santiago de Compostela, Servicio de Publicaciones and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The marking of arguments is semantically oriented in Georgian. The basic concept of the argument marking is the activity hierarchy of the arguments. The opposition active/inactive underlies the distinction of the two patterns of Georgian person markers and governs all specific rules of the distribution of their allomorphs. Syntactic function plays almost no role in the morphological marking of arguments. Three TAM Series of Georgian verb system distinguish different types of argument marking. The problem of the diachronic relationship between the constructions of different Series is discussed in the paper from the viewpoint of the theory of markedness and the hierarchy of the parts of the clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]