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The present article presents a corpus-based study of two near-synonymous verbs in Spanish: the locative verbs of putting poner and meter. Starting from the universal principle of linguistic economy, the paper aims to empirically identify potentially influencing variables that determine the native speaker’s choice between the two verbs. It is investigated whether and to what extent the choice is governed by a set of variables related to the nature of the locative movement itself and the characteristics of the participants taking part in the event. The difference between the near-synonyms is shown to be determined mainly by the direction of the locative movement, the semantic nature of the participants (animacy, concreteness), the reflexiveness of the event, as well as the cognitive construal of the locative event (the possibility of a container-reading). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) has long been characterized by its openness towards contributions from other fields. However, it has remained virtually uninformed by neuroscience. Such a disconnection has become all the more unfortunate since SFL ventured into the cognitive domain (Halliday & Matthiessen 1999). Opening a new avenue of disciplinary interaction for SFL, this paper reviews experimental studies on the neurocognitive basis of processes and verbs of doing, highlighting their manifold implications for the theory. Available data corroborates the SFL assumptions that these processes and verbs are (i) conceptually different from participants and nouns, (ii) functionally distinguishable from other process and verb types, and (iii) non-arbitrarily related to each other. Moreover, the evidence shows that (at least some of) the conceptual distinctions within semantics are naturally grounded in more basic (motor and perceptual) neurocognitive distinctions. This, we propose, calls for an elaboration of the stratified SFL model via the inclusion of a sensorimotor stratum. More generally, the article seeks to foster an empirically sound and theoretically relevant dialogue between SFL and promising approaches within cognitive neuroscience. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates how syntactic knowledge interfaces with other cognitive systems by analysing the production of postverbal subjects, V(erb)-S(ubject) order, in an L1 Spanish-L2 English corpus and a comparable English native corpus. VS order in both native and L2 English is shown to be constrained by properties operating at three interfaces: (i) LEXICON-SYNTAX: the verb is unaccusative (Unaccusative Hypothesis); (ii) SYNTAX-DISCOURSE: the subject is focus (End-Focus Principle) and (iii) SYNTAX-PHONOLOGY: the subject is heavy (End-Weight Principle). We show that, since learners produce VS under the same interface conditions as native speakers, unaccusativity is a necessary but not a sufficient condition for VS production. However, learners overproduce VS and make persistent errors in their syntactic encoding. Our findings support recent proposals that these difficulties stem from problems at coordinating syntactic knowledge with knowledge from other external systems, but they suggest that the nature of such difficulties is not external to the syntax. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes a methodology aimed at grouping Catalan verbs according to their syntactic behavior. Our goal is to acquire a small number of basic classes with a high level of accuracy, using minimal resources. Information on syntactic class, expensive and slow to compile by hand, is useful for any NLP task requiring specific lexical information. We show that it is possible to acquire this kind of information using only a POS-tagged corpus. We perform two clustering experiments. The first one aims at classifying verbs into transitive, intransitive and verbs alternating with a se-construction. Our system achieves an average 0.84 F-score, for a task with a 0.33 baseline. The second experiment aims at further distinguishing among pure intransitives and verbs bearing a prepositional object. The baseline for the task is 0.51 and the upperbound 0.98. The system achieves an average 0.88 F-score. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the relationships among lexical classes, argument structures, and sin tactic constructions. Focusing on the ditransitive construction in English, Chinese, and Spanish, the author shows that the interpretation of indirect object of certain classes of verbs, such as transference verbs and state-changing verbs, is goal in English, source in chinese, and either goal or source in Spanish. In addition, creation verbs, but not consuming verbs, are permitted in the English ditransitive construction. In contrast, consuming verbs, but not creation verbs, are permitted in the chinese ditransitive construction. Spanish allows both classes. The author attributes the contrast to the interactions between lexical meaning and construction meaning. In particular, the author argues that the default meaning of the ditransitive construction is transference to the referent qj the indirect object in English, transference from the referent of the indirect object in chinese, and simply transference, without a specification for direction, in Spanish. creation verbs, for example, are compatible with the transference-to meaning and are thus acceptable in the English but not the Chinese ditransitive construction; consuming verbs are compatible with the transfrrence-from meaning and are thus allowed in the chinese but not the English ditransitive construction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]