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This study aims to uncover the combined effects of a higher-level verb distribution (i.e., the distribution of one-construction only verbs and alternating verbs across English) and verb semantics on Chinese EFL learners' restriction of generalization of English prenominal past participles (PPPs). Three groups were formed: a lexicalist group, a generalist group, and a mixed group. During the treatment, the lexicalist group were exposed to input involving one-construction only verbs exclusively; the generalist group, alternating verbs only; the mixed group, both one-construction only and alternating verbs. An acceptability judgment task was employed to assess L2 learners' construction generalization. The study found that, (1) the Lexicalist group exhibited significantly less generalization with the known state-change verbs than either the Generalist or the Mixed group, and significantly less generalization with the known non-state-change verbs than the Generalist group; (2) the Lexicalist group showed less generalization with extensive exposure one-construction only new verbs than the mixed group whereas the generalist and the mixed group did not differ significantly regarding construction preference of extensive exposure alternating new verbs; (3) the Lexicalist group were significantly less likely to generalize the PPP-only minimal exposure new verb than either the Generalist or Mixed group, and significantly less liable to generalize the relative clause (RC)-only minimal exposure new verb as opposed to the Generalist group; (4) moreover, the three groups differed significantly in regularization (operationalized as the number of participants who tended to accept each verb in only one of two competing constructions) of no exposure new verbs, with the lexicalist group producing more regularization than the other two groups. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study aims to describe the linguistic concept of affectedness, which is mostly intuitively but not clearly defined, though it has been used frequently in the related literature in Turkish. It is referred to in many studies on syntax, semantics, and pragmatics in Turkish, yet it has not been studied on its own and is not comprehensively defined. The study analyzes this semantic primitive using constructed and natural language data in Turkish. With that aim, the literature on different languages and proposed diagnostic tests will first be reviewed, and then the question of which verbs can be the affecting ones in Turkish will be addressed within the scope of English classifications. Subsequently, combinations of Turkish verbs and their case marked arguments will be overviewed. The typical potentially affecting transitive action verb kır- , the typical potentially affecting transitive psychological verb üz-, and the postpositions üst- and üzeri- in Turkish will be examined in terms of affectedness in natural language data. The main purpose of the study is to clear the ground for further studies in Turkish that will potentially use this semantic primitive.

This study investigated the effects of entrenchment, preemption, verb semantics, and morphophonological constraints in Chinese EFL (English as a Foreign Language) learners' retreat from the overgeneralization errors of English dative alternations. Two groups of Chinese EFL learners rated the acceptability of 66 dative verbs in their well and ill forms. The results demonstrated that Chinese EFL learners were simultaneously sensitive to the multiple cues from entrenchment, preemption, semantic, and morphophonological constraints, indicating that Chinese EFL learners restricted the generalization of the dative alternation by utilizing both the statistical verb-bias information and semantic properties of the dative verbs. Moreover, the sensitivity of Chinese EFL learners to these constraints increases with the improvement of their English proficiency. These results validated the usage-based approaches to second language acquisition and provided an answer to the "Baker's Paradox." [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Linguistic Research / Dilbilim Arastirmalari Dergisi is the property of Bogazici University Press 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.)

This study addresses claims made by two theories--the Alternative Projection and Verb Sensitive approaches--regarding an interpretation of possession attributed to certain ditransitive constructions. The Alternative Projection approach argues that an interpretation of possession is only available in the double object (DO) pattern expressed by English ditransitive verbs (1a) and is not available in the prepositional (PP) pattern (1b). The Verb Sensitive approach argues that this possession interpretation is either available for both the DO and PP patterns, or for neither pattern, depending on the class of ditransitive verb with which the patterns occur. (1a) The salesperson gave the young farmer the grain mixture. (1b) The salesperson gave the grain mixture to the young farmer. Both approaches posit a possession interpretation of the DO pattern across all ditransitive verbs. This study tests to what degree native English speakers interpret a meaning of possession from the DO and PP patterns through an online survey with 88 participants. Ditransitive verbs from five semantic classes are analyzed to determine if the interpretation of possession varies based on use of the DO or PP pattern (Alternative Projection) or by the semantic class of the verb (Verb Sensitive). The results do not support the Alternative Projection approach. The results suggest partial support for the Verb Sensitive approach, as semantic classes do not entirely follow the pattern predicted by this approach. Further, judgements reported in this study contradict some judgements reported in the literature, highlighting the importance of quantitative studies in evaluating theoretical claims. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper presents the first complete reconstruction of the Old Tibetan (OT) verb morphology and semantics. Old Tibetan had a productive verb inflection with meaningful inflectional affixes b-, g-, ɣ-, d-, -d, and -s. The distribution of the prefixes was asymmetric and closely related to transitivity of a verb. Verbs of highest transitivity formed four distinct stems, whereas intransitive verbs inflected for one or two stems only. Grammatical voice is the only category that can explain the disproportion in the markings of transitive and intransitive verbs. Because the basic opposition was that between active and passive voice, intransitive verbs could only form active forms, whereas both active and passive forms were available for the majority of transitive verbs. In addition, both groups of verbs inflected for aspect, distinguishing between perfective and imperfective aspect. The OT inflectional system seems to have been a local innovation, only marginally related to verb morphology of other Tibeto-Burman languages.

Languages differ in the way motion events are encoded. In satellite-framed languages, motion verbs typically encode manner, while in verb-framed languages, path. We investigated the ways in which satellite-framed Dutch and verb-framed Turkish co-determine one's attention to motion events in early bilinguals. In an EEG oddball paradigm, Turkish–Dutch bilinguals (n = 25) and Dutch controls (n = 27) watched short video clips of motion events, followed by a still picture that matched the preceding video in four ways (oddball design: 10% full match, 10% manner match, 10% endpoint match, and 70% full mismatch). We found that both groups showed similar oddball P300 effects, associated with task-related attention. Group differences were revealed in a late positivity (LP): The endpoint-match elicited a larger LP than the manner-match in the bilinguals, which may reflect language-driven attention. Our results indicate that cross-linguistic manner encoding difference impacts attention at a later stage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do cognitive biases and mechanisms from learning and use interact when a system of language conventions emerges? We investigate this question by focusing on how transitive events are conveyed in silent gesture production and interaction. Silent gesture experiments (in which participants improvise to use gesture but no speech) have been used to investigate cognitive biases that shape utterances produced in the absence of a conventional language system. In this mode of communication, participants do not follow the dominant order of their native language (e.g., Subject-Verb-Object), and instead condition the structure on the semantic properties of the events they are conveying. An important source of variability in structure in silent gesture is the property of reversibility. Reversible events typically have two animate participants whose roles can be reversed (girl kicks boy). Without a syntactic/conventional means of conveying who does what to whom, there is inherent unclarity about the agent and patient roles in the event (by contrast, this is less pressing for non-reversible events like girl kicks ball). In experiment 1 we test a novel, fine-grained analysis of reversibility. Presenting a silent gesture production experiment, we show that the variability in word order depends on two factors (properties of the verb and properties of the direct object) that together determine how reversible an event is. We relate our experimental results to principles from information theory, showing that our data support the "noisy channel" account of constituent order. In experiment 2, we focus on the influence of interaction on word order variability for reversible and non-reversible events. We show that when participants use silent gesture for communicative interaction, they become more consistent in their usage of word order over time, however, this pattern less pronounced for events that are classified as strongly non-reversible. We conclude that full consistency in word order is theoretically a good strategy, but word order use in practice is a more complex phenomenon. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Tutkimme kyselytestin avulla sitä, miten edistyneet S2-oppijat tunnistavat erilaisia nollasubjektilauseita ja missä määrin S2-vastaajien nollasubjektikäsityksissä voi havaita kiteytymistä. Koska nollapersoonalla ei ole omaa kieliopillista tunnusta toisin kuin esimerkiksi (yksipersoonaisella) passiivilla, pyrimme selvittämään, millaiset nollasubjektilauseet ovat edistyneen tason S2-oppijoiden mielestä luontevimpia. Samalla testaamme erilaisten kyselytehtävien toimivuutta ja niiden hyötyjä oppijankielen tutkimukselle. Nollapersoona saa usein esimerkiksi S2-oppikirjoissa passiivia vähemmän huomiota, mikä saattaa johtua siitä, että sen lähestyminen on spesifien muotopiirteiden puuttumisen takia vaikeaa. Tästä on seurannut tietynlaisten nollapersoonalauseiden, esimerkiksi modaaliverbin sisältävien lauseiden, korostuminen S2-opetuksessa. Koska nollapersoona (ja nollasubjekti) on kuitenkin ilmiönä frekventti sekä arkipuheessa että akateemisissa teksteissä, on sen tunnistaminen ja käyttöyhteyksien hallinta oleellista myös oppijankielelle. Kyselytestissä on hyödynnetty puhutun kielen aineistosta tehtyä korpustutkimusta. Tulokset viittaavat siihen, että nollasubjektilauseiden tulkinta on S2-oppijoille usein haastavaa ja nollasubjektilauseiden luontevuuden tulkintaan vaikuttaa etenkin verbisemantiikka, ei esimerkiksi lauseen konstituenttien keskinäinen järjestys.

How do cognitive biases and mechanisms from learning and use interact when a system of language conventions emerges? We investigate this question by focusing on how transitive events are conveyed in silent gesture production and interaction. Silent gesture experiments (in which participants improvise to use gesture but no speech) have been used to investigate cognitive biases that shape utterances produced in the absence of a conventional language system. In this mode of communication, participants do not follow the dominant order of their native language (e.g., Subject-Verb-Object), and instead condition the structure on the semantic properties of the events they are conveying. An important source of variability in structure in silent gesture is the property of reversibility. Reversible events typically have two animate participants whose roles can be reversed (girl kicks boy). Without a syntactic/conventional means of conveying who does what to whom, there is inherent unclarity about the agent and patient roles in the event (by contrast, this is less pressing for non-reversible events like girl kicks ball). In experiment 1 we test a novel, fine-grained analysis of reversibility. Presenting a silent gesture production experiment, we show that the variability in word order depends on two factors (properties of the verb and properties of the direct object) that together determine how reversible an event is. We relate our experimental results to principles from information theory, showing that our data support the “noisy channel” account of constituent order. In experiment 2, we focus on the influence of interaction on word order variability for reversible and non-reversible events. We show that when participants use silent gesture for communicative interaction, they become more consistent in their usage of word order over time, however, this pattern less pronounced for events that are classified as strongly non-reversible. We conclude that full consistency in word order is theoretically a good strategy, but word order use in practice is a more complex phenomenon.

How do language learners avoid the production of verb argument structure overgeneralization errors (*The clown laughed the man c.f. The clown made the man laugh), while retaining the ability to apply such generalizations productively when appropriate? This question has long been seen as one that is both particularly central to acquisition research and particularly challenging. Focussing on causative overgeneralization errors of this type, a previous study reported a computational model that learns, on the basis of corpus data and human-derived verb-semantic-feature ratings, to predict adults’ by-verb preferences for less- versus more-transparent causative forms (e.g., * The clown laughed the man vs The clown made the man laugh) across English, Hebrew, Hindi, Japanese and K’iche Mayan. Here, we tested the ability of this model (and an expanded version with multiple hidden layers) to explain binary grammaticality judgment data from children aged 4;0-5;0, and elicited-production data from children aged 4;0-5;0 and 5;6-6;6 (N=48 per language). In general, the model successfully simulated both children’s judgment and production data, with correlations of r=0.5-0.6 and r=0.75-0.85, respectively, and also generalized to unseen verbs. Importantly, learners of all five languages showed some evidence of making the types of overgeneralization errors – in both judgments and production – previously observed in naturalistic studies of English (e.g., *I’m dancing it). Together with previous findings, the present study demonstrates that a simple learning model can explain (a) adults’ continuous judgment data, (b) children’s binary judgment data and (c) children’s production data (with no training of these datasets), and therefore constitutes a plausible mechanistic account of the acquisition of verbs’ argument structure restrictions.

The packaging of meaning in verbs varies widely across languages since verbs are free to encode different aspects of an event. At the same time, languages tend to display recurrent preferences in lexicalization, e.g. verb-framing vs. satellite-framing in motion. It has been noted, however, that the lexicalization patterns in motion are not carried over to the domain of vision, since gaze trajectory ('visual path') is coded outside the main verb even in verb-framed languages. This 'typological split' (Matsumoto 2001), however, is not universal. This article contains the first extensive report of verb-framing in the domain of vision based on data from Maniq (Austroasiatic, Thailand). The verbs are investigated using a translation questionnaire and a picture-naming task, which tap into subtle semantic detail. Results suggest the meanings of the verbs are shaped by universal constraints linked to earth-based verticality and bodily mechanics, as well as local factors such as the environment and the cultural scenarios of which looking is a salient part. A broader look across the whole Maniq verb lexicon reveals further cases of verbally encoded spatial notions and demonstrates a pervasive cross-domain systematicity, pointing to the language system itself as an important shaping force in lexicalization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Prilozi Proucavanju Jezika is the property of Faculty of Philosophy, University of Novi Sad 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.)

Copyright of Linguistica is the property of Linguistica 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.)

During language comprehension, comprehenders form mental representations of the described events. We investigate discourse-level and verb-level cues that guide this process. In particular, we investigate how comprehenders represent object states when events are described with manner verbs that do not entail change-of-state (e.g. hit, wash): a potential change-of-state of the object can be inferred but is not semantically required. We report two reaction-time-based experiments (Experiment 1: lexical decision, Experiment 2: self-paced reading) that investigated how rapidly comprehenders process linguistic material associated with potential change-of-state inferences, in contexts where the preceding discourse context and verb-level information are manipulated. In both experiments, we find an interaction between discourse-level information and verb-level information in guiding object state representations. We highlight the need to take into account discourse-level factors in theorising about the cognitive process of understanding the dynamics of event representation during language comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examined the Arabic aspectual particle qad within the framework of Smith’s Two-Component Theory of Aspect, which views aspectual meaning as a combination of covert situation types and overt viewpoint markers. The analysis, which was conducted on Modern Standard Arabic, revealed that the Arabic aspectual marker qad has a tendency to be used perfectively, but it also has imperfective uses. However, as far as situation types are concerned, the analysis found some variation when it comes to the use of imperfective and perfective qad. The findings were also correlated to different constructions in which qad typically occurs.

The sememe heredity of action semantics may be affected by the related association of a verb or noun in an action phrase and the related association between one action phrase and another. The motor encoding theory and the five-component view of the subject-performed task supported by the verb’s specificity highly promote the enactment effect. However, the episodic integration theory emphasizes the role of semantic integration between the verb and noun on the enactment effect. In this study, a subject-performed task was combined with a priming paradigm and found that verb-semantic priming quantity was more significant than that of noun-semantic priming quantity under motor encoding in Experiment 1. Besides, it was observed that the verb-semantic association might play a more significant role in the sememe heredity of action semantics. Therefore, in Experiment 2, a subject-performed task was combined with the dual task of prospective memory. Results showed that the accuracy of prospective memory targets related to the learning phrases was significantly higher compared to that of the prospective memory targets unrelated to the learning phrases. Besides, the above difference is more evident verbally compared to motor encoding conditions. Thus, the sememe heredity of action semantics may rely on the related association of action semantic contents rather than on the semantic processing form of external motor encoding.

Based on personal experience during long term fieldwork in Ladakh, this article will discuss a special technique for field research. It will emphasise the need to access the speakers' creative unconsciousness by applying the time-consuming 'ping-pong game', that is, by confronting every speaker with real language data, by rechecking each speaker's statement with at least one other speaker, and by feeding back evaluations from a second or third speaker to an original speaker and back in an almost endless repetition. A special focus here will be on the collection of compounds showing the phenomenon of consonant migration and on data gathering with respect to verb semantics and verb valency. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The sememe heredity of action semantics may be affected by the related association of a verb or noun in an action phrase and the related association between one action phrase and another. The motor encoding theory and the five-component view of the subject-performed task supported by the verb's specificity highly promote the enactment effect. However, the episodic integration theory emphasizes the role of semantic integration between the verb and noun on the enactment effect. In this study, a subject-performed task was combined with a priming paradigm and found that verb-semantic priming quantity was more significant than that of noun-semantic priming quantity under motor encoding in Experiment 1. Besides, it was observed that the verb-semantic association might play a more significant role in the sememe heredity of action semantics. Therefore, in Experiment 2, a subject-performed task was combined with the dual task of prospective memory. Results showed that the accuracy of prospective memory targets related to the learning phrases was significantly higher compared to that of the prospective memory targets unrelated to the learning phrases. Besides, the above difference is more evident verbally compared to motor encoding conditions. Thus, the sememe heredity of action semantics may rely on the related association of action semantic contents rather than on the semantic processing form of external motor encoding. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Visual Question Answering (VQA) concerns providing answers to Natural Language questions about images. Several deep neural network approaches have been proposed to model the task in an end-to-end fashion. Whereas the task is grounded in visual processing, if the question focuses on events described by verbs, the language understanding component becomes crucial. Our hypothesis is that models should be aware of verb semantics, as expressed via semantic role labels, argument types, and/or frame elements. Unfortunately, no VQA dataset exists that includes verb semantic information. Our first contribution is a new VQA dataset (imSituVQA) that we built by taking advantage of the imSitu annotations. The imSitu dataset consists of images manually labeled with semantic frame elements, mostly taken from FrameNet. Second, we propose a multi-task CNN-LSTM VQA model that learns to classify the answers as well as the semantic frame elements. Our experiments show that semantic frame element classification helps the VQA system avoid inconsistent responses and improves performance. Third, we employ an automatic semantic role labeler and annotate a subset of the VQA dataset (VQAsub). This way, the proposed multi-task CNN-LSTM VQA model can be trained with the VQAsub as well. The results show a slight improvement over the single-task CNN-LSTM model. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a cognitive model of event structure that can be used to explain several features of the semantics of verbs. The model consists of four basic components: agent, patient, force vector and result vector. Each component is described in terms of the theory of conceptual spaces. The force vector is the cause of the result vector. Unlike other event models both the cause and the effect are included in the representation of a single event. The model is used for two central topics. Firstly, to provide a force dynamic representation of causation. Secondly, to give a unified analysis of Aktionsart in terms of different forms of vectors, using force diagrams that are extensions of those used by Croft and others. It is then shown that the event model can be used to derive a variety of semantic features of verbs. In particular, I analyze manner-result complementarity, the ambiguity of the passive participle, and the role of goals (telicity). • A cognitively grounded model of events is proposed. • The model can account for many different types of causation. • The model provides a unified analysis of many forms of Aktionsart. • The model explains several central semantics features of verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Lähivõrdlusi / Lähivertailuja is the property of Eesti Rakenduslingvistika Uhing (ERU) / Estonian Association for Applied Linguistics 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.)

Recent research calls into question the predictive power of the Aspect Hypothesis as it has been found that it is advanced learners rather than beginners who show the developmental pattern predicted by the hypothesis. Following the identification of several design issues including lack of rigorous treatment of proficiency level and reliance on controlled elicitation tasks, this cross-sectional study used an Arab learner corpus (BALC) that controls proficiency level and task. This corpus-based study analysed the development of tense-aspect among Arabic-speaking EFL learners at two levels, beginner and advanced, by comparing their performance on 200 essays. Contrary to the recent research on Aspect Hypothesis, it was found that lexical aspect influences the early acquisition of the English progressive as the lower proficiency level in the present study extensively attached the progressive on activity verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Lexical ambiguity abounds in languages and multiple one-to-many form-function mappings create challenges for language learners. This study extends the theoretical approaches to the acquisition of polysemy to the Mandarin verb 打 dǎ, which is highly polysemous and among the earliest verbs in child speech. It analyzes longitudinal naturalistic data of nine children (1;05–3;10) from two Mandarin child speech corpora to explore the developmental trajectory of different senses of 打 dǎ and the role of input. The results support a continuous derivational and restricted monosemy approach: children initially extract a core feature of 打 dǎ, but only apply it in a restricted way, reflected in a small number of senses in a limited set of semantic domains and syntactic frames, revealing an early preference for initial unambiguous form-meaning mappings. Mandarin-speaking children’s production mirrors the semantic and syntactic distribution of the input, supporting the usage-based approach to the acquisition of polysemy that meaning is derived from the confluence of lexical and syntactic cues in the usage patterns in the input. Our research is the first longitudinal study of the emergence and development of polysemous verbs in Mandarin and has pedagogical implications for teaching Mandarin as a second language.

The paper discusses the semantic properties of separation verbs in GurenƒÃ. The language uses a rich set of verbs to describe different kinds of separation events with fine-grained semantics. The separation verbs are classified into CUT and BREAK (C&B events henceforth), and opening or detachment verbs. The C&B verbs describe the severance or the destruction of an object while the opening or detachment verbs describe the separation of a distinguishable part of an object from another. In this paper, I discuss in detail the semantics of the separation verbs in GurenƒÃ to show that verb meaning in the language is highly specific and precise. The paper further explores the syntax of the verbs in light of the Guerssel et al. (1985) causative-inchoative hypothesis in their study of separation verbs in four languages (Berber, English, Hocak & Warlpiri) that BREAK verbs but not CUT verbs participate in causative-inchoative alternation. The Guren. data show that CUT verbs as well as both BREAK and opening verbs do participate in the causative-inchoative alternation. The discussion is pursued from a descriptive and typological perspective. The data is largely based on elicitations with six native-speaker consultants using the C&B video stimuli designed by Bohnnemeyer et al. (2001) and Majid et al. (2007). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to fill a gap in the existing research by analysing the construction of leadership and group identity in a corpus of 13 party conference speeches by the party leaders of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the British Labour Party between 1997 and 2003. The comparative approach chosen will demonstrate the context sensitivity and strategic use of the pronominal self-references. The article will demonstrate how changes of pronominal self-reference in party conference speeches can be understood as strategic changes of footing to foreground either the voice of the party leader or the voice of the party. It will conclude with the results of an analysis of the combination of pronominal self-references and verb forms construing competence and responsiveness, as suggested by Fetzer and Bull, and demonstrates that these verb forms are used differently in combination with the various forms of self-reference, a fact neglected in their analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper confirms that the English verb system (similar to the Finnish, Dutch, and Bulgarian verb systems) represents path curvature at three different grain levels: neutral path curvature, global path curvature, and local path curvature. We show that the three-grain-level hypothesis makes it possible to formulate constraints on English sentence structure and makes it possible to define constructions in English that refer to path curvature. We furthermore demonstrate in an experiment that the proposed English lexicalization pattern regarding path curvature in tandem with the spatial information shown to English speakers correctly predicts their packaging of grain levels in iconic gestures. We conclude that the data studied confirm Nikanne and Van der Zee's three-grain-level hypothesis in relation to English and Kita and Ozyurek’s interface hypothesis in relation to gesture production.

Children must learn the structural biases of locative verbs in order to avoid making overgeneralisation errors (e.g., (∗)I filled water into the glass). It is thought that they use linguistic and situational information to learn verb classes that encode structural biases. In addition to situational cues, we examined whether children and adults could use the lexical distribution of nouns in the post-verbal noun phrase of transitive utterances to assign novel verbs to locative classes. In Experiment 1, children and adults used lexical distributional cues to assign verb classes, but were unable to use situational cues appropriately. In Experiment 2, adults generalised distributionally-learned classes to novel verb arguments, demonstrating that distributional information can cue abstract verb classes. Taken together, these studies show that human language learners can use a lexical distributional mechanism that is similar to that used by computational linguistic systems that use large unlabelled corpora to learn verb meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research on cross-linguistic categorization reveals that there were universal principles constraining the categorization of motion events across languages, and variations only distributed in a limited range. However, this finding has not been widely verified across languages and semantic domains. In this paper, we will address whether the universal constraints exist in the cross-linguistic categorization of throwing events, with the data collected with a behavioral approach. We asked 79 adult native speakers of English(12 male, 17 female), Chinese(15 male, 15 female), and German(18 male, 12 female) to perform actions denoted by near-synonymous 'throw' verbs in their native languages. Then we coded the features of their actions and compared them across individuals and languages. The results support the finding of previous studies that event categorization is constrained across languages. In addition, the top-down approach we adopted in this study allowed us to capture the focal and extensional semantic range of each verb involved, which advanced our knowledge of event categories and different semantic representations of a class of near-synonyms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children overgeneralise verbs to ungrammatical structures early in acquisition, but retreat from these overgeneralisations as they learn semantic verb classes. In a large corpus of English locative utterances (e.g., the woman sprayed water onto the wall / wall with water ), we found structural biases which changed over development and which could explain overgeneralisation behaviour. Children and adults had similar verb classes and a correspondence analysis suggested that lexical distributional regularities in the adult input could help to explain the acquisition of these classes. A connectionist model provided an explicit account of how structural biases could be learned over development and how these biases could be reduced by learning verb classes from distributional regularities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Language in Different Contexts / Kalba ir Kontekstai is the property of Vytautas Magnus University 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.)

This article is a study of such prepositional constructions as aslepnuts na vochy, hvarets na astsu, azlabitstsa na sina, graz na dudtsy, ehats na kani in folk dialects of north-west Belarus. These constructions have received too little attention in the research on the standard variety of Belorussian and a few issues still need analysis: the usage patterns of the structure and its relations with other dialects. In this paper, we discuss the structural features, the geographical expansion and the prescriptive status of the construction. Our study revealed that the constructions can express different meanings, and they modify the meaning of the verb. The analysed structure exhibits high productivity in the dialects of north-west Belarus. We believe that all prepositional constructions of this kind were derived from non-prepositional constructions; the exact time of such shift is difficult to determine, since the two kinds of constructions have existed in parallel for a long time. The prepositional construction ehats na kani is normative in modern Belorussian and Russian. In the west of Belarus, people also use the prepositionless variant of the construction: ehats kanem. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A paradox at the heart of language acquisition research is that, to achieve adult-like competence, children must acquire the ability to generalize verbs into non-attested structures, while avoiding utterances that are deemed ungrammatical by native speakers. For example, children must learn that, to denote the reversal of an action, un- can be added to many verbs, but not all (e.g., roll/unroll; close/*unclose). This study compared theoretical accounts of how this is done. Children aged 5-6 ( N = 18), 9-10 ( N = 18), and adults ( N = 18) rated the acceptability of un- prefixed forms of 48 verbs (and, as a control, bare forms). Across verbs, a negative correlation was observed between the acceptability of ungrammatical un- prefixed forms (e.g., *unclose) and the frequency of (a) the bare form and (b) alternative forms (e.g., open), supporting the entrenchment and pre-emption hypotheses, respectively. Independent ratings of the extent to which verbs instantiate the semantic properties characteristic of a hypothesized semantic cryptotype for un- prefixation were a significant positive predictor of acceptability, for all age groups. The relative importance of each factor differed for attested and unattested un- forms and also varied with age. The findings are interpreted in the context of a new hybrid account designed to incorporate the three factors of entrenchment, pre-emption, and verb semantics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]