Event Semantics of Verb Frame Alternations PDF Download

Author: Angeliek Van Hout
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135670749
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Using both theoretical and language acquisition arguments, this study proposes a new model of the lexicon-syntax interface defined in terms of checking event-semantic features. The research is based on Dutch verbs and their possible verb frames (intransitive, transitive, etc.) and two studies of children's Dutch. The model developed from these cases represents more generally the way in which Universal Grammar organizes the lexicon of a language and the mapping system that associates a verb's lexical features with its syntactic projection.

Author: Artemis Alexiadou
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780199257652
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
The phenomenon of unaccusativity is a central focus for the study of the complex properties of verb classes. This book combines contemporary approaches to the subject with several papers that have achieved a significant status even though formally unpublished.

Author: Kristen Syrett
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing Company
ISBN: 9027263604
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 399

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Book Description
This volume presents the state of the art of recent research on the acquisition of semantics. Covering topics ranging from infants' initial acquisition of word meaning to the more sophisticated mapping between structure and meaning in the syntax-semantics interface, and the relation between logical content and inferences on language meaning (semantics and pragmatics), the papers in this volume introduce the reader to the variety of ways in which children come to realize that semantic content is encoded in word meaning (for example, in the event semantics of the verbal domain or the scope of logical operators), and at the level of the sentence, which requires the composition of semantic meaning. The authors represent some of the most established and promising researchers in this domain, demonstrating collective expertise in a range of methodologies and topics relevant to the acquisition of semantics. This volume will serve as a valuable resource for students and faculty, and junior and seasoned researchers alike.

Author: Malka Rappaport Hovav
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191572845
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
This book focuses on the linguistic representation of temporality in the verbal domain and its interaction with the syntax and semantics of verbs, arguments, and modifiers. Leading scholars explore the division of labour between syntax, compositional semantics, and lexical semantics in the encoding of event structure, encompassing event participants and the temporal properties associated with events. They examine the interface between event structure and the systems with which it interacts, including the interface between event structure and the syntactic realization of arguments and modifiers. Deploying a variety of frameworks and theoretical perspectives they consider central issues and questions in the field, among them whether argument-structure is specified in the lexical entries of verbs or syntactically constructed so that syntactic position determines thematic status; whether the hierarchical structure evidenced in argument structure find parallels in sign language; should the relation between members of an alternation pair, such as the causative-inchoative alternation, be understood lexically or derivationally; and the role of syntactic category in determining the configuration of argument structure.

Author: Qilong Cheng
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 100089245X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book presents a complementary study of lexicalist approaches and constructionist approaches in linguistics. Specific topics discussed include different versions of semantic roles, predicate decomposition, event structures, argument realizations, and cognitive construction grammars. For decades, the relationship between certain concepts and constructions along with related issues of verb-construction associations have been perennially taxing for both lexicalist and constructionist approaches alike. Indeed, in Chinese, unmatched verb-construction associations and the much richer alternate realizations pose very difficult problems. Based on a comparative study, the authors make an attempt to account for the possible correspondence between the delicacy of argument setting and the principles of their realization. They also account for the integration of construction with verbs in terms of their coherent conceptual content. The resultant newly developed model throws new light on these thorny Chinese problems. The book will appeal to scholars and students studying cognitive linguistics, cognitive semantics, computational linguistics, and also natural language processing. The book also brings up some new analysis of Chinese data for both researchers and learners of Modern Chinese.

Author: Henk J. Verkuyl
Publisher: Springer Science & Business Media
ISBN: 1402032323
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
This book offers both a retrospective view on how theories of aspectuality have developed over the past 30 years, and presents current, new directions of aspectuality research. The articles in this book take a wide crosslinguistic scope including aspectual analyses of the following languages: English and two varieties of English: African American English and Colloquial Singapore English, Italian, French, Bulgarian, Czech, Mandarin Chinese, West-Greenlandic, Wakashan languages, and Nahk-Daghestanian languages.

Author: Anna Pompei
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 3110748118
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
The notion of light verb constructions has been traditionally related to the ‘insignificance’ of the verb, which is described as a grammatical item only codifying TAM system and φ-features, whereas the whole predicative content is thought to be conveyed by the noun. This book deals with the light verb constructions as instances of complex verbs, intended as multi-predicational but monoclausal structures. This allows to deepen the actual verb lightness, the effective noun predicativity, as well as their effect on the cohesion of the construction. The papers in this volume reflect on the concrete contribution of noun and verb to the event and argument structure, and on the relevance of semantically different noun classes for the verb selection. From different theoretical approaches, data of a great variety of languages are investigated, such as Indo-European languages – both modern (Germanic, Slavic, Romance and Iranian languages) and ancient (Latin and Ancient Greek) – but also Mandarin Chinese, and different polysynthetic languages (e.g. Ket, Nivkh, Murrinh-Patha, Kiowa, Bininj Gun-wok, Ainu). The range of topics, languages and perspectives presented in this book make it of great interest to both theoretical and applied linguists.

Author: Ursula Brinkmann
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
ISBN: 9027281718
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 289

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Book Description
This monograph deals with the locative alternation in German, a change in the argument structure of verbs like spray and load. Like most argument structure changes, the alternation is both productive and constrained: new forms may be derived, but not from all candidate verbs. This raises a learnability problem: how can children determine, in the absence of negative evidence, which verbs participate in the alternation? The Locative Alternation in German tries to answer this question by providing an in-depth analysis of the conditions that verbs must meet in order to participate in the alternation. Most importantly, transitive verbs must allow speakers to presuppose the existence of their theme argument. This condition requires the theme to be incremental so that it can be conceived of as nonindividuated (or unbounded) when the verb is used in the alternative syntactic frame. The Nonindividuation Hypothesis splits locative verbs into two types, mass verbs (like spray) and count verbs (like load), and it predicts that children acquire the alternation first for mass verbs, whose theme must be a substance and so is nonindividuated by default. Support for this hypothesis is provided in the empirical part of the book, which also provides evidence against claims in the literature that children acquire the alternation by drawing on an innate Affectness Linking Rule.

Author: Roberto G. de Almeida
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 3319101129
Category : Psychology
Languages : en
Pages : 310

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Book Description
Verbs play an important role in how events, states and other “happenings” are mentally represented and how they are expressed in natural language. Besides their central role in linguistics, verbs have long been prominent topics of research in analytic philosophy—mostly on the nature of events and predicate-argument structure—and a topic of empirical investigation in psycholinguistics, mostly on argument structure and its role in sentence comprehension. More recently, the representation of verb meaning has been gaining momentum as a topic of research in other cognitive science branches, notably neuroscience and the psychology of concepts. The present volume is an expression of this recent surge in the investigation of verb structure and meaning from the interdisciplinary perspective of cognitive science, with up-to-date contributions by theoretical linguists, philosophers, psycholinguists and neuroscientists. The volume presents new theoretical and empirical studies on how verb structure and verb meaning are represented, how they are processed during language comprehension, how they are acquired, and how they are neurologically implemented. Cognitive Science Perspectives on Verb Representation and Processing is a reflection of the recent collaboration between the disciplines that constitute cognitive science, bringing new empirical data and theoretical insights on a key element of natural language and conceptualization.

Author: Claudia Maienborn
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311062639X
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 577

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Book Description
Discover vital research on the lexical and cognitive meanings of words. In this exciting book from a team of world-class researchers, in-depth articles explain a wide range of topics, including thematic roles, sense relation, ambiguity and comparison. The authors focus on the cognitive and conceptual structure of words and their meaning extensions such as coercion, metaphors and metonymies. The book features highly cited material – available in paperback for the first time since its publication – and is an essential starting point for anyone interested in lexical semantics, especially where it meets other cognitive and conceptual research.