Verbs describing routines facilitate object omission in English

Journal of Cognition and Culture, 2004

This study investigates the role of language on verb concepts in a cross-linguistic environment. The inflectional morphology of verbs in Tamil is contrasted with Mandarin, a language that does not explicitly reflect tense changes in the same manner as Tamil and English. In the baseline condition in experiment 1, participants were required to rate the similarity of object picture pairs; and in the experimental condition, they were asked to rate the similarity of action picture pairs. In experiment 2, participants' similarity judgments and response latencies were recorded when they were presented with the object and action picture pairs. This allowed us to investigate the strength of linguistic influence when representing event concepts. Data from this study revealed a moderate influence of language on verb concepts in the target populations. There was a significant different in the response latencies of the Tamil and Chinese participants, although both language groups exhibited a similar response pattern in the action picture judgment task. This finding suggests that while both groups perceived the events similarly, language may be mediating their responses, resulting in longer response times for the Chinese participants. This could be because considering tense in Mandarin is not 'automatic' and requires extra work, possibly because it is not intrinsic to the verb.

2017

NB: For a revised and condensed version of this overview, see the article Serial Verb Constructions in Annual Review of Linguistics 7 (2021). http://www.annualreviews.org/eprint/ZK6GFQCYSQDNXK2WXI7B/full/10.1146/annurev-linguistics-031920-115317 This paper was a draft of an extended overview of the literature on serial verb constructions prepared as part of the background reading for my PhD dissertation. Feel free to use this document to search for other references, but be aware that there may be some errors or misrepresentations that have not been corrected. Please do not cite or quote this document.

Съпоставително езикознание [Contrastive Linguistics], 2016

This paper reflects on the <en> verbs of English with respect to their word-formation, their morphological and syntactic properties, their motivation, and their status. The verbs are divided into several groups on the basis of a set of criteria, the central criterion being their word-formation pattern. The influence of the interplay of several categories – phrasality, transitivity, perfectivity, inchoativness, the ergative element and causality – on the verbs is discussed. In analyzing the categories, significant attention is paid to the role that grammatical context plays in motivating the appearance of these lexical items. Thus, symmetry is introduced where such has hitherto been lacking.

2014

English light verb constructions (LVCs), such as make an offer and take a bath, are semi-productive constructions: while some novel combinations of a light verb and eventive or stative noun are acceptable, others are not. LVCs tend to occur in families defined by a shared light verb and semantically similar nominal complements, but it remains mysterious precisely how such families are circumscribed; this presents both theoretical and natural language processing (NLP) challenges. This research first aims to address the void in linguistic resources identifying LVCs in a consistent fashion with the development of annotation guidelines for LVCs within the PropBank project. Using the resulting annotated corpus of LVCs, another theoretically important question of why LVCs exist alongside semantically similar lexical verbs is addressed: corpus evidence demonstrates that the ease and variety with which LVCs can be modified is the primary motivating factor for their use over a lexical verb....

2006

This dissertation explores the cognitive underpinnings of the linguistic observation that there is a strong correspondence between the meanings of verbs and the syntactic contexts in which they occur. Building on the assumption that this correspondence is due to the fact that speakers’ prior experience with linguistic structures affects their subsequent behavior (priming), I propose the Verb Anchor hypothesis that holds that experience with a sentence leads to a cognitive association between the sentence’s verb and the syntactic frame the sentence instantiates and that when this association is strong, the verb serves as an ‘anchor’ of the frame. I predict that high semantic similarity between verbs leads to an increase in the likelihood of speakers’ choosing the same syntactic frame across sentences. More precisely, the more semantically similar a verb is to the anchor, the more likely speakers are to choose the same frame as the frame associated with the anchor. I examine the Verb Anchor Hypothesis in two related but separate contexts of use. First, four syntactic priming experiments investigate whether an anchor formed via speakers’ immediate sentence experience (the recent anchor of a frame) affects syntactic frame selection in subsequent sentence production. Second, two sets of corpus analyses investigate whether an anchor that results from repeated experience of association between verb and syntactic frame (the typical anchor of a frame) influences the syntactic realization of verbs that are semantically similar to the anchor and have similar syntactic options. Overall, the studies this thesis report on support the Verb Anchor hypothesis and provide a partial answer to the question why verbs with similar meanings tend to occur in similar syntactic contexts. They thus contribute to answering the ultimate question of why grammars of language are the way they are.

Aphasiology

Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics https://spilplus.journals.ac.za/pub, 2022

This is a brief introduction to the special issue of Stellenbosch Papers in Linguistics Plus. We present the concept of serial verb constructions (SVCs) conventionally understood as monoclausal sequences of verbs without any overt marker of coordination, subordination, or syntactic dependency. We then focus on the mechanisms at work in the evolution of serial verb constructions, and the investigations of their origin and demise. We introduce the prototype approach to the category of SVCs as the basis of the study of verb serialization throughout the volume and discuss the research strategies applicable to the development of serial verbs in individual languages. The concluding section offers an overview of the volume.

Cognitive Linguistics 16 (4): 635-676. , 2005

Much recent work in Cognitive Linguistics and neighbouring disciplines has adopted a so-called usage-based perspective in which generalizations are based on the analysis of authentic usage data provided by computerized corpora. However, the analysis of such data does not always utilize methodological findings from other disciplines to avoid analytical pitfalls and, at the same time, generate robust results. A case in point is the strategy of using corpus frequencies. In this paper, we take up a recently much debated issue from construction grammar concerning the association between verbs and argument-structure constructions, and investigate a construction, the English as-predicative, in order to test the predictive power of di¤erent kinds of frequency data against that of a recent, more refined corpus-based approach, the so-called collexeme analysis. To that end, the results of the application of these corpus-based approaches to an analysis of the aspredicative are compared with the results of a sentence-completion experiment. Concerning the topic under consideration, collexeme analysis is not only shown to be superior on a variety of theoretical and methodological grounds, it also significantly outperforms frequency as a predictor of subjects' production preferences. We conclude by pointing out some implications for usage-based approaches.