Complex Verb Constructions in Old Dutch

2020 ◽  
Vol 80 (3) ◽  
pp. 286-302
Author(s):  
Evie Coussé
Keyword(s):  
Systematic Search ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Linguistic Context ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Passive Construction ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
Main Verb

Abstract This article presents a corpus study of complex verb constructions in Old Dutch. A systematic search of the Old Dutch Corpus uncovers a set of fifteen complex verb constructions which all stack two auxiliaries (one finite and one nonfinite) on top of a main verb. The oldest and most frequent complex verb construction in the corpus is a future passive construction combining finite sullan ‘shall’ with nonfinite werthan ‘be’ and a past participle. The article discusses all fifteen complex verb constructions in detail and sketches the wider linguistic context in which they are found.

scholarly journals Directionals and re-autonomization in Dutch modals

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Jan Nuyts ◽  
Wim Caers
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Study ◽  
Modal Auxiliaries ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
Alternative Suggestion ◽  
Germanic Languages

Abstract Modal auxiliaries in Present Day Dutch are going through a process of ‘re-autonomization’, i.e. they are increasingly used without a main verb elsewhere in the clause, in ways which are not possible in other Germanic languages. Many Germanic languages do allow omission of the main verb when a modal is combined with a directional phrase in the clause. This paper investigates whether the latter phenomenon may have been the cause of the former process in Dutch. A diachronic corpus study of the Dutch modals shows that the answer is negative. The paper offers an alternative suggestion as to how the re-autonomization trend may have emerged.

scholarly journals A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post and the relation with text characteristics

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2) ◽  
pp. 108
Author(s):  
Ikmi Nur Oktavianti ◽  
Asmad Adnan
Keyword(s):  
Corpus Study ◽  
The Third ◽  
Material Type ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
Verb Classification

As one of the text categories, opinion texts have distinctive characteristics compared to any other texts in newspapers, including the choice of verb usage. This study then aims at preliminarily examining the verbs used in opinion articles in The Jakarta Post to find out the relation between frequency and text characteristics. This study collected the opinion articles of The Jakarta Post comprising 47.143 words. This study was assisted by Lancsbox to store the corpus of opinion section texts, to identify the verb lemmas, and to count the frequency of verbs. The verbs found in this study were then classified based on Scheibman’s main verb classification (which is based on Halliday’s and Dixon’s verb types). The results of the study show that there are three most frequent verb types used in opinion texts in The Jakarta Post; they are material, verbal, and feeling verb types. Meanwhile, the lesser frequent ones are perception, possessive/relational, relational, and cognition verbs types. Meanwhile, the least frequent verb types are existential, corporeal and perception/relational verbs types. As opinion text conveys the argument of the writer, it is plausible to find feeling verb type belongs to the third most frequent types, along with material type to show concrete actions and verbal type to report the information. These frequencies exhibit that there is a firm relationship between text characteristics and the tendency of verb choice.

The English get-passive in spoken discourse: description and implications for an interpersonal grammar

1999 ◽  
Vol 3 (1) ◽  
pp. 41-58 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ronald Carter ◽  
Michael McCarthy
Keyword(s):  
Past Participle ◽  
British English ◽  
Spoken Discourse ◽  
Spoken English ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Probabilistic Grammars

Using a 1.5-million-word sample from the CANCODE spoken English corpus, we present a description of the get-passive in informal spoken British English. Previous studies of the get-passive are reviewed, and their focus on contextual and interpersonal meanings is noted. A number of related structures are then considered and the possibility of a passive gradient is discussed. The corpus sample contains 139 get-passives of the type X get + past participle (by Y) (e.g. He got killed), of which 124 occur in contexts interpreted as adversative or problematic from the speaker's viewpoint. Very few examples contain an explicit agent or adverbials. Main verb frequency is also considered. Where contexts are positive rather than adversative, newsworthiness or focus of some kind on the subject and/or events is still apparent. The corpus evidence is used to evaluate the terms upon which an interpersonal grammar of English might be developed, and a contrast is drawn between deterministic grammars and probabilistic ones, with probabilistic grammars offering the best potential for the understanding of interpersonal features.

The Use of the Verb Dare in Blends between the Modal and Main Verb Constructions

1992 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-16 ◽  
Author(s):  
Patrick Duffley
Keyword(s):  
Normal Forms ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Third ◽  
Other Hand ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
Third Person ◽  
Main Verb ◽  
The Third Person

It is a well-known fact that the verb dare can be used with either modal or main verb characteristics both in its inflection and in its syntax. When used as a modal, it drops the -s ending in the third person singular present indicative (She dare not mention it in his presence), has no imperative, infinitive or participial forms, takes direct negation by not, AUX-inverts in questions (Dare I ask you another question?) and is followed by the bare infinitive. In main verb use, on the other hand, it has all the normal forms of the verb, occurs with do auxiliary in negatives and interrogatives, and is construed with the to infinitive (She doesn’t dare to mention it in his presence).

Choosing an event description: What a PropBank study reveals about the contrast between light verb constructions and counterpart synthetic verbs

2020 ◽  
Vol 56 (3) ◽  
pp. 577-600
Author(s):  
CLAIRE BONIAL ◽  
KIMBERLY A. POLLARD
Keyword(s):  
Large Scale ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
General Function ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Light Verb Constructions ◽  
Light Verb ◽  
Event Description ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
Motivating Factor

Light verb constructions (LVCs) in English and Romance languages are somewhat unique crosslinguistically because LVCs in these languages tend to have semantically similar synthetic verb counterparts (Zarco 1999): e.g. make an appearance and appear. This runs contrary to assumptions in linguistic theories that two competing forms are rarely maintained in a language unless they serve distinct purposes (e.g. Grice 1975). Why do English LVCs exist alongside counterpart synthetic verbs, especially given that synthetic verbs are arguably the more efficient form (Zipf 1949)? It has been proposed that LVCs serve an aspectual function (Prince 1972, Live 1973, Wierzbicka 1982, Tanabe 1999, Butt & Geuder 2001), as there are telic LVC counterparts (e.g. have a thought) of atelic verbs (e.g. think).  This proposal has been difficult to evaluate without a large-scale resource providing a markup of both LVCs and counterpart verbs. Addressing this gap in resources, the present research describes the development of guidelines for LVC annotation in the English PropBank (Bonial & Palmer 2015). The focus of this article is the subsequent analysis of these annotations, aimed at uncovering corpus evidence of what contexts call for the use of an LVC over a synthetic verb. The corpus study shows that the general function of LVCs is not an aspectual one and provides distributional evidence that the ease and variety with which LVCs can be modified is the general motivating factor for the use of an LVC.

scholarly journals Soundscapes in English and Spanish: a corpus investigation of verb constructions

2020 ◽  
Vol 12 (4) ◽  
pp. 705-728
Author(s):  
ROSARIO CABALLERO ◽  
CARITA PARADIS
Keyword(s):  
Striking Difference ◽  
Production Data ◽  
Theoretical Discussion ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Verb Constructions

ABSTRACTThis corpus study explores how sound events are communicated in English and Spanish. The aims are to (i) contribute production data for a better understanding of the couplings of meanings and their realizations, (ii) account for typological differences between the languages, and (iii) further the theoretical discussion of how sound is conceptualized through the window of language. We found that, while there are significant differences between the languages with respect to how sound events are communicated, they are similar with respect to what domains the sound descriptions are instantiated in, namely perception, motion, manipulation, emotion-reaction, consumption, and cognition. One striking difference has to do with the conflation of sound for action, e.g., creak, squeak, and sound for motion, e.g., slam, crash. This finding supports the received view of English as a language that may lexicalize manner in those kinds of verbs, while Spanish expresses manner through qualifiers outside the verb. Moreover, both languages employ three different perspectives on the soundscapes: Producer-, Experiencer-, and Phenomenon-based. While English favours the Producer perspective, Spanish features an even distribution between Producer and Experiencer. Phenomenon-based descriptions are relatively few in both languages.

Rise and be surprised: Aspectual profiling and mirativity in Odia light verb constructions

2019 ◽  
Vol 30 (1) ◽  
pp. 123-164
Author(s):  
Maarten Lemmens ◽  
Kalyanamalini Sahoo
Keyword(s):  
Argument Structure ◽  
Coherent System ◽  
Semantic Features ◽  
Theoretical Contribution ◽  
Light Verbs ◽  
Light Verb Constructions ◽  
Light Verb ◽  
Verb Constructions ◽  
The Status ◽  
Main Verb

AbstractIn this paper, we present our Construction Grammar account of light verb constructions in the Indo-Aryan language Odia (earlier known as Oriya). These light verb constructions are asymmetric complex verb predicates that combine a main verb (MV) with a light verb (LV). While the LVs are form-identical with a lexical verb, they are “light” because they have lost their lexical content as well as their argument structure. We argue that LV constructions present a coherent system: (i) they all modulate the interpretation of the event encoded by the main verb by adding a particular aspectual (phasal) profile on the event (i.e. profiling the ONSET, DURATION or COMPLETION of the event) and (ii) some of these light verbs further add a mirative interpretation. The present paper focuses on this subset of “aspectuo-mirative LVs” which can be characterised as non-parasitic expressions of mirativity; in particular, it presents new work on the light verb -uʈh ‘-rise’ that combines a profile on ONSET with mirativity. The constructional view that we present here offers an account of light verbs that is both descriptively and theoretically innovative. Its descriptive value resides in its systematic and fine-grained corpus-based analysis of the formal and semantic features of LVs beyond what is found in the existing literature. The theoretical contribution of our paper not only resides in offering a better understanding of the status of LVs in the grammar, but by situating the semantic value of some of these in the complex category of mirativity, it offers a more unified answer of quite disparate observations in the literature. Finally, we also address the question of whether this mirative value of the aspectuo-mirative LVs is semantic or pragmatic. As we will show, such a strict dichotomy cannot be maintained, which gives further support for a constructional approach.

scholarly journals Foreword

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (2) ◽  
pp. 5-5
Author(s):  
Nina GOLOB
Keyword(s):  
Online Journal ◽  
Corpus Study ◽  
Passive Construction ◽  
Taiwan Mandarin ◽  
Nasal Vowels ◽  
Core Function ◽  
Phonemic Status ◽  
Neutral Tone ◽  
Insight Into

This last year has been busy for the journal not only in terms of the volume of submissions but also due to the newliest demands as an online journal. Words of appreciaton go to the authors who have contributed to this edition, all the reviewers, finally to the production team, who prepared the papers for publication. Altogether this summer’s edition of the journal brings together six research articles. The first paper was authored by Karen HUANG, who acoustically analyzed neutral tone syllables in Taiwan Mandarin to show the effects of stress and accent on its tone patterns.   The following paper is a corpus study on phonemic status of Bangla nasal vowels and was written by Jahurul ISLAM. It offers a new insight into the number of such vowels, which is lower than reported up until now. Nina GOLOB and Mateja PETROVČIČ wrote an article on vowel sequences in Japanese and Chinese, and reviewed their appearance in official Latin scripts of the two languages and pronunciation catches in those scripts. A paper by Liulin ZHANG dedicates its attention to a character-based historical overview of the notional passive construction in Chinese through corpus analysis. Yet another paper on Chinese was written by LI Wenchao, who focused on the evolution of the Chinese verb 断 (duàn ‘break’) and discussed the development of its several syntactic functions. Last but not least, I-hao WOO’s paper on Mandarin Chinese perfective suffix -‍le proposed a straightforward definition on the core function of the suffix, and provided a simple way for the instruction of it. Editors and Editorial Board wish the regular and new readers of the ALA journal a pleasant read full of inspiration.

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