scholarly journals Animacy and Affectedness in Germanic Languages

2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (1) ◽  
pp. 566-588
Author(s):  
Jens Fleischhauer
Keyword(s):  
Psychological Effect ◽  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Germanic Languages

Abstract This paper deals with the influence of animacy on affectedness. German, like other Germanic languages, requires oblique marking of the inanimate undergoer argument of verbs of contact by impact (e.g. hit, kick, bite), whereas the animate undergoer argument takes non-oblique marking. Inanimacy does not necessarily result in oblique marking; undergoer arguments with inanimate referents are realized in a non-oblique construction if a change of state or location is explicitly predicated, as in resultative constructions. This suggests that the marking of inanimate undergoer arguments is conditioned by two factors: animacy and affectedness. The basic claim is that animate and inanimate entities are affected differently by hitting, kicking and similar activities. Inanimates can only be physically affected, whereas animates can be psychologically affected as well. Since verbs of contact by impact do not entail a change of state/location, they do not represent their undergoer arguments as being (necessarily) physically affected. Hence, the potential psychological effect of hitting, kicking and the like on animate beings gives rise for interpreting animate undergoer arguments of those verbs as being affected.

scholarly journals A formação de construções resultativas no português brasileiro

2011 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 79-100 ◽  
Author(s):  
Núbia Rech
Keyword(s):  
Brazilian Portuguese ◽  
Romance Languages ◽  
Small Clause ◽  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Verb Phrase ◽  
Causative Alternation ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Motion Constructions ◽  
Secondary Predicates ◽  
Germanic Languages

This paper aims mainly at investigating if there is the formation of resultative constructions with simple adjective in Brazilian Portuguese, since researchers disagree on the existence of these constructions in Romance Languages. To start this discussion, first I make a distinction between resultative, depictive and circumstantial constructions. Then, I relate some of their main characteristics, testing how they appear in sentences written in Brazilian Portuguese. Afterwards, I propose an extension of Folli and Ramchand (2001)’s analysis on the Portuguese. These authors use a structure of verb phrase that consists of three different projections, each one consisting in a subpart of the event: Cause, Process and Result. My hypothesis about the Brazilian Portuguese is that the verbs of causative alternation – as they imply change of state – are the head of Result projection and have as their complement an adjective small clause (SC), whose predicate indicates the telic aspect of event, forming a resultative construction. Following this perspective of analysis, I study the possibility of formation of adjective resultatives with atelic and telic verbs that admit causative alternation. I also approach – although briefly – other types of constructions that express results, whose secondary predicates are, respectively, a complex adjective phrase, a PP or a DP. In this paper, only the constructions resulting from verbal actions are considered. Thus, goal of motion constructions – in which prepositions indicate the following of movement and its ending – and resultative constructions with causative verbs are not considered. The results show that there are not resultative constructions in the Brazilian Portuguese equivalent to those found in Germanic Languages, in which an atelic verb becomes a telic verb by adding a resultative secondary predicate to the sentence.

CHANGE- OF -STATE PREDICATES: THE ACQUISITION OF THE ENGLISH RESULTATIVE CONSTRUCTIONS BY SPANISH SPEAKERS

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salvador Bautista-Maldonado ◽  
Yazmin del Carmen Perez-Nares ◽  
Zenaida Rodriguez-Cordova ◽  
Santa del Carmen Herrera-Sanchez ◽  
Marla Perez-Barriga
Keyword(s):  
Spanish Speakers ◽  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Change Of State

Posture verbs

2013 ◽  
Vol 13 (2) ◽  
pp. 139-169 ◽  
Author(s):  
Åke Viberg
Keyword(s):  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Parallel Corpus ◽  
Written Text ◽  
Contrastive Study ◽  
Fine Grained ◽  
General Similarity ◽  
Data Source ◽  
Reflexive Verbs ◽  
Rich Data ◽  
Germanic Languages

From a typological perspective, the verbs of sitting, standing and lying have been described relatively extensively. Against this background, the present paper provides a contrastive study of the lexical semantics of the Swedish posture verbs sitta ‘sit’, stå ‘stand’ and ligga ‘lie’ based on the Multilingual Parallel Corpus (MPC), which contains extracts from Swedish novels and their published translations into English, German, French and Finnish. Since the corpus is a very rich data source, the study is focused on the use of posture verbs as locative verbs. It turns out that it is possible to arrange the languages along a continuum with respect to the use of posture verbs versus the copula to describe the location of inanimate objects. In Finnish the copula dominates completely, in English there is more of a balance (in this kind of written text), whereas the posture verbs dominate in German and Swedish. French stands out as a completely different type in this comparison, since the copula is used very little and posture verbs hardly at all. Actually, there is a tension in French between the use of a small number of verbs with a general locative meaning as translations and the use of a large variety of reflexive verbs and resultative constructions with past participles (e.g. être fixé ‘be attached’) which convey fine-grained information about the placement. Among the languages that use posture verbs as locative predicates, there is a general similarity with respect to the factors that condition the choice between lie and stand, whereas even closely related Germanic languages differ with respect to the semantic factors that condition the choice of sit as a locative predicate.

scholarly journals On the Distribution and Acquisition of the West Germanic ‘Need’-Verbs: German between Dutch and English

2016 ◽  
Vol 28 (4) ◽  
pp. 349-369
Author(s):  
Jing Lin
Keyword(s):  
Similar Pattern ◽  
Child Language ◽  
Negative Polarity ◽  
Input Frequency ◽  
Negative Polarity Items ◽  
The West ◽  
Polarity Items ◽  
West Germanic ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Germanic Languages

This paper investigates three verbs expressing necessity in the three West Germanic languages: Dutchhoeven, Englishneed, and Germanbrauchen. These three verbs are all categorized as negative polarity items(npis). However, there are differences in their distribution as NPIs, which posit Germanbrauchenbetween Englishneedand Dutchhoeven.By analyzing two factors that may influence acquisition, namely, opacity and input frequency, this paper moreover presents a similar pattern for the acquisition of these NPIs: The Dutch NPIhoevenemerges earlier in child language than its German counterpart, which in turn arises earlier than the English NPIneed.

Reanalyzing Mandarin V1-V2 resultative constructions—A force-theoretic approach

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-32
Author(s):  
Peng (Benjamin) Han
Keyword(s):  
Theoretic Approach ◽  
External Argument ◽  
Result State ◽  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Causal Influence ◽  
Internal Argument ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Resultative Construction ◽  
Event Based

Abstract This study takes a force-theoretic approach to Mandarin V1-V2 resultative constructions. Unlike event-based analyses that hold a causing event accountable for a result state, this study attributes a result state to a specific entity involved in the relevant causing event. In this way, V1-V2 resultative construction (RC) sentences have the interpretation that through a causing action, one entity relevant to the action caused a change of state to another entity; this causal influence is reconceptualized as a force from the former entity, characterizing the situation change concerning the latter entity. Following Copley and Harley (2015), this conceptual reanalysis is represented structurally, successfully deriving V1-V2 RC sentences. V2 and the internal argument DP specify the property of a resultant situation and its holder, defining the force; the external argument DP tells about this force's source; V1 modifies this force, indicating the causing action through which this force is realized.

Unaccusatives and unergatives: Evidence from Croatian

2014 ◽  
Vol 48 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-84
Author(s):  
Božana Knežević ◽  
Irena Brdar
Keyword(s):  
Diagnostic Criteria ◽  
Semantic Representation ◽  
Past Participle ◽  
Directed Motion ◽  
Perfective Aspect ◽  
Resultative Constructions ◽  
Lexical Semantic ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Intransitive Verbs

Abstract We argue that the unaccusativity phenomenon occurs in Croatian, as in many other languages. We demonstrate that unaccusative predicates not only have to meet specific (morpho)syntactic diagnostic criteria, but also that semantic criteria are involved. We show that it is possible to characterize Croatian intransitive verbs as unaccusatives using the following diagnostics: 1. past participle derivation by suffixation of -l; 2. participial adjective formation; 3. -ač (-er) nominals; 4. prefixation by the preverbs po-, do- and u-; 5. the perfective aspect; 6. resultative constructions; and 7. the possessive dative. In order to demonstrate a number of relevant semantic diagnostics, three classes of verbs are isolated, defined in terms of their lexical semantic representation and their morphosyntactic configuration: verbs of change of state, verbs of appearance and verbs of inherently directed motion

Pro-drop in interrogatives across older Germanic and Romance languages

2021 ◽  
pp. 97-136
Author(s):  
Federica Cognola ◽  
George Walkden
Keyword(s):  
Romance Languages ◽  
Left Periphery ◽  
Null Subjects ◽  
Null Subject ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Agreement Morphology ◽  
Using Data ◽  
Interrogative Clauses ◽  
Germanic Languages

This chapter investigates the mechanisms of null subject licensing in direct interrogatives, an environment which is generally neglected in investigation into null subjects, using data from a range of early Romance and Germanic languages considered to be asymmetric pro-drop languages, i.e. languages in which null subjects are favoured in main clauses. We find that there is subtle variation between the languages in question, but that two factors in particular – interrogative type and person – are crucial in conditioning this variation, and we sketch analyses based on the differential availability of Agree relations with left-peripheral elements. Therefore, null subjects in main interrogative clauses are licensed in two slightly different manners in the two language families – a fact which we show follows from differences in the structure of their left periphery and in agreement morphology

A Study into the Prototypicality of Chinese Labile Verbs

2019 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 1-31 ◽  
Author(s):  
Liulin Zhang
Keyword(s):  
Construction Grammar ◽  
Human Cognition ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Spontaneous Occurrence ◽  
Cognitive Construction Grammar

Trying to situate Chinese into the typology of labile verbs (verbs that may be used transitively or intransitively), this paper analyzes Chinese labile verbals under the framework of cognitive construction grammar. By exhaustively looking at labile verbals in a small corpus, it is found that as an isolating language in which causative (transitive use) or anticausative (intransitive use) is not morphologically marked, Chinese is particularly rich in labile verbals. After estimating how often several target verbals are used transitively and intransitively, two factors grounded in human cognition are revealed determining verbal lability in Chinese: change of state and spontaneity of the event. Change-of-state events give way to two competing profiling strategies, realized as a transitive construction and an intransitive construction, respectively. The degree and direction (transitive-dominated or intransitive-dominated) of verbal lability are sensitive to the likelihood of spontaneous occurrence of the event.

Intentionality, scalar change, and non-culmination in Korean caused change-of-state predicates

Linguistics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 58 (5) ◽  
pp. 1233-1283 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Beavers ◽  
Juwon Lee
Keyword(s):  
Partial Result ◽  
Result State ◽  
Active Voice ◽  
Change Of State ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
Direct Causation ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Agent Control ◽  
Control Hypothesis

AbstractThis paper investigates the interpretations of caused change-of-state predicates in Korean, and in particular non-culmination readings in which the result state inherent to the meaning of the predicate fails to obtain either fully (zero result) or partially. We argue that zero result readings require that the subject intended the coming about of the result state, while readings in which some result obtains (partially or completely) lack this entailment. Yet zero result interpretations are not reducible to ‘try’-constructions since the former but not the latter require the direct causation. Furthermore, zero result readings arise only in active voice, a grammatical constraint not explicitly discussed for other languages. We argue that the full suite of possible readings arises from two factors: a sublexical modality over worlds conforming to the agent’s intentions for zero result readings that arises from a special active voice inflection in Korean and a scalar semantics for change-of-state verbs that derives partial result readings as a type of degree achievement interpretation. An interaction of these two factors produce the range of possible readings for Korean change-of-state predicates. Finally, we discuss our account in relation to the Agent Control Hypothesis of Demirdache and Martin (2015) that agentivity properties of the subject are necessary for certain non-culmination readings, and suggest that Korean exemplifies the ACH provided that what counts as “control” includes intentionality.

Slow Down You’re Moving Too Fast

2015 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 53-63 ◽  
Author(s):  
Annie Lang ◽  
Nancy Schwartz ◽  
Sharon Mayell
Keyword(s):  
Older Adults ◽  
Cognitive Aging ◽  
Attention And Memory ◽  
Younger Adults ◽  
Media Messages ◽  
Two Factors ◽  
The Difference

The study reported here compared how younger and older adults processed the same set of media messages which were selected to vary on two factors, arousing content and valence. Results showed that older and younger adults had similar arousal responses but different patterns of attention and memory. Older adults paid more attention to all messages than did younger adults. However, this attention did not translate into greater memory. Older and younger adults had similar levels of memory for slow-paced messages, but younger adults outperformed older adults significantly as pacing increased, and the difference was larger for arousing compared with calm messages. The differences found are in line with predictions made based on the cognitive-aging literature.

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