Is Passive Priming Really Impervious to Verb Semantics? A High-Powered Replication of Messenger Et al. (2012)

The aim of the present study was to conduct a particularly stringent pre-registered in-vestigation of the claim that there exists a level of linguistic representation that “includes syntactic category information but not semantic information” (Branigan & Pickering, 2017: 8). As a test case, we focussed on the English passive; a construction for which previous findings have been somewhat contradictory. On the one hand, several studies using different methodologies have found an advantage for theme-experiencer passives (e.g., The girl was shocked by the tiger; and also agent-patient passives; e.g., The girl was hit by the tiger) over experiencer-theme passives (e.g., The girl was ignored by the tiger). On the other hand, Messenger et al. (2012) found no evidence that theme-experiencer and experiencer-theme passives vary in their propensity to prime production of agent-patient passives. We therefore conducted an online replication of Messen-ger et al (2012) with a pre-registered appropriately powered sample (N=240). Although a large and significant priming effect (i.e., an effect of prime sentence type) was ob-served, a Bayesian analysis yielded only weak/anecdotal evidence (BF=2.11) for the crucial interaction of verb type by prime type; a finding that was robust to different coding and exclusion decisions, operationalizations of verb semantics (dichoto-mous/continuous), analysis frameworks (Bayesian/frequentist) and – as per a mixed-effects-multiverse analyses – random effects structures. Nevertheless, these findings do no not provide evidence for the absence of semantic effects (as has been argued for the findings of Messenger et al, 2012). We conclude that these and related findings are best explained by a model that includes both lexical, exemplar-level representations and rep-resentations at multiple higher levels of abstraction.

Functional Category of Aspectuality in the Russian And English Languages

This article studies functional and semantic Tense/Aspect complexes in Russian and English, focusing on their similarities and differences. In Russian, Tense-Aspect meanings of the verb forms correlate with the semantic components of Aktionsart, while in English both Imperfective and Perfective aspects of the verb semantics are realized by the constituent category of Tense/Aspect. The inner asymmetry of the verb forms and meanings is acknowledged for each of the contrastive languages, especially for the two languages compared. The material of the study is retrieved from grammar books and manuals and from literary text samples, principally concerns the use of Tense/Aspect forms of the Russian verb and the forms of the English Perfect. The novelty impact of the study is determined by focusing on the irregularity of the aspectual meanings of English Perfect forms and Tense/Aspect forms of the Russian verb, whereas they are mostly due to lexical meanings of the verbs influenced by intralinguistic specificities of the semantics of lexical indicators as well as mechanisms of communication on the whole. Aspectual meanings both for the Perfective and Imperfective Aspect in languages under comparison used to make up lexical and grammatical aspectual categorical complexes. In terms of Aspect and Tense, peculiarities are found as functional and semantic ones, highly dependent on the situation and context of communication, thus involving extralinguistic factors which also concern the extralinguistic environment of Tense/Aspect verbal forms in use. The comparison of functions and the semantics of Aspect and Aktionsart in the Russian language with those of English Perfect asymmetry is proved to emerge, being caused by cross-linguistic structural and typological differences, particularly, the existence or not the similar forms, their varying semantic load, analytical or synthetic tendencies and others. The asymmetry is especially vividly seen translation and lexicographic field to compose varying kinds of bilingual dictionaries.

Korean Learners’ Acquisition and Use of Variable First-Person Subject Forms in Spanish

Within the scope of research that lies at the intersection of sociolinguistics and second language acquisition, there is a growing body of empirical work on learners’ acquisition of variable subject expression in Spanish. This research has been instrumental for demonstrating that second language (L2) learners acquire linguistic and social constraints on subject form use. The present study extends research on variable Spanish subject expression to an understudied learner population: native Korean-speaking learners. Interview data were examined for the range and frequency of first-person subject forms produced by Korean-speaking learners at four instructional levels as well as linguistic and individual (extralinguistic) predictors of subject use. Results showed that learners at each level produced primarily null subjects, and verb number, verb-form regularity, verb semantics, and use of Spanish outside of class significantly predicted use of an overt personal pronoun over null subjects.

Roles of verb and construction cues

This study investigates how speakers of English and Korean, two typologically distinct languages, derive information from a verb and a construction to achieve sentence comprehension. In a sentence-sorting task, we manipulated verb semantics (real versus nonce) in each language. The results showed that participants from both languages were less inclined to sort sentences by a verb cue when the lexical-semantic information about a verb was obscured (i.e., nonce verb). In addition, the Korean-speaking participants were less likely affected by the verb semantics conditions than the English-speaking participants. These findings suggest the role of an argument structure construction in sentence comprehension as a co-contributor of sentence meaning, supporting the constructionist approach. The findings also imply language-specific mechanisms of sentence comprehension, contingent upon the varied impact of a verb on sentence meaning in English and Korean.

STRUCTURAL AND SEMANTIC PECULIARITIES OF EMOTIONAL STATES VERBALISATION IN MODERN ENGLISH LITERATURE DISCOURSE (BASED ON THE NOVEL BY E. GILBERT ‘EAT, PRAY, LOVE’)

The article is devoted to the study of means expressing emotional states in modern English literature discourse, i.e., the novel by E. Gilbert ‘Eat, Pray, Love’. The paper outlines structural and semantic peculiarities of lexical means expressing emotional states based on 163 verbal constructions obtained by continuous sampling from the novel under analysis. Emotional and emotive vocabulary are two adjacent but not identical notions; the term ‘emotive’ belongs to the sphere of linguistics comprising multilevel lingual means of expressing emotions, i.e., a linguistic research focuses on emotive vocabulary where the verb plays a significant role as a meaningful centre of the sentence. Verbalisation of emotional states is performed synthetically (indication of the emotional state is incorporated into the verb semantics) and analytically (emotional state is expressed through an adjective or / and noun semantics which follow the link verb). Emotional states include means of positive, negative, and neutral states. Emotive vocabulary denoting positive emotions comprises 8 emotional states among which are love, gaiety, happiness, satisfaction, excitement, admiration, tranquillity, inspiration, with the units containing semantic component ‘love’ dominating this group and constructions denoting excitement, admiration, tranquillity, and inspiration demonstrating low productivity. Negative emotions include 7 emotional states: fear, grief, anxiety, anger, sadness, rage, anguish, where constructions denoting fear and grief demonstrate the highest productivity, and units denoting anxiety, anger, sadness, rage, and anguish show low productivity.

Separation events in Tafi language and culture

Separation events differ in lexicalisation patterns (Talmy 2000) and in argument realisation (Levin and Rappaport Hovav 2005) cross-linguistically. There are different types of separation events. “Cutting” and “breaking” events involve a non-reversible change in object integrity and have been systematically researched cross-linguistically in recent times (Guerssel et al 1985; Bohnemeyer 2008; Majid et al. 2008; Schaefer and Egbokhare 2012). In this paper, some of the generalisations that have been made concerning CUT and BREAK verbs are tested based on data from Tafi, a Ghana-Togo Mountain language. I investigate the morpho-syntactic properties of Tafi CUT and BREAK verbs in relation to a suggested generalisation by Guerssel et al. that BREAK verbs have a transitive/intransitive argument structure and participate in the causative/inchoative alternation; while CUT verbs are transitive and they are not expected to occur without their external argument. The types of events referred to by the CUT and BREAK verbs and the combinatorial capacity of the individual verbs are also explored. Based on an analysis of stimulus-elicitations and spontaneous language performances recorded in the field, I show that the Tafi verb bhui ‘cut’ can be used in an intransitive/resultative construction in which the theme, the internal argument, occurs as the subject. Drawing on the behaviour of bhui ‘cut’ I interrogate the explanations that have been offered in the literature with respect to such deviations from the generalisation. I argue that the verb argument alternation potential of a verb depends on the verb semantics as well as the type of (internal) argument it collocates with. Moreover, I explore the semantic interpretations of the verb when it combines with non-typical objects such as ‘water’. I show that such patterns and collocations such as ‘the water cut’ = ‘the water stopped running’, ‘cut a village’ = ‘establish a village’ are areal in nature (cf. Huttar et al. 2007).

Balancing information-structure and semantic constraints on construction choice: building a computational model of passive and passive-like constructions in Mandarin Chinese

A central tenet of cognitive linguistics is that adults’ knowledge of language consists of a structured inventory of constructions, including various two-argument constructions such as the active (e.g., Lizzy rescued John), the passive (e.g., John was rescued by Lizzy) and “fronting” constructions (e.g., John was the one Lizzy rescued). But how do speakers choose which construction to use for a particular utterance, given constraints such as discourse/information structure and the semantic fit between verb and construction? The goal of the present study was to build a computational model of this phenomenon for two-argument constructions in Mandarin. First, we conducted a grammaticality judgment study with 60 native speakers which demonstrated that, across 57 verbs, semantic affectedness – as determined by further 16 native speakers – predicted each verb’s relative acceptability in the bei-passive and ba-active constructions, but not the Notional Passive and SVO Active constructions. Second, in order to simulate acquisition of these competing constraints, we built a computational model that learns to map from corpus-derived input (information structure + verb semantics + lexical verb identity) to an output representation corresponding to these four constructions (+“other”). The model was able to predict judgments of the relative acceptability of the test verbs in the ba-active and bei-passive constructions obtained in Study 1, with model-human correlations in the region of r = 0.5 and r = 0.3, respectively. Surprisingly, these correlations increased (to r = 0.75 and r = 0.5 respectively) when lexical verb identity was removed; perhaps because this information leads to over-fitting of the training set. These findings suggest the intriguing possibility that acquiring constructions involves forgetting as a mechanism for abstracting across certain fine-grained lexical details and idiosyncrasies.

The role of verb semantics in Hungarian verb-object order

Hungarian is often referred to as a discourse-configurational language, since the structural position of constituents is determined by their logical function (topic or comment) rather than their grammatical function (e.g., subject or object). We build on work by Komlósy (1989) and argue that in addition to discourse context, the lexical semantics of the verb also plays a significant role in determining Hungarian word order. In order to investigate the role of lexical semantics in determining Hungarian word order, we conduct a large-scale, data-driven analysis on the ordering of 380 transitive verbs and their objects, as observed in hundreds of thousands of examples extracted from the Hungarian Gigaword Corpus. We test the effect of lexical semantics on the ordering of verbs and their objects by grouping verbs into 11 semantic classes. In addition to the semantic class of the verb, we also include two control features related to information structure, object definiteness and object NP weight, chosen to allow a comparison of their effect size to that of verb semantics. Our results suggest that all three features have a significant effect on verb-object ordering in Hungarian and among these features, the semantic class of the verb has the largest effect. Specifically, we find that stative verbs, such as fed 'cover', jelent 'mean' and övez 'surround', tend to be OV-preferring (with the exception of psych verbs which are strongly VO-preferring) and non-stative verbs, such as bírál 'judge', csökkent 'reduce' and csókol 'kiss', verbs tend to be VO-preferring. These findings support our hypothesis that lexical semantic factors influence word order in Hungarian.

An aspectual contour of phrasal verb constructions with English think

In English, the internal constituency of an event is obligatorily expressed by means of non-progressive versus progressive aspect. It is also represented linguistically by means of lexical aspect, and thus verb semantics. The two types of distinctions are shown to lie at two different levels of schematicity in the Integrated Model of Aspect (IMA, Kokorniak 2018). Although particles constitute only an additional tool in aspectual profiling in English, they are very productive at the level of lexical aspect in profiling minor aspectual differences that main verb semantics and inflection cannot reflect. The particles that the verb think can be combined with include out, over, through and up. Monolingual learners’ dictionaries suggest that think out, think over and think through can be used interchangeably. Their definitions indicate that in all three cases the particles designate a careful and thorough mental process. The study presents an aspectual contour of think and the particles that the verb can be combined with, and displays that each particle constitutes an elaboration of the mental path in a slightly different way. Their semantic contribution to the aspectual verb profile is shown and located in the IMA continuum, while corpus examples depict their use.