Another look at the interaction between verbs and constructions

Despite the wealth of literature on English resultatives, there still remain a number of issues that have not been squarely addressed. This paper addresses two of them through a case study of resultatives based on wipe. First, while the existence of resultatives with objects not selected by verbs is well-known in the literature (e.g., wipe the crumbs off the table/*wipe the crumbs), few studies have addressed the issue of exactly which entities may appear as non-selected objects. Second, there are resultatives whose form is to be analyzed as a mixture of the verb’s lexically-specified syntactic frame and the syntactic frame of resultatives (e.g. wipe the blade clean on his skin coat), but such resultatives have been neglected in previous studies. In order to find an answer to the first issue, this paper adopts a force-recipient account, according to which the post-verbal NP of a resultative is a force-recipient (cf. Croft 1990, 1991, 1998, 2012). It is shown that non-selected objects like crumbs are indeed force-recipients in a conceptual scene. As for the second issue, such resultatives can be accommodated by means of a constructional analysis which holds that verbs contribute the semantics of the resulting expression, and that argument structure constructions simply enable the verb meaning to take its form. Together, these findings indicate that verbs play a far more important role than argument structure constructions in effecting the syntax and semantics of the resulting expression.

ASPECT AND AKTIONSART OF SECONDARY ASPECTUAL VERBS IN SERBIAN

The aim of the paper is to investigate aspectual value of secondary aspectual verb phrase in Serbian in terms of both grammatical and lexical aspect (Aktionsart). The present analysis focuses on two secondary aspectualizers krenuti and stati, which when used as lexical verbs have the opposite meanings related to motion in space, but when they appear as phase construction heads both verbs modify the opening segment of the aspectual event. The central idea of the proposal is that event types in general largely depend on temporal structures which need to be contextualized before they are formally identifiable. In other words, contrary to traditional approaches which define lexical aspect as inherent to verb meaning, we claim that each verb form (or any lexical and/or grammatical form for that matter) has an underlying meaning through which it entertains systematic relations with other forms in a language (Hirtle 1982:40). We start form aspectual and Aktionsart features of krenuti and stati as verb lexemes, then move onto the level of syntax to identify the co-compositional aspect of the overall phase construction via event structure and event segmentation mechanisms. Finally, the present paper aims to examine different uses of the two secondary aspectual verbs, along with the different types of events they can denote in order to bring to light the potential meanings which give rise to the various contextual senses of the aspectual construction. The reported results of the analysis were checked on the Corpus of Contemporary Serbian Language (SrpKor 2013). Key words: aspectual constructions, Aktionsart, aspectual event, temporal structure, secondary aspectualizer, event segmentation, event co-composition

Maîtrise des clitiques datifs dans les structures bitransitives en français L2 par des apprenants anglophones : influence de la structure argumentale de la L1

The objective of this study is to measure the influence of L1 verb argument structure, as well as verb meaning, on the mastery of dative clitics in French as a second language for a group of Anglophone learners. More specifically, we focus on ditransitive structures. While French and English share the V NP PP structure, English also has a double-object structure, V NP NP, for a subset of verbs. The results of our study show that L1 argument structure influences the mastery of dative clitics in French, especially for verbs that only accept the double-object structure in English. Further, the behaviour of our participants with verbs that accept the dative alternation led us to conduct a follow-up study. The findings show that verb meaning also influences performance with dative clitics, but this effect cannot be explained by L1 influence.

ВСИЧКО Е НАРЕД С ГЛАГОЛА (ИНОВАЦИОННИТЕ ПРОЦЕСИ ТРАНЗИТИВАЦИЯ И ДЕРЕФЛЕКТИВАЦИЯ С ЦЕЛ ПРИПИСВАНЕ НА КАУЗАТИВНОСТ) / EVERYTHING IS FINE WITH THE VERB (INNOVATION PROCESSES OF TRANSITIVIZATION AND DEREFLEXIVIZATION AS A MEANS OF ATTRIBUTING CAUSATIVITY)

The paper presents a summary of the observations on the tranisitivization and dereflexivization of Bulgarian verbs as a means of attributing causativity. The majority of the newly formed verbs that we analyze are causative while others may, under certain conditions and in particular sentences, exemplify the causative rule. The lability of morphological identification regarding the transitivity – intransitivity distinction is the reason to examine the excerpted verbs as being either A- or Р-labile. The following tendency can be observed: P-lability has to do with causativity, while A-labile verbs are not-causative. In such cases the subject does not undergo changes neither in their intransitive nor in their transitive use. With P-labile verbs, the subject of the intransitive verb becomes the object of the transitive verb. There are some ambiva-lent verbs, such as minavam (pass), premina (pass over), svetna (light up), spomagam (facilitate), stigna (reach), treniram (train). Although the second group contains 40 causatives and the third group has 3 verbs, the lability procedure is not applicable because of the difference between the reflexive with the se- (се) marker and the transitive verb, i.e. the mismatch in form also means non-lability. The examples in the third group can also be viewed as the absolute use of the transitive verb meaning. The changes in the verbs indicate a change in the way contemporary Bulgarians think – the causative verbs serve as an expression of an active position, while the interplay between transitive and intransitive and/or reflexive and non-reflexive verbs has mostly pragmatic purposes, such as achieving a certain communicative effect, attractiveness, informality. Keywords: labile verbs, A-lability, P-lability, the lexico-grammatical category of transitivity ‒ intransitivity, causativity, Bulgarian language

BioVerbNet: a large semantic-syntactic classification of verbs in biomedicine

Background Recent advances in representation learning have enabled large strides in natural language understanding; However, verbal reasoning remains a challenge for state-of-the-art systems. External sources of structured, expert-curated verb-related knowledge have been shown to boost model performance in different Natural Language Processing (NLP) tasks where accurate handling of verb meaning and behaviour is critical. The costliness and time required for manual lexicon construction has been a major obstacle to porting the benefits of such resources to NLP in specialised domains, such as biomedicine. To address this issue, we combine a neural classification method with expert annotation to create BioVerbNet. This new resource comprises 693 verbs assigned to 22 top-level and 117 fine-grained semantic-syntactic verb classes. We make this resource available complete with semantic roles and VerbNet-style syntactic frames. Results We demonstrate the utility of the new resource in boosting model performance in document- and sentence-level classification in biomedicine. We apply an established retrofitting method to harness the verb class membership knowledge from BioVerbNet and transform a pretrained word embedding space by pulling together verbs belonging to the same semantic-syntactic class. The BioVerbNet knowledge-aware embeddings surpass the non-specialised baseline by a significant margin on both tasks. Conclusion This work introduces the first large, annotated semantic-syntactic classification of biomedical verbs, providing a detailed account of the annotation process, the key differences in verb behaviour between the general and biomedical domain, and the design choices made to accurately capture the meaning and properties of verbs used in biomedical texts. The demonstrated benefits of leveraging BioVerbNet in text classification suggest the resource could help systems better tackle challenging NLP tasks in biomedicine.

Predictive language comprehension in Parkinson’s disease

Language impairment in Parkinson’s disease (PD) may be attributable to motor and action/event knowledge deficits. We predicted that cognitively intact PD participants would be impaired in anticipating objects in sentences from event-based thematic fit information. Twenty-four PD and 24 healthy age-matched participants completed comprehensive neuropsychological assessments. We recorded participants’ eye movements as they heard predictive (The fisherman rocks the boat) and non-predictive baseline sentences (Look at the bathtub). Predictive sentences contained target, agent-related, verb-related, and unrelated images. Baseline sentences used phonologically and semantically unrelated distractors. We tested effects of group (PD/control) on gaze using growth curve models. There were no significant differences between PD and control participants in either sentence type, suggesting that PD participants successfully and rapidly use combinatory thematic fit information to predict upcoming language. Additionally, we conducted an exploratory analysis contrasting PD and controls’ performance on low motion content versus high motion content verbs. This analysis revealed fewer predictive fixations in high-motion sentences only for healthy older adults, suggesting that people with Parkinson’s disease may adapt to their disease by relying on spared, non-action-simulation-based language prediction and processing mechanisms. Given that multiple studies have shown that individuals with PD have difficulty processing verbs, it is highly surprising that they match healthy adults in their ability to use verb meaning to predict upcoming nouns.

Thematic reanalysis in the left posterior parietal sulcus: A TMS study

Understanding who does what to whom is at the core of sentence comprehension. The actors that contribute to the verb meaning are labeled thematic roles. We used Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation (TMS) to verify the possible impact of verb semantics on the thematic role encoding process that has been shown to involve the posterior portion of the left posterior parietal sulcus (PPS; Finocchiaro et al., 2015). Sixteen participants underwent TMS and SHAM sessions while performing an ℌagent-decisionℍ task, in which they had to decide by key press which of the two arguments was the agent of visually presented sentences or pseudo-sentences. (Pseudo)sentences were all reversible and were presented in the active or passive diathesis. Double pulse TMS was delivered to the posterior part of the IPS in an event-related fashion, at two different time windows: 200-400 msec (T1) or 600-800 msec (T2) time-locked to the presentation of the (pseudo)sentence. Results showed that TMS increased accuracy on passive sentences and pseudo-sentences as compared to active sentences and to the baseline, SHAM condition. Indeed, the presence of a verb with a full semantic representation was not a necessary precondition for the TMS-induced facilitation of passive (pseudo)sentences. Stimulation timing had no effect on accuracy for sentences vs. pseudo-sentences. These observations support the idea that the posterior parietal site is recruited when the correct interpretation of a sentence requires reanalysis of temporarily encoded thematic roles (as in reversible passive sentences) even when the verb is not an entry in the lexicon and hence does not have a semantic representation. Results are consistent with previous evidence and deserve further investigation in larger experimental samples. Increasing the number and variety of stimulus sentences, and administering TMS to additional control sites will be key to further articulate the conclusions allowed by these initial findings.

Verb movement and the lack of verb-doubling VP-topicalization in Germanic

In the absence of a stranded auxiliary or modal, VP-topicalization in most Germanic languages gives rise to the presence of a dummy verb meaning ‘do’. Cross-linguistically, this is a rather uncommon strategy as comparable VP-fronting constructions in other languages, e.g. Hebrew, Polish, and Portuguese, among many others, exhibit verb doubling. A comparison of several recent approaches to verb doubling in VP-fronting reveals that it is the consequence of VP-evacuating head movement of the verb to some higher functional head, which saves the (low copy of the) verb from undergoing copy deletion as part of the low VP copy in the VP-topicalization dependency. Given that almost all Germanic languages have such V-salvaging head movement, namely V-to-C movement, but do not show verb doubling, this paper suggests that V-raising is exceptionally impossible in VP-topicalization clauses and addresses the question of why it is blocked. After discussing and rejecting some conceivable explanations for the lack of verb doubling, I propose that the blocking effect arises from a bleeding interaction between V-to-C movement and VP-to-SpecCP movement. As both operations are triggered by the same head, i.e. C, the VP is always encountered first by a downward search algorithm. Movement of VP then freezes it and its lower copies for subextraction precluding subsequent V-raising. Crucially, this implies that there is no V-to-T raising in most Germanic languages. V2 languages with V-to-T raising, e.g. Yiddish, are correctly predicted to not exhibit the blocking effect.

Using Verb Extension to Gauge Children’s Verb Meaning Construals: The Case of Chinese

Verb extension is a crucial gauge of the acquisition of verb meaning. In English, studies suggest that young children show conservative extension. An important test of whether an early conservative extension is a general phenomenon or a function of the input language is made possible by Chinese, a language in which verbs are more frequent and acquired earlier. This study tested whether 3-year-old Chinese children extended a group of familiar verbs that specify various ways to carry objects. Shown videos that portrayed typical, mid-typical, or atypical carrying actions (as verified by Chinese adults), children were asked to judge whether they were examples of specific Chinese carry verbs. Children’s verb extensions were mostly limited to typical exemplars, suggesting that an early conservative extension may be universal. Furthermore, extension breadth was related to the onset of verb production: verbs acquired earlier elicited more extension judgments than those acquired later.