A lexical semantic approach to the L2 acquisition of Spanish psych verbs

This study builds on prior research on second language (L2) Spanish psych verbs, which has centered on morphosyntactic properties, by examining their syntactic distribution, which relies on lexical semantic knowledge. The fact that certain forms are licensed for some verbs, but not others, is the result of an underlying lexical semantic difference across verb classes, represented here as a difference in formal feature strength. To fully acquire the relevant grammatical distribution, L2 learners must successfully acquire (i) licensing restrictions on argument structure and (ii) underlying lexical semantic representations of individual verbs. Three groups of L2 learners ( n = 66) and a group of native Spanish speakers ( n = 19) completed two judgment tasks (one with aural stimuli and one with written stimuli) which presented object experiencer psych verbs in multiple argument structures. Results show that advanced L2 learners are largely sensitive to the distribution tested here; however, while they have acquired relevant licensing restrictions, they may associate fixed feature settings with verbs that allow variable feature settings. These results are consistent with predictions made by the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis and highlight the role of lexical semantic features in second language acquisition.

ПРЕДИКАТИТЕ ЗА СЪСТОЯНИЕ В СЪВРЕМЕННИТЕ ЛИНГВИСТИЧНИ ТЕОРИИ (II) / STATIVE PREDICATES IN CONTEMPORARY LINGUISTIC THEORIES (II)

This paper presents a critical overview of thematic classes of stative verbs. To this end, we analyse three well-known thematic classifications of stative verb classes. While the main focus is on the works by Paducheva (1996; 2004), Spencer and Zaretskaya (2003) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997), where relevant we comment on research by other authors. The goal of the study is to shed light on the different views regarding the properties of stative predicates from an aspectual and semantic perspective and to outline the main thematic classes that fall into the category of statives. Keywords: stative predicates, semantic typology, thematic classes and subclasses

An Analysis on Newly Introduced English Verb in Oxford English Dictionary in 2016-2018: Levin’s Taxonomy of Verb Classification and Verbnet

Levin (1993) argues that the behaviour of verbs is determined by word meaning which is directly linked to the expression and interpretation of its argument. Based on this statement, Levin classified verbs into 48 classes and VerbNet, an English verb lexicon was created based on the extension of Levin’s taxonomy of verb classification (VC). Therefore, this study presents the classification of the updated English verbs of 2016 to 2018 in the online version of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) to examine the relevance of Levin’s VC and VerbNet in the recently added repertoire of verbs. In Addition, the study seeks to find out the new verb classes introduced in this study. This study uses a mixed-method to identify and classify the verbs. To conclude, this study found that both classifications were applicable and relevant in 14 new main verb classes introduced to classify the verbs that did not belong to Levin’s VC and VerbNet. Hence, this contributes to the body of knowledge as the newly introduced verb classes could be used based on the given semantic and syntactic conditions.

Thematic role assignment in non-default verb classes: A cross-linguistic comparison of English and German

The influence of sentential cues (such as animacy and word order) on thematic role interpretation differs as a function of language (MacWhinney et al. 1984). However, existing cross-linguistic research has typically focused on transitive sentences involving agents, and interpretation of non-default verb classes is less well understood. Here, we compared the way in which English and German native speakers – languages known to differ in the cue prominence of animacy and word order – assign thematic roles. We compared their interpretation of sentences containing either default (agent-subject) or non-default (experiencer-subject) verb classes. Animacy of the two noun phrases in a sentence was either animate-inanimate and plausible (e.g. “The men will devour the meals...”) or inanimate-animate and implausible in English (e.g. “The meals will devour the men…”). We examined role assignment by probing for either the actor or undergoer of the sentence. Mixed effects modelling revealed that role assignment was significantly influenced by noun animacy, verb class, question type, and language. Results are interpreted within the Competition Model framework (Bates et al. 1982; MacWhinney et al. 1984), and show that English speakers predominantly relied on word order for thematic role assignment. German speakers relied on word order to a comparatively lesser degree, with animacy a prominent cue. Non-default verbs (experiencer-subject) promoted a non-default comprehension strategy regarding the prominence of sentential cues, particularly in German. Intriguingly, responses were modulated by the probe task, with undergoer probes promoting object-initial interpretations, particularly for German speakers. This suggests that task focus may retroactively influence sentence interpretation.

ПРЕДИКАТИТЕ ЗА СЪСТОЯНИЕ В СЪВРЕМЕННИТЕ ЛИНГВИСТИЧНИ ТЕОРИИ (I) / STATIVE PREDICATES IN CONTEMPORARY LINGUISTIC THEORIES (I)

This paper presents a critical overview of thematic classes of stative verbs. To this end, we analyse three well-known thematic classifications of stative verb classes. While the main focus is on the works by Paducheva (1996; 2004), Spencer and Zaretskaya (2003) and Van Valin and LaPolla (1997), where relevant we comment on research by other authors. The goal of the study is to shed light on the different views regarding the properties of stative predicates from an aspectual and semantic perspective and to outline the main thematic classes that fall into the category of statives. Keywords: stative predicates, semantic typology, thematic classes and subclasses

(Im)perfectivity and actionality in East Ruvu Bantu

Temporal/aspectual morphology often serves as a diagnostic for actional classes. Bantu languages are known for their highly developed tense, aspect (and mood) systems. The East Ruvu Bantu languages of Tanzania are unusual in that they exhibit a decidedly reduced set of temporal/aspectual morphemes. This paper contributes to the growing body of research on Bantu actionality in showing that despite not being encoded overtly, perfective distinguishes between at least two actional classes. We suggest, however, that imperfective, morphologically encoded by present and non-past tense morphology, does not clearly delineate between the two verb classes. This discussion highlights the complex interaction between tense and aspect.

Parameter setting and acceleration

The present contribution analyzes the acquisition of subjects in French based on a longitudinal case study of a trilingual child aged 2;8–3;2 who acquired French, Italian and Spanish simultaneously. The three languages vary with respect to the null-subject property; French is traditionally characterized as a non-null-subject language, while Italian and Spanish are prototypical null-subject languages. Argument subject omissions in French are ungrammatical but frequently observed in monolingual children in early acquisitional phases, as are ungrammatical postverbal subjects which cluster with null-subjects. Bilingual children acquiring French produce fewer subject omissions and postverbal subjects. The present study also finds an acceleration effect in the trilingual child. The results are interpreted in light of a parameter setting which accounts for different verb classes at different locations with which the null-subjects occur, giving rise to ‘categorial CS’ or ‘congruent categorialization.’

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.