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In this article we consider the nature of ‘result verbs’, typically defined as verbs describing scalar changes, which have played a significant role in the literature on verb typologies, event structures, and theories of (im)possible word meanings. We argue that the entailment of scalar change and the entailment of a new result state should not be wholly conflated. Rather, various previously proposed diagnostics for scalar change actually pick out at least two distinct notions—entailing change along a scale regardless of whether a new state obtains for the theme argument, more broadly, and change along a scale that does result in a new state, more narrowly. We specifically examine verbs of manner of motion, with a special emphasis on the verb climb , and show that there is a subclass of manner-of-motion verbs that entail scalar change without a new result and are themselves also cross-classified by other standard distinctions among scalar change verbs. These observations have several consequences. First, manner-of-motion verbs are not as distinct from path verbs as prior work in the Talmy typology has suggested. Second, prior diagnostics for identifying result verbs and subtypes of result verbs are sensitive to the various distinctions we propose, producing more nuanced results than previously assumed. Third, the observation that a large swath of manner-of-motion verbs also have result entailments further supports the conclusion in Beavers & Koontz-Garboden 2012 that there is no truth-conditional manner/result complementarity in verb meaning, expanding the base of potential counterexamples and raising questions about how the claim is meant to be interpreted.

The principal concern in this study is to provide a detailed discussion of the pragmatic properties of ‘possible’ modal adverbs, mainly by comparing conceivably with perhaps. First, we identify two factors regarding the occurrence patterns of these modal adverbs: their cooccurrence with modal verbs and their position in the clause, both of which are pragmatic-related characteristics. Two techniques were employed: analysis of manually coded corpus data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and analysis of questionnaire data (from a completion test). The combined results demonstrate that the two adverbs display opposite functional characteristics, and that the factors influencing the use of these adverbs are strongly associated with the contexts of modality and discourse.

Some natural languages do not lexically distinguish between modals of possibility and modals of necessity. From the perspective of languages like English, modals in such languages appear to do double duty: they are used both where possibility modals are expected and where necessity modals are expected. The Nez Perce modal suffix o'qa offers an example of this behavior. I offer a simple account of the flexibility of the o'qa modal centered on the absence of scalar implicatures. O'qa is a possibility modal that does not belong to a Horn scale; its use is never associated with a scalar implicature. Accordingly, in an upward-entailing environment, φ- o'qa is appropriate whenever there are accessible φ-worlds, even if indeed ALL accessible worlds are φ-worlds. In a downward-entailing environment, the flexibility of the o'qa modal is seen no more. Here, neither o'qa nor English possibility modals are associated with scalar implicatures, and the use of o'qa exactly parallels the use of English modals of possibility. Given that o'qa is a possibility modal that does not contrast with a modal of necessity, just how do you talk about necessities in Nez Perce? Speakers translating into Nez Perce rely on a variety of techniques to paraphrase away expressions of simple necessity. Their strategies highlight an area where Nez Perce and English plausibly differ in the range of propositions they convey. The data cast doubt on any strong form of effability as a language universal.

On the naive account of scalar modifiers like more than and at least, At least three girls snored is synonymous with More than two girls snored, and both sentences mean that the number of snoring girls exceeded two (the same, mutatis mutandis, for sentences with at most and less/fewer than). We show that this is false and propose an alternative theory, according to which superlative modifiers (at least/most) are quite different from comparative ones (more/less/fewer than). Whereas the naive theory is basically right about comparative modifiers, it is wrong about superlative modifiers, which we claim have a MODAL meaning: an utterance of At least three girls snored conveys two things: first, that it is CERTAIN that there was a group of three snoring girls, and second, that more than four girls MAY have snored. We argue that this analysis explains various facts that are problematic for the naive view, which have to do with specificity, distributional differences between superlative and comparative modifiers, differential patterns of inference licensed by these expressions, and the way they interact with various operators, like modals and negation

The main focus of this article is the occurrence of some polarity items (PIs) in the complements of emotive factive verbs and only . This fact has been taken as a challenge to the semantic approach to PIs (Linebarger 1980), because only and factive verbs are not downward entailing (DE). A modification of the classical DE account is proposed by introducing the notion of nonveridicality (Zwarts 1995, Giannakidou 1998, 1999, 2001) as the one crucial for PI sanctioning. To motivate this move, it is first shown that two solutions in the direction of weakening classical monotonicity do not work: Strawson DE (von Fintel 1999) and weak DE (Hoeksema 1986). Weakening DE systematically either overgenerates or undergenerates, in either case failing to characterize the correct set of licensers. Nonveridicality is introduced as a conservative extension of DE and is shown to account for PIs also in contexts that are not DE (i.e. questions, modal verbs, imperatives, directive propositional attitudes). This theory, augmented with the premise that certain PIs (i.e. the liberal class represented by any) are subject to a weaker polarity dependency identified not as licensing but as rescuing by nonveridicality, explains the occurrence of this particular class with only and emotive factive verbs. Crosslinguistic comparisons illustrate that the occurrence of PIs with only and emotive factives is not a general phenomenon, and further support the dual nature of polarity dependency and the semantic characterization of the elements that license or rescue PIs.

The lexical semantic structures of change-of-state verbs are explored via linguistic theory, corpus analysis, and psycholinguistic experimentation. The data support the idea that these verbs can be divided into two classes, those for which the change of state is internally caused and those for which it is externally caused (Levin & Rappaport Hovav 1995, cf. Smith 1970). External causation change-of-state verbs have been hypothesized to denote two subevents, internal causation change-of-state verbs only one event. Consistent with this difference, the psycholinguistic data indicate that, in both transitive AND intransitive constructions, sentences with external causation verbs take longer to comprehend than sentences with internal causation verbs.

The primary purpose of this study is to present evidence, based on experimental data from Western European languages, that there is orderly variation in the choice of perfective auxiliary with intransitive verbs. Specifically, auxiliary selection is sensitive to a hierarchy of aspectual/thematic verb types: some verbs require a given auxiliary categorically, whereas others allow both auxiliaries to a greater or lesser extent depending on their position on the hierarchy. It is argued that this gradience has potentially important implications for the UNACCUSATIVE HYPOTHESIS, and more generally for theories of the lexicon-syntax interface.

We tested two hypotheses about how English-speaking children learn to avoid making argument structure errors such as Don't giggle me. The first is that children base their usage of verbs on membership in narrow-range semantic classes (Pinker 1989). The second is that children make use of indirect negative evidence in the form of alternative expressions that preempt tendencies to overgeneralize. Ninety-six children (32 each at 2.5, 4.5, and 6/7 years of age) were introduced to two nonce verbs, one as a transitive verb and one as an intransitive verb. One verb was from a semantic class that can be used both transitively and intransitively while the other was from a fixed transitivity class. Half of the children were given preempting alternatives with both verbs; for example, they heard a verb in a simple transitive construction (as in Ernie's meeking the car) and then they also heard it in a passive construction-which enabled them to answer the question What's happening with the car?' with It's getting meeked (rather than generalizing to the intransitive construction with It's meeking). We found empirical support for the constraining role of verb classes and of preemption, but only for children 4.5 years of age and older. Results are discussed in terms of a model of syntactic development in which children begin with lexically specific linguistic constructions and only gradually learn to differentiate verbs as lexical items from argument structure constructions as abstract linguistic entities.

Many Mayan languages use a special verb form, the AGENT FOCUS form, when extracting the subject of a transitive clause. These verbs have a cluster of properties that have resisted satisfactory analysis. This article suggests that in Tzotzil, agent focus verbs are INVERSE, in the sense of Algonquian linguistics, and that their distribution is determined by the relative OBVIATION status of agent and patient. Evidence for the analysis comes from syntactic constraints on agent focus verbs and on their use in discourse. The properties of these verbs provide further evidence that obviation can play a central role in languages where it is not a morphological category.

1. Preface 2. Japanese Modals are Conditionals (by Akatsuka, Noriko) 3. The Cairene Arabic Verb Without Form Classes (by Darden, Bill) 4. The Transition from Oral to Written Competence: Evidence from Teaching Freshman Composition (by Deane, Paul D.) 5. Two Types of "World-Greating" Predicates (by Farkas, Donka F.) 6. Tojolabal (Mayan) Kinterms and the Theory of Markedness or a Near Triumph of the Feminie Gender (by Furbee, N. Louanna) 7. Tone and Accent in Llogoori (by Goldsmith, John A.) 8. Purpose Infinitives and Their Relatives (by Green, Georgia M.) 9. A Semantic Etymology 10. Are Conditionals Topics? The Japanese Case (by Jacobsen, Wesley M.) 11. Gender and Sex in Standard Modern greek Pet Names (by Kazazis, Kostas) 12. Philosophical Speculation and Cognitive Science Comments of William Lycan's Logical Form in Natural Language (by Lakoff, George) 13. Symmetric Relations (by Langendoen, D. Terence) 14. The Korean Precursors of Generative Phonology (by Manaster-Ramer, Alexis) 15. Why Grammars are Not Monolithic (by Mufwene, Salikoko S.) 16. On Extracting from Asymmetrical Structures (by Na, Younghee) 17. The Markedness of Plurality (by Ojeda, Almerindo E.) 18. Phantom Succesors and the French FAIRE PAR Connstruction (by Postal, Paul M.) 19. A Paper on Yiddish for James D. McCawley (by Sadock, Jerrold M.) 20. Survival of the Positive: History of Japanese Antonyms (by Tagashira, Y.) 21. Lexical Phonology and Japanese Vowel Devoicing (by Vance, Timothy J.) 22. First He Called Her a Philologist and Then She Insulted Him (by Winters, Margaret E.) 23. Jottings on Adpositions, Case Inflections, Government, and Agreement (by Zwicky, Arnold M.) 24. Indices

PART 1: Goals and methods: the state of the art in corpus linguistics, Geoffrey Leech 1.2 Corpus studies and probabilistic grammar, M.A.K.Halliday 1.3 Intuition-based and observation-based grammars, Jan Aarts PART 2 Corpus design and development: toward a new corpus of spoken American English, Wallace L.Chafe, et al 2.2 The development of the international corpus of English PART 3 Exploration of corpora: between and through - the company they keep and the functions they serve, Graeme Kennedy 3.2 A mint of phrases, Goran Kjellmer collocational frameworks in English, Antoinette Renouf and John McH.Sinclair 3.3 The modals of obligation and necessity in Australian English, Peter Collins 3.4 A corpus-based study of apposition in English, Charles F.Meyer 3.5 Syntactic evidence for semantic distinctions in English, Dieter Mindt on having a look in a corpus, Gabriele Stein and Randolph Quirk 3.6 On the exploitation of computerized corpora in variation studies, Douglas Biber and Edward Finegan 3.7 Stylistic profiling, David Crystal 3.8 Expletives in the London-Lund corpus,Anna-Brita Stenstrom 3.9 Conversational style in British and American English - the case of backchannels, Gunnel Tottie 3.10 On the history of that/zero as object clause links in English, Matti Rissanen 3.11 A point of verb syntax in South-western British English - an analysis of a dialect continuum, Ossi Ihalainen PART 4 Prospects for the future: times change, and so do corpora, Stig Johansson Appendix: List of computer corpora.

The nature of the auxiliary system in English has drawn much attention in the past fifteen years because it involve fundamental issues in linguistic theory, such as categories and the nature of levels of representation. This article presents an analysis of the English auxiliary system within the framework of Lexical-Functional Grammar (cf. Bresnan 1982c). By presenting explicit representations and explicit rules (syntactic and lexical), we find that an analysis incorporating a distinction between Modals and Verbs, in which auxiliaries like have and be belong to one of these categories depending on inflectional properties of particular forms, can explain all the relevant facts about auxiliaries that have appeared in the literature, Explicit analyses for 'irregular' auxiliaries like ought and used to are also provided.*

Dr. Steever explores the linguistic structure and development of the Serial Verb Formation, a family of constructions whose very existence has escaped the notice of earlier Dravidianists.

Germanic verbs of the 3rd weak class form presents characterized by an alternation between predesinential *ai (e.g. Go. 3sg. habaib) and *a (e.g. lpl. habam). These verbs are usually compared with the 'e-verbs' of Italic and BaltoSlavic, but no IE present built on the stative suffix *-ewill account phonologically for the form of the suffix in Germanic. Instead, it can be shown that the characteristic Germanic paradigm results from the 'activization' of an older middle paradigm in which a 3sg. in *-ai (< IE *-oi; cf. Skt. duhd 'milks') was further suffixed by the productive active ending *-bi (< IE *-ti).

[The Slavic languages, with the exception of Bulgarian, in contrast with the languages of western Europe, have preserved the IE nominal inflection but have simplified the verbal system. Russian has gone farthest in this direction. Original auxiliaries in Russian have become particles; all finite verb forms except those of the present tense have been replaced by nominal or participial constructions.]

Every Serbo-Croatian verb form' consists of the constituents listed in Table 1.2 While prefixes are optional, every verb form has a stem and at least one inflectional element. The stem consists of at least a root.3 Every verb paradigm has a thematic vowel in some or all of its forms, though some forms of some paradigms are without this. The remaining stem constituents are optional. The constituents always occur in the order given in Table 1. A given Serbo-Croatian verb has the following sets of forms, which constitute

The following description of Old English weak-verb morphophonemics is predicated on a constituent-structure analysis which differs in some respects from that implied in traditional grammars of Old English-particularly in the treatment of the gemination of final stem-consonants of verbs of the first class and the -ielement of verbs of the second class. A system of morphonemes, represented as a matrix of distinctive features, is posited for Old English, and the rules are cast in terms of these features. The resulting description emphasizes the underlying structural regularities of the weak-verb system, and is suggestive of relationships between ordered synchronic rules and linguistic change.

4. Palatalized only: C 9 y 4j Vowels (showing the occurrence of phonemes in various positions): In stressed syllables: i e a o u Initial, unstressed: i e a u Final, and pretonic after plain consonant except s ~: i a u Non-final after palatal consonant or s ~: i u Non-final and non-pretonic after plain consonant except i: a u STRESS also is phonemic: every word, pronounced in isolation, has a stress on one syllable. Russian verbs show three patterns of stress; we call them A, B, and C: Stress pattern A: stress on the stem of the verb throughout the paradigm. Stress pattern B: stress on the endings of the verb throughout the paradigm. Stress pattern C: in the present tense, stress on the ending of the 1st sing. but on the stem in other forms; in gender forms, stress on the ending in the feminine, but on the stem in other forms.

1. WHAT IS A RESULTATIVE VERB COMPOUND? A resultative verb compound (hereafter RV) in Mandarin Chinese is, very roughly, a compound verb made up of two parts, the first indicating an action and the second the result of that action. An example is the verb of 1, illustrated in 2:' (1) la-kai 'pull-open' (2) Ta la-kai le men 'He pull-open ASPECT door' = 'He pulled the door open.' However, this is only a rough characterization. A generally accepted diagnostic for RV's is whether they can occur in the 'potential' mode.2 The 'potential' form of an RV involves the insertion of -deor -bubetween the two parts, -deadding the meaning 'be able', -bu'be unable': (3) T ld-de-kdi m6n 'He pull-can-open door' = 'He can pull the door open.' (4) Td ld-bu-kai m6n 'He pull-can't-open door' = 'He can't pull the door open.' Other compound-verb types in Mandarin do not permit the insertion of these two morphemes; e.g., corresponding to the verb-object compound 5, there is no 6: (5) tido-wiv 'jump-dance' = 'dance' (6) *tido-de-wa, *tido-bu-wi.

A small set of English verbs may take the inflections -ed or -t for preterit and past participle. The hypothesis that forms in divided usage are not randomly distributed was tested on groups of British and American subjects by presenting these forms in 'forced-choice' selection tests. Despite the well-known difference between American and British usage in preferring one or the other of the inflections, the -t forms were predominantly selected in participial use and for preterits in contexts suggestive of non-durative ('effective') aspect.