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AbstractA multiple-probe across participants design was used to examine whether three young children diagnosed with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) could learn to use verb symbols presented on an AAC application to request actions. Using researcher coaching (involving joint planning, descriptive instructions, and guided practice) parents of participants were taught to (a) embed opportunities for children to request actions in daily home routines, (b) model AAC responses, (c) use a prompt hierarchy with a time delay, and (d) contingently reinforce correct aided AAC responses. Following intervention delivered by parents, all three participants increased their use of verb symbols to request actions and parents implemented procedures with high fidelity. There were, however, individualized differences in rate of acquisition, variability of responding, readiness for fading supports, and moving to more advanced skills. One of the three participants was able to master two-step responses involving navigation to a category folder. Generalization of requesting actions to labeling actions was limited. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores the nuanced meanings of two Old English verbs related to visual perception. Topics include the distinction between agentive and experiential verbs in Old English, the rarity and poetic nature of the verbs wītan and wlātian, and the semantic relationships of these verbs to their cognates in other Germanic languages.

The interpersonal aspect of political discourse has long been a central issue in translation studies. This paper adds to this line of research by drawing on the latest modelling of translation by systemic functional linguistics with some related notions of coupling, commitment and grammatical metaphor (GM). The language in focus was the coupling of "manner + cognitive process" as in "kexue renshi (scientifically understand)". This study analysed two processes, renshi 认识 (know) and bawo 把握 (hold), extracted from the Chinese–English paralleled corpus of Xi Jinping: The Governance of China I. The major findings are as follows: (i) Cognitive processes were frequently coupled with evaluative manners in Chinese political discourse; (ii) Translation strategies were highly sensitive to the occurrence of manner; and (iii) Phrasal verbs were likelier to be used to reinstantiate "manner + cognitive process"; and (iv) Semantic prosody, GM and lexicalised intensification were the three mechanisms that helped achieve evaluative adequacy while accommodating acceptability to a target reader. Thus, in a political context, it seems that a translator is highly alert to the peculiarity of the Chinese language and often chooses to retain evaluative forces in translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractIn this essay, we address the multilingual challenge that is faced by both the “science of reading” and the field of educational psychology. We describe some significant contributions made by educational psychology to the field’s understanding of the “science of reading” as well as multilingual reading, more specifically. While these contributions have been productive, they do not reflect contemporary multilingual theories that pertain to reading and literacy. To move reading research toward a more multilingual orientation, we propose that language be considered as a verb, to language, and that the language user be considered as a languager, who brings their own unique set of linguistic resources to bear on the reading process. Each languager, we argue, possesses their own dynamic idiolect, comprising three components: linguistic awareness, sensemaking, and linguistic lamination. After providing examples of the dynamic idiolect in instructional contexts, we illustrate how its three components can be captured in empirical contexts to operationalize the dynamic idiolect and move educational psychology toward a more multilingual “science of reading.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Children with developmental language disorder (DLD) experience difficulties with a range of morphosyntactic skills, particularly with tense and subject – verb agreement. Many studies have examined verb-morphology production in children with DLD. We extend this line of research by profiling verb-morphology comprehension in 67 monolingual Saudi Arabic-speaking children, comprising 33 with DLD (M = 61 months, SD = 10.70), and 34 age-matched typically developing (TD) children (M = 63 months, SD = 8.94). Children completed a novel picture selection task developed to assess their comprehension of verb tense, gender agreement, and number agreement. Children with DLD scored significantly lower than TD children on the verb morphology comprehension task. They showed greater difficulty identifying verb tense forms, particularly future tense. They also demonstrated lower accuracy in identifying subject-verb agreement in general, with specific difficulty in comprehending masculine verbs, and singular verbs. These findings were compared with production verb-morphology data from previous Arabic studies. Overall, this study highlights the challenges experienced by Arabic-speaking children with DLD in comprehending verb morphology, particularly tense and subject-verb agreement inflections. These findings can be used to tailor appropriate assessment designs and interventions for an Arabic-speaking DLD population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyses how the Stoic philosopher Epictetus uses the reflexive pronoun (e.g. myself, yourself) in his teachings on human character formation. Following Jeremiah, who has highlighted the importance of Epictetus in the history of Western philosophical self-reflexivity, the article emphasises the different verbal contexts in which this pronoun is used to show how Epictetus employs the reflexive pronoun as a complement to verbs which would normally be constructed with referential others as complements (e.g. blaming, ridiculing, distrusting, fighting). Such usage expands and changes the range and nature of one’s relation to oneself. This article presents a philological-rhetorical analysis of such reflexive relations in Epictetus’ work through the lens of the philosophical issue of self and personhood. While one text from Epictetus has already been proposed as a candidate for the nominalisation of the reflexive pronoun (a/the self), this article introduces a second text into this discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores the Buddha's philosophy of becoming in relation to that of Whitehead. It questions how we might begin to understand the spatial production of organization differently if we move beyond Western concepts of space and time. While Whitehead provides a way to comprehend a world in flux, his approach to spatial becoming tends to transform processes (verbs) into entities (nouns) by halting their becoming. In contrast, the Buddha's perspective on becoming is not limited by the noun/verb dichotomy and does not revert to notions of permanence. This paper posits that the Buddha conceptualizes becoming as a continuous stream, while Whitehead portrays it as a series of events. The study concludes that the Buddha's concept of the 'specious present'—a fusion of his doctrines of 'dependent origination' and 'dependently arisen'—provides novel insights into organizational space that can be of value in sharpening the conceptual underpinnings of the field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessing vocabulary knowledge is an important part of establishing language proficiency in bilingual children. The crosslinguistic lexical tasks (CLTs) provide a framework for testing vocabulary development in three-to-six year-olds using a standard procedure and comparable items for multiple languages. This study describes the development of the Irish CLTs to test receptive and expressive vocabulary for nouns and verbs. The test was then used in a pilot study to measure the vocabulary development in both Irish and English of 41 bilingual children attending Irish-immersion education in an Irish-speaking region of Ireland. The results showed that, as expected, children found lexical comprehension to be easier than production, and nouns easier than verbs. As a group, those from Irish dominant homes performed similarly on both the Irish and English versions of the CLTs, but those from bilingual and English-dominant homes performed significantly better on the English version. The amount of home-language exposure to Irish and English showed advantages on production tasks in each language. However, all groups performed relatively poorly on the production and comprehension of Irish verbs. We explore the findings in relation to the importance of language exposure in a minority language context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

All common variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA) exhibit naming deficits. Variants are distinguished by relative deficits in repetition (logopenic; lvPPA), object knowledge (semantic; svPPA), and agrammatism or articulation (non-fluent/agrammatic; nfavPPA; Gorno-Tempini et al., 2011). The Hopkins Action Naming Assessment (HANA) is a 30-item verb naming task that can distinguish between variants (Stockbridge et al., 2021). Item-level accuracy is driven by target verb frequency, semantic information density, and conceptual concreteness of the target word (Stockbridge, Venezia, et al., 2022). In this investigation, we examined whether word frequency, semantic density, concreteness, and age of acquisition (AoA) also shaped the incorrect responses patients provided. We hypothesised that error responses would vary in these dimensions as a function of PPA variant. The HANA was administered to 271 participants with PPA, resulting in 443 total administrations and 4,529 analysable error responses. Standardised differences between error and target responses for frequency, density, concreteness, and AoA were calculated and averaged for each patient. Analysis of variance (ANOVA) for correlated samples was used to compare variants and planned post-hoc analyses examined the effect of variant on each response quality. Participants were similar in age, sex, handedness, and education. There was a significant interaction between PPA variant and the standardised mean differences in lexical qualities (Pillai's Trace = 0.11, F(9, 747) = 3.19, p < 0.001). Univariate ANOVAs revealed significant differences in the semantic density of error responses relative to the target (F(3) = 7.91, p < 0.001, ηP2= 0.09), as individuals with lvPPA tended to produce error responses with greater semantic density than the target when compared to the words produced by individuals with nfavPPA (mean difference = 1.45, 95%CI = [0.60,2.29], p < 0.001; Figure 1). PPA variants also differed in the concreteness of their error responses relative to the target (F(3) = 5.99, p<0.001, ηP2 = 0.07), as error responses produced by individuals with nfavPPA were significantly more concrete than those with lvPPA (mean difference = 0.08, 95%CI = [0.02,0.13], p = 0.003) or svPPA (mean difference=0.08, 95%CI = [0.02,0.14], p = 0.007). Variants did not differ significantly in AoA or frequency of responses relative to their targets. All variants tended to produce more frequent words with a lower AoA than the target verb. Error responses tended to be more semantically dense, more concrete, higher frequency, and younger AoA than the target verb. However, PPA variants differed significantly in the extent to which these broader trends held true. These distinct patterns may be included as part of a larger diagnostic picture that to distinguish among PPA variants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Nominalization is an important resource for creating grammatical metaphor (GM). Previous research shows that nominalization is characteristic of academic writing but does not demonstrate discipline sensitivity within the academic genre. The reason might be that some nominalizations have developed into dead GM. This study aims to identify nominalizations that create live GM and explore the discipline sensitivity of live GMs based on a corpus of academic article abstracts across three discipline groups. The findings indicate that a clause construes an event or a status, which is either conveyed by the verbal group or a nominal group functioning as a participant of the verbal group. Verb nominalizations construing events and adjective nominalizations construing statuses are the key factors in identifying live GM. Notably, nominalizations not cooccurring with verbalizations are not necessarily dead GMs. The corpus-based research shows that both verb and adjective nominalizations exhibit discipline sensitivity. Verb nominalizations are more prevalent in natural science texts, whereas adjective nominalizations are more prevalent in the humanities and social science texts. However, live GMs are not inherently discipline sensitive; rather, it is those GMs contributing to the lexical density of the text that are discipline sensitive. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sound symbolism, the iconic link between speech sounds and meanings, helps children's verb learning. In sound symbolically rich languages such as Turkish, hearing sound symbolic words might facilitate early verb learning and later language-specific expressions of motion events, by providing an easier way to map verbs onto events. These links could be much stronger for children who had difficulties in word-referent mapping (e.g., preterm children). The current study examined the association of Turkish-speaking parents' sound symbolic input at 20 months with children's concurrent verb knowledge and later motion event descriptions at 48 months. Ninety-one parent-infant dyads (Mage = 19.92 months, SD = 1.38; 41 preterms) were observed at 20 months, where we measured sound symbolic input and verb knowledge. Sixty-four of these dyads participated in a motion event description task at 48 months (25 preterms, Mage = 48.79 months, SD = 1.68), where we coded how children use path (the trajectory of motion) and manner (how an action is performed) of a motion. Results from the robust regression models suggested that for preterm children, parents' sound symbolic input used in adverb forms was positively and concurrently related to children's verb knowledge. Only for full-term children, sound symbolic input (used as adverbs) predicted full-term children's use of both path and manner information in their descriptions at 48 months. Lack of replication of these findings with outlier-removed analyses could only suggest a trend toward the differential contributions of sound symbolic input in different child populations and the importance of sentential cues in sound symbolic input in verb learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verb production impairments in aphasia have important implications for sentence production and communication in general. Verbs with low concreteness may be especially important for certain functional uses, and yet limited data regarding their response to treatment are available. This study was designed to examine a novel behavioral treatment approach to improve low concreteness verb naming in persons with aphasia. Three persons with nonfluent aphasia participated in a single-subject experimental design research study examining the feasibility of the novel treatment. The treatment was based on approaches that target the verb as the central node of meaning during sentence construction. The primary outcome measure was a sentence completion probe. Effects on untreated stimuli and on general language and naming assessments were also examined. Results indicated some limited changes associated with the treatment for two of the participants. Treatment performance data suggested possible improvements in verb processing that were not reflected in the primary outcome measure. Modest decreases in aphasia severity were noted for two of the participants. The findings provide further support for targeting verbal production of verbs with low concreteness in aphasia. Several lessons learned may benefit future researchers examining areas related to the topic. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents a corpusbased study of a group of lexical verbs in eighteenth and nineteenth century scientific texts. The study has a twofold aim. Firstly, it aims to select four types of verb classes (verbs of communication, desire, aspectuals and perception) identified by Levin and Noonan and explore their use in the Corpus of English Life Sciences Texts, a subcorpus of the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing. Secondly, it aims to determine if the frequency of these verbs varies based on the gender of the authors. Further, the study seeks to ascertain if a shifting pattern could be attested in the use of these verbs throughout the two centuries examined in the corpus, at a time when the scientific register was already becoming established. The findings of the study obtained from the greater or lesser occurrence of the verbs in question over the two centuries indicate which ones were more frequent in Life Sciences texts, whether they were more commonly used either by men or women and whether there was a pattern of continued usage of these verbs in Late Modern English scientific language rather than a shift towards nominalisation in this type of discourse. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

BackgroundAimsMethods & ProceduresOutcomes & ResultsConclusionAgrammatism in agglutinative languages exhibits preservation of verb morphology due to their rich morphological paradigms. Tagalog, an agglutinative language mainly spoken in the Philippines, remains uncharacterized in agrammatism yet holds potential for future research that can challenge existing theories and help advance novel ones.The purpose of this study is to quantify and describe the characteristics of agrammatism in Tagalog in narrative spontaneous speech, to examine whether these patterns resemble those reported in other agglutinative languages, and to compare the results obtained to those emerging in literature for non-agglutinative languages.Narrative spontaneous speech was elicited from 10 individuals with non-fluent Broca’s aphasia and 12 matched controls. A series of parameters, both conventional and language-specific measures, were selected for analyses.Tagalog-speaking individuals with agrammatism exhibited slow and fragmented speech, with a strong preference for minor and simple constructions resulting to decrease in overall grammaticality and sentence complexity. Verb deficits were also found specifically in verbal predication, lexical diversity, and finiteness. There is a prevalent use of bare verb forms, consequently resulting to the decline of verb finiteness and inflections. Code-mixing is found to be extremely variable and statistically non-prominent between groups but patterns may be attributed to personal and sociolinguistic factors.Patterns of agrammatism in Tagalog majorly mirror the trends reported in other agglutinative and non-agglutinative languages. Where Tagalog agrammatism departs from other agglutinative languages is the increased use of bare verbs as opposed to the obligatory inflected forms. Although still many questions are unresolved, Tagalog offers an interesting testing ground for variety of topics and issues in agrammatic aphasia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phrasal verbs formed with forth spread within the linguistic system up to the Early Modern English (EModE) period when they started to decrease in use as a result of internal mechanisms of change and linguistic competition with other particles such as on and out (Brinton 1988; Hiltunen 1994; Akimoto 2006; Thim 2006; De Smet 2010). Despite widespread knowledge, no studies have examined quantitatively the single steps forth followed over the years or questioned the role performed by productivity and processes of semantic specialisation of single instances in the processes of replacement. The present study is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap. The study has been undertaken on the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED), which is a multi-genre corpus covering the EModE period and, specifically, the years 1560–1760 (Kytö & Walker 2006). The analysis proves that the particle forth shows limited productivity, which created the conditions for processes of interference and replacement. The lexical context favoured the semantic specialisation of the particles on and out which stimulated the retraction of forth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Objective: Language dysfunction is one of the most common cognitive impairments in amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS). Although discourse capacities are essential for daily functioning, verbal expressive language has not been widely investigated in ALS. The existing research available suggests that discourse impairments are prevalent. This study investigates verbal expressive language in people living with ALS (plwALS) in contrast to healthy controls (HC). Methods: 64 plwALS and 49 age, gender and education-matched healthy controls were ask to describe the Cookie Theft Picture Task. The recordings were analyzed for discourse productivity, discourse content, syntactic complexity, speech fluency and verb processing. We applied the Bayesian hypothesis-testing framework, incorporating the effects of dysarthria, cognitive impairment status (CIS), and premorbid crystalline verbal IQ. Results: Compared to HC, plwALS only showed a single impairment: speech dysfluency. Discourse productivity, discourse content, syntactic complexity and verb processing were not impaired. Cognition and dysarthria exceeded the influence of verbal IQ for total words spoken and content density. Cognition alone seemed to explain dysfluency. Body-agent verbs were produced at even higher rates than other verb types. For the remaining outcomes, verbal IQ was the most decisive factor. Conclusions: In contrast to existing research, our data demonstrates no discernible impairment in verbal expressive language in ALS. What our findings show to be decisive is accounting for the influence of dysarthria, cognitive impairment status, and verbal IQ as variables on spontaneous verbal expressive language. Minor impairments in verbal expressive language appear to be influenced to a greater degree by executive dysfunctioning and dysarthria than by language impairment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses the specific use of deictic verbs for encoding boundary-crossing situations in descriptions of non-actual motion, i.e. dynamic depictions of static spatial configurations (e.g. The road comes from the tunnel). We analyse data elicited with visual stimuli from speakers of Finnish and Estonian to show that venitive ('come') and andative ('go') deictic verbs tend to appear in boundary-crossing contexts of entering and exiting. This pattern applies to both actual and non-actual motion descriptions produced by the same speakers, thus showing pervasiveness in the expression of both concrete and abstract meanings. We suggest that this tendency can be interpreted in terms of functional deixis: motion (actual or non-actual) encoded in relation to the speaker's visual and interactive circle of attention. Considering the relevance of spatial boundaries for event perception, boundary-crossing situations can be expected to show specific encoding patterns not only in the verb-framed languages, in which the expression of these situations typically requires the use of Path verbs, but also in the satellite-framed languages of the Talmian typology. Extensive variation between participants in our study indicates that in Finnish and Estonian, the use of deictic verbs in boundary-crossing situations is an optional strategy instead of a constraint. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article contributes to the discussion of the approach to the grammatical analysis of speech acts by testing an ellipsis-based analysis of verbless speech acts. The analysis tested implies the following relevant conditions for ellipsis: either the context makes manifest a salient action, licensing the ellipsis of do it, or a script associated with the current activity makes manifest a particular linguistic expression, licensing the ellipsis of the expression. The hypothesis is tested on 12 speech acts stemming from a set of observations of 240 discourse-initial action-guiding verbless speech acts in Danish. The result of the context-based ellipsis is that the majority of the examples either become ungrammatical or change meaning when gør det (do it) is added. The result of the script-based ellipsis is that in some cases there is no manifest verb, and in other cases the manifest verb cannot be added without causing ungrammaticality. In general, the recovered illocutionary force indicating device is misleading. Hence, the hypothesis cannot be supported. However, as a heuristic, the ellipsis-based analysis is informative with regard to the properties of the speech acts in question and points in the direction of an alternative approach to the grammatical analysis of verbless speech acts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents cases of tense-aspect variations in Malawian CiTonga and traces the historical processes of change that have led to the different realisations of tense-aspect grammatical units (grams). The author is a CiTonga native speaker and the primary source of the data. The majority of tense-aspect grams are based on motion verbs, including the present tense-aspect tú-/tí- which seems to originate from t-á 'go-FV', which is unlike Chichewa (N31) and CiTumbuka (N21) which use ku-, believed to be based on the Proto-Bantu li-ku- 'be + INF'. The remote past kú- seems to have ku- 'INF' as its origin. The language leans towards CiTumbuka more than Chichewa as it shares many tense-aspect features with it. Crucially, while a majority of variants are conditioned by phonology, there is also an indication that some of them are morphologically conditioned. There is also an indication that several others are dialectal or occur in free variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper investigates the so-called transitive out of -ing construction, characterised by the structure of NP subject + V1 + NP object + out of VP2[-ing] predicate with corpus data (e.g., I cheated you all out of being in my life), and offers a construction-based account of the construction. In this paper, based on 725 examples from COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), we first explore its real-life uses in terms of the verbs frequently found in the V1 slot, favoured distribution patterns based on their semantic classes, subject types, preferred interpretation types, and frequent V1-V2[-ing] pairs, adopting collostructional analyses. We then show that the overall grammatical properties of the transitive out of -ing construction as well as the idiosyncrasies of its two atypical variants can be best accounted for in the Construction Grammar perspective. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study contributes to the analysis of thinking-for-translating in comics. It explores the translation of motion events in five albums of the French comic Asterix and its corresponding translations into Galician and into English. It aims at analysing any differences in the number and the type of motion verbs used across the three languages and the strategies used to translate Manner and Path of motion verbs. With this purpose in mind, the study includes type-token analyses of all motion verbs; it covers the intratypological language pair French > Galician that has not been analysed in the phenomenon of motion events in this genre, as well as the intertypological pair French > English. Finally, while most studies focus on the translation strategies for manner verbs, this study includes the strategies not only of manner but also of path verbs. Findings in the compiled corpus indicated intertypological differences in the translation of path and manner verbs into English. With regard to the strategies used for the translation of both manner and path verbs, it was observed that Manner and Path tend to be retained and intertypological differences were found in the use of omission, replacement and visual compensation strategies in the translation of path verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Congenital cytomegalovirus (cCMV) is the most common prenatal infection and the main infectious cause of neurodevelopmental abnormalities in developed countries. Long-term neuropsychological outcome of cCMV infection is still not well understood. This is the first study that presents linguistic follow-up data performed on adults who were infected in utero. All individuals from a universal newborn CMV screening study in Sweden sampled from 1977 to 1985 were invited to participate in a follow-up study. 34/71 persons (48%) with cCMV and 22/46 controls (48%) were enrolled. Participants were between 34 and 43 years. Linguistic ability was evaluated with two-word fluency tasks (FAS letter fluency and verb fluency), and a qualitative analysis of the participants' word retrieval strategies was conducted. No statistically significant group differences were found in the total number of retrieved words. When related to Swedish norm data, 43% of participants with cCMV infection, all asymptomatic at birth, had adequate results on both FAS and verb fluency tasks, compared to 86% of the controls. Education level was the most important factor for word fluency ability in both groups. Adults with cCMV infection and higher education levels used less effective retrieval strategies on FAS letter fluency than controls. This study suggests that adults with cCMV infection may have deficits in the word retrieval process, even in the absence of known neurodevelopmental disorders. Long-term effects of cCMV infection may exist even in those with asymptomatic infection at birth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Modals (e.g., can, must) vary along two dimensions of meaning: "force" (i.e., possibility or necessity), and "flavor" (i.e., possibilities relative to knowledge [epistemic], goals [teleological], or rules [deontic] ...). Comprehension studies show that children struggle with both force and flavor dimensions of modals. However, given the complex one-to-many mappings from forms to meanings, it is not clear what force or flavor children assign to the modals being tested. In this study, we use a sentence-repair task to test which modals 3- and 4-year-old children themselves prefer to produce in teleological (goal-oriented) and epistemic (knowledge-based) possibility and necessity contexts, and how these preferences differ from those of adults. Our results provide a first controlled look at which modals children use to express the major flavor and force dimensions of modal verb meanings. We shed new light on children's modal systems, and show that learners generally distinguish modal flavors but struggle distinguishing forces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent work has highlighted the utility of the Boston Naming Test and Hopkins Action Naming Assessment (HANA) for distinguishing between semantic (svPPA), logopenic (lvPPA) and non-fluent agrammatic (nfavPPA) variants of primary progressive aphasia (PPA). To determine whether item level differences between variants on when naming verbs on the HANA were able to be accounted for using common variables of lexical interest: word frequency, semantic density, concreteness, or valency. We also examined three specific hypotheses: (1) svPPA and lvPPA may result in increased difficulty with decreased semantic density compared to nfavPPA; (2) svPPA may result in increased difficulty with decreased concreteness; and (3) nfavPPA may result in increased difficulty with high syntactic valency. 268 patients with PPA were evaluated using the HANA. A hierarchical Bayesian regression approach was adopted to account for effects of repeated measurement within participants and items. The main effects of variant and verb trait were significant in all models, as was the interaction for frequency, semantic density, and valency. Increasing frequency, semantic density, and concreteness led to better performance, while increasing valency led to poorer performance. Low semantic density contributed to greater difficulty in svPPA and lvPPA, but low concreteness did not uniquely impact verb naming in svPPA. Those with nfavPPA had no particular difficulty as a result of valency. Prior studies have identified the independent effects of frequency and semantic density on verb naming in PPA, which were confirmed by our analyses, and the best predictions of the data were achieved by combining these dimensions. This investigation complements our previous work highlighting the value of the HANA for efficiently demonstrating verb performance in PPA. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article focuses on the causative morpheme in Kiswahili. It notes that the causative morpheme has many allomorphs. The study explains the relationship between the verb root and the causative form. It also clarifies phonetic harmony through the effect of the verb root structure of consonants and vowels on the morphological unit of the causative morpheme. Data relating to the causative case was collected from dictionaries and textbooks. The study used the analytical descriptive linguistic method. This study addresses the following questions: What is the cause of the verity of causative allomorphs in Kiswahili, and what is the relationship between the root of the verb and the morpheme of the causative form? Variation of causative allomorphs is imposed by the morphophonemic rule 'phonetic harmony' in Kiswahili. This study can contribute to clarifying the method of using the allomorph of causation in the word. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Previous studies on translator’s or translation style have mostly focused on literary works. This study is a stylistic analysis of Chinese-language editorials and commentaries published in the Hong Kong Economic Journal (HKEJ) and their print and web versions of English translations. The study includes a corpus analysis of the original and translated news texts’ average sentence length, standardized type-token ratio, reporting verbs and high-frequency words. These are interpreted in relation to the translators’ personal attributes and the socio-cultural contexts to identify several major factors contributing to stylistic differences. This study finds that the news translation style is influenced by both source language linguistic features and target language conventions. The production of translated news texts involves the input of multiple agents, which is demonstrated in the collective traces of translation styles. The stylistic shifts between the original and translated news editorials and commentaries reflect the news outlet’s editorial stance and targeted readership. The empirical findings contribute to our understanding of the critical role stylistic features play in Chinese-to-English journalistic translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article takes issue with type-based automatic lemmatisation of the Old English class I strong verbs L-Y. To reach this goal, the article discusses the design of a Morphological Generation interface implemented with the rules of Old English strong verb inflection as well as with the most frequent variant spellings. The forms provided by the interface are automatically checked against the two most representative corpora of Old English, the Dictionary of Old English Corpus and the The York-Toronto-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Old English Prose, and validated results are assigned the corresponding lemma. The results prove that almost 99% of the validated forms can successfully be assigned lemma. The remaining 1% correspond to formally ambiguous inflectional forms, where lemma assignment is in dispute between two candidates. The conclusion is reached that disambiguation is only possible on the basis of contextualised token-based analysis. The article confirms that type-based lemmatisation of Old English strong verbs can be largely automatised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English-medium instruction (EMI) programmes have been mushrooming in the last two decades as part of the internationalisation processes. However, the rapid implementation of EMI has outpaced research in many different areas, classroom interaction being one of them. Since classroom interaction is an indication of quality teaching, the analysis of the use of questions made by EMI lecturers needs to be carefully examined. Questioning practices, however, may be determined not only by the use of English as means of instruction but also by the discipline. In this study, we intend to analyse whether the questioning practices of university lecturers from different disciplines differ both in the number and the type of questions asked. Thirty-six lectures from history, engineering and economics at various Spanish universities were recorded and transcribed verbatim, to later on undertake the analysis of the questions made. The findings revealed that questions were not very frequent in class, and that there was no statistically significant difference between disciplines. As for the type of questions asked, confirmation check questions were by far the most common, followed by display, referential and self-answered questions in the three disciplines. Based on these results, some pedagogical implications are drawn with a view to fostering more interactive lectures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a quantitative study of the polysemy of the Chinese perception verb kàn 'look/see' by using a corpus-based behavioural profile approach. The analysis yields the following findings. First, two significant meaning clusters of kàn can be distinguished: the first represents physical perceptual senses, and the second groups together cognitive senses. Second, both the frequency and behavioural profiles are used to determine the prototypicality of kàn. They lead to the same conclusion that the sense 'perceive with eyes' is the prototypical meaning of kàn. Based on the corpus results, a semantic network of kàn has been proposed and the cognitive mechanisms underlying its meaning extension have been addressed. It is found that its meaning extensions in the domain of physical perception are attributed to the metonymy SUBEVENT FOR WHOLE EVENT, while its meaning extensions in the domain of cognition are ascribed to the metaphor COGNITION IS PERCEPTUAL VISION. These results not only provide usage-based evidence for the universal interconnections between perception and cognition, but also confirm the effectiveness and viability of a behavioural profile analysis in studying the polysemy of perception verbs. This study also demonstrates that quantitative methods are essential for the description and understanding of semasiological structures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines diachronic development patterns of the concessive though-fronting construction in American English, using corpus data. The findings of this study, on the one hand, show that the fronted expression has been dominantly an AdjP with a subject predicative complement function and a rather negative connotation, and that the major licensing verbs are linking verbs, which is in line with the previous observations in literature on its contemporary uses. However, the findings also show that the construction has undergone some interesting diachronic changes regarding the increasing dominance of AdjP as the syntactic category of the fronted expression, more diverse grammatical functions of the fronted expression than noted in previous literature, the change of the most preferred position of the concessive though-fronting clause, the strong preference for the singular countable bare NP without a/an, and the uses of the copula as the licensing verb. Furthermore, the attested data provide some examples that weaken the movement-based analysis. The findings, therefore, indicate that it is worth investigating its diachronic properties about expressions that occur in the pre-though position, the salient position of the concessive though-fronting clause, licensing verbs, and the relationship between the pre-though expression and its putative gap in detail. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We studied English-learning children's ability to learn the meanings of novel words from sentences containing truth-functional negation (Exp1) and to use the semantics of negation to inform word meaning (Exp2). In Exp1, 22-month-olds (n = 21) heard dialogues introducing a novel verb in either negative-transitive ("Mary didn't blick the baby") or negative-intransitive ("Mary didn't blick") sentences. When then asked to "Find blicking!" while viewing two-participant versus one-participant actions, children who heard negative-transitive sentences looked longer at the two-participant event than children who heard negative-intransitives. Thus, the mere presence of negation does not disrupt sentence processing and word learning in young children. Experiment 2 tested whether 2-to-4-year-olds (n = 20) use the semantics of negation to restrict the meaning of novel nouns when categorizing objects varying along a perceptual continuum (from 10 to 90% exemplars). Children initially heard "These are blickets" paired with certain exemplars (e.g., yellowish creatures, exemplars 10 and 30%). They then saw additional exemplars (e.g., pinkish creatures, 70 and 90%) while hearing either "These are not blickets" (negative condition) or "These are also blickets" (affirmative condition). At test, when seeing two novel exemplars from the continuum (e.g., creatures 20 and 80%) and asked to find "a blicket," children in the negative condition selected the exemplar from the bottom of the continuum (i.e., the 20%) more often than children in the affirmative condition. Thus, English-learning children as young as 22-months of age correctly parse negative sentences and 2-to-4-year-olds can use negation to understand the boundaries of a word's meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Parser-grammar transparency and the development of syntactic dependencies The paper by Lidz also advocates a tighter connection between language acquisition and processing. Two central questions addressed in psycholinguistics pertain to acquisition and process. Lidz reviews evidence from his group pertaining to children's representation and processing of syntactic dependencies, making the case that the moment grammatical knowledge is acquired, even partially, children deploy this knowledge when making real-time sentence processing decisions. As Lidz notes, there has been a long history within psycholinguistics of looking for transparent connections between grammar and process (e.g., Chomsky [6], Kaplan & Bresnan [22], Steedman [34]). [Extracted from the article]

In instances where verbs that start with vowel sounds and a vowel prefix is attached, the hiatus is repaired through resyllabification, i.e. the manifestation of an initial underlying sound called a glottal catch. This sound fills the onset position of vowel initial verbs in Sepedi, and is responsible for the drastic alternation when the verb comes into contact with a reflexive prefix or an object concord. This article examines the effect of morphophonological realisation on inflected verbal roots with initial vowel sounds in Sepedi. The data collected through documents and semi-structured interviews shows that the glottal catch makes verbs follow the CV syllable pattern. The vowel reflexive prefix which threatens to create a hiatus is repaired through epenthesis by adding a sound to the interior of a word (at the beginning of prosthesis). This repair strategy ensures that the CV syllable structure of Sepedi is maintained. This article provides new data that offers innovative understanding of Sepedi on the concepts such as epenthesis and hiatus, relating to alternations in morphophonological environments using the optimality theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In learning French as a foreign language, mastery of agreement marking is indicative of learner progression. In this article, I focus on how subject-verb agreement markers are acquired by Ghanaian learners of French. Based on written data collected from examination scripts, I attempt to present a coherent explanation for the trends noted. The results show that allomorphy that characterises the verb stem influences the production of agreement markers. While verbs with a single stem are strongly associated with first person singular marking, verbs without an identifiable stem are more strongly associated with third person singular marking. Interpreting this within the item-learning/rule-learning dichotomy, it is argued that both strategies are simultaneously deployed. Consequently, it is suggested that the dichotomy between rule-based versus item-based learning can be impacted by the modality of language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article examines the Sesotho control structures to account for their dual behaviours resulting from the attachment of the reflexive prefix. The reflexive is a morpheme that is annexed to a verb to show that the subject acts upon itself. It is observed that some control verbs yield acceptable syntactic constructions when the reflexive attaches, while others yield unacceptable results. Using the minimalist programme (merge and adjunction) the investigation reveals that both the acceptability and unacceptability of reflexive control structures result from the effect the reflexive has on the argument structure of the verbs. The absorption of the internal argument renders two-argumentstaking verbs unacceptable as PRO subject of the infinitive clause lacks reference. In the case of three-argument-taking verbs, the absorption of one of the arguments leaves a controller for PRO, hence the acceptability of the structures. It can, therefore, be concluded that both acceptability and unacceptability of control verbs with the reflexive prefix can be accounted for in terms of the argument structure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Anxiety is a dominant emotion in schizophrenia. It is most often diagnosed by questionnaire-based methods. In this study, it was decided to analyse the utterances of patients with schizophrenia for the occurrence of lexical indicators of anxiety, which are a good predictor of experienced anxiety and lie beyond the subject's control. The indicators most frequently described in the literature and considered to be of the most significant diagnostic value were selected: first-person pronouns and verbs; causal expressions and conjunctions; affirmative and negative particles; and dogmatic expressions. It was assumed that more of these would appear in the utterances of people with schizophrenia than in the utterances of healthy subjects. The study was conducted on 130 patients with paranoid schizophrenia and 130 healthy subjects. They were asked to describe five pictures. In all verbal indicators of anxiety (except for negative particles) patients with positive schizophrenia attained the highest values, differing significantly from the results for the control groups. This result is consistent with the subject literature, which emphasizes the high level of anxiety in schizophrenia, especially in its first phase, when the generative symptoms of the illness predominate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mobile-assisted language learning (MALL), which provides access to learning without the constraints of place and time, is worthy of exploration for pedagogical purposes. Given the use of gaming applications and social media as potential instructional methods for MALL, this study investigated the effect of these two methods, along with traditional classroom-based instruction on the learning of English phrasal verbs. To teach phrasal verbs through three different methods (game-based, social media, and classroom-based), 150 learners of English, selected from a language institute in Isfahan, were assigned to game-based, social media, and classroom-based groups. The game-based group received instruction on phrasal verbs via a mobile gaming application called Phrasal Nerds: Phrasal Verbs. The social media group received instruction via a Telegram channel. Finally, the classroom-based group was taught through the traditional teacher-fronted method. A researcher-made test served as the pretest and posttest to measure the contribution of each instructional method to the learners' phrasal verb achievements. The analysis of data through t-test and analysis of covariance (ANCOVA) indicated improvements in learning English phrasal verbs in the three groups. Although the effects of the three methods were found to be statistically significant, the game-based method was the most effective one for learning English phrasal verbs. The findings highlight the integration of gaming applications into the English teaching curriculum to enhance foreign language lexical learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do quotidian speech-acts, lived experiences, and normative grammars/logics capture affects of antiBlack racism that co-constitute campus memory and landscapes beyond infrastructure and spectacular commemoration of exceptional past events/historical figures? How does Black resistance to white supremacist university structures (un)fold with/in them? This experimental essay considers power dynamics inherent in complaint about antiBlackness at an historically white U.S. campus amid 2020's racialized pandemic violence. Through narrative-driven inter(con)textual reading, it toys with the politics of subject(ivity), t(h)inking through how names function rhetorically to reify what Hortense Spillers conjures as "American grammar," while wrestling (in-and-of itself) with onto-linguistic violence in re/membering trauma. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recently, the hypothesis that purely evaluative disputes are metalinguistic negotiations has gained traction. I resist a strong version of that hypothesis, and argue that some of those disputes are not metalinguistic negotiations. To defend that claim, I argue that metalinguistic negotiations have three linguistic properties that some purely evaluative disputes lack. First, in a metalinguistic negotiation it is felicitous to embed the dispute-initial statement under the subjective attitude verb consider; second, a speaker can reply to that initial statement by using a metalinguistic comparative; and, third, such negotiations address metalinguistic questions under discussion. Some purely evaluative disputes lack these properties, which suggests that they are not metalinguistic negotiations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We segment what we read into meaningful events, each separated by a discrete boundary. How does event segmentation during encoding relate to the structure of story information in long-term memory? To evaluate this question, participants read stories of fictional historical events and then engaged in a postreading verb arrangement task. In this task, participants saw verbs from each of the events placed randomly on a computer screen and then arranged the verbs into groups onscreen based on their understanding of the story. Participants who successfully comprehended the story placed verbs from the same event closer to each other than verbs from different events, even after controlling for orthographic, text-based, semantic, and situational overlap between verbs. Thus, how people structure story information into separate events during online comprehension is associated with how that information is stored in memory. Specifically, story information within an event is bound together in memory more so than information between events. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verbs such as seem and appear combine features of evidential meaning with epistemic modality. This study takes a corpus-based, contrastive view of such verbs in Norwegian and English. It investigates the frequencies, patterns and meanings of seem, appear and their Norwegian correspondences virke, synes and se ut in English fiction and academic prose. Both similarities and differences are found across languages and registers. Appear and synes are clearly more frequent in academic prose and can therefore be characterised as more formal. Of all the verbs investigated, seem has the greatest syntactic flexibility. The Norwegian verbs show more syntactic variation across lexemes than the English verbs do. The English verbs are arguably more grammaticalised in their evidential meanings: they occur more regularly with catenative function, and are also complemented directly by NPs and nominal clauses rather than by PPs and adverbial clauses, which is often the pattern of the Norwegian verbs. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Cognitive aging negatively impacts language comprehension performance.. However, there is evidence that older adults skillfully use linguistic context and their crystallized world knowledge to offset age-related changes that negatively impact comprehension. Two visual-world paradigm experiments examined how aging changes verb-argument prediction, a comprehension process that relies on world knowledge but has rarely been examined in the cognitive-aging literature. Older adults did not differ from younger adults in their activation of an upcoming likely verb argument, particularly when cued by a semantically-rich agent+verb combination (Experiment 1). However, older adults showed elevated activation of previously-mentioned agents (Experiment 1) and of unlikely but verb-congruent referents (Experiment 2). This is novel evidence that older adults exploit semantic context and world knowledge during comprehension to successfully activate upcoming referents. However, older adults also show elevated activation of irrelevant information, consistent with previous findings demonstrating that older adults may experience greater proactive interference and competition from task-irrelevant information. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Byzantine metaphrasis means reformulating texts in another register, either by upgrading (a common practice with regard to saints' Lives in the tenth century) or downgrading (a phenomenon best known from the fourteenth century). In this paper, a previously unstudied example of upgrading is investigated: the so-called Version B of the Chronicle of Symeon the Logothete. Changes in B as compared to its source text, Symeon's Chronicle, mostly involve case and the syntax of participles, word order and vocabulary. Some explanations for the changes are suggested and wider implications discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this short note, I discuss the text of Menaechmi 497, where I argue for adopting A's pol and propose the conjecture iam for eam, and Truculentus 311–312, where I argue for adopting P's exportatur and propose bibitis for ebibitis. I argue that a proper understanding of the distinction between prefixed comesse (with a "perfectivizing" com-) and uncompounded esse is crucial to understanding these passages. I also discuss the rare verb exunguo and argue that both occurrences in Plautus are from an active verb which is being used reflexively (and not as a transitive deponent as often assumed). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is concerned with the syntactic and semantic development of the impersonal verb hunger in Early Modern English. An analysis of corpus data has been carried out on ca. 20 million words drawn from EEBOCorp 1.0 (1473–1700). Results show that, from a semantic perspective, the verb hunger undergoes a process of metaphorical extension involving a change from the original meaning 'to feel hunger', in the domain of Physical Sensation, to the meaning 'to desire', in the domain of Emotion. In this latter sense, the verb becomes predominantly associated with prepositional complements (e.g. 1542, our hungry soules [...] hunger for y^ word of God). Also in the course of the Early Modern period, the verb is subject to competition with the adjectival periphrasis be hungry, especially in the sense 'to feel hunger'. The article concludes by putting forward hypotheses to explain the motivations for these various developments. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper deals with the function of the Italian subjunctive in the sphere of volition. It argues that the subjunctive designates what is called a state-of-affairs (SoA) in this sphere. This argument is substantiated in two parts. The first part is a discussion of the subjunctive in the sphere of volition across the system. In the discussion, it is concluded that the subjunctive designates a SoA where it opposes the proposition-designating indicative. The second part is a corpus-based study of 25 verbs of volition with data from CORIS, a corpus of written Italian. This qualitative study tests the hypothesis that mood alternation in complements of verbs of volition has a decisive semantic impact on the main verb or the complex structure as whole. The data confirms the hypothesis, since the SoA-designating subjunctive is found to prompt a volitional meaning, whereas the proposition-designating indicative prompts a non-volitional meaning. By analyzing certain variants of the Italian subjunctive as SoA-designating, we can better account for, on the one hand, why the subjunctive remains persistent in the sphere of volition compared to other spheres of meaning, where it tends to lose ground to the indicative, and, on the other hand, what mood alternation entails in the sphere of volition. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Recent research in motion event typology has moved beyond the binary Talmian division of "verb-framed" and "satellite-framed" languages and has established the existence of at least four distinct typological clusters, instantiated by, for example, Swedish (Germanic), French (Romance), Thai (Tai-Kadai) and Telugu (Dravidian). In this paper, we focus on characteristic features of Telugu, as a representative of the fourth cluster. In the study, 30 native Telugu speakers described video-recorded translocative events, in which the factors boundedness, viewpoint and causation were manipulated. Using the model Holistic Spatial Semantics, we show that Telugu speakers (a) preferentially used Direction verbs rather than Path verbs, (b) predominantly used case markers rather than verbs for encoding Path, (c) extensively used Landmark and Region expressions, and (d) frequently used Manner verbs in situations of "boundary-crossing" unlike speakers of typical "verb-framed" languages. We propose these features to be criterial of the fourth typological cluster mentioned above, a claim to be investigated in future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Philosophy based on epistemology is a philosophy of nouns which is restricted by the horizon of the knower, and cannot explain creation by human beings within its subjectobject frame. Therefore, we propose a philosophy of verbs that establishes itself on creational ontology and re-understands existence and origin from the horizon of the creator, so as to make that "I do" (facio) the starting point for the understanding of all order, ideas, and history that require consideration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Material artifacts play an important role in many learning environments. Such artifacts can include sketches, manipulatives, 3D models, toys and games, or the scrap materials found in makerspaces. Some theorists have argued that material artifacts, even though they do not move or talk, should be considered to have autonomous agency and to interact as equals with human participants. But there have been few empirical studies that explore whether or how material artifacts are attributed agency by human participants. This paper contributes to this issue by analyzing interactions between professor and student in design studio classrooms, where the student's created work is the central focus. I analyze the close coordination of talk—including syntactic constructions and verb aspect—with nonverbal action, including eye gaze, gesture, body orientation, and body position. In the first set of findings, I identify six interactional mechanisms that attribute agency to the work, in both verbal and nonverbal modalities. I demonstrate that through the use of these six laminated multimodal resources, the student's creative work is socially constructed as an agentive participant. These findings contribute to our understanding of the role of artifact agency in social practices. In the second set of findings, I show how professors enlist these six practices in discursive patterns that scaffold students in mastering the dialogue of creativity: a process that distributes creative agency between the student and their unfolding work. These dialogues model for students a creative process characterized by iteration, ambiguity, exploration, and emergence. I conclude by discussing the implications for our understanding of teaching and learning for creativity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]