Children's understanding of passives of certain mental state predicates appears to lag behind passives of so-called actional predicates, an asymmetry that has posed a major empirical challenge for theories of passive acquisition. This paper argues against the dominant view in the literature that treats the predicate-based asymmetry as…

That a certain class of verb commonly known as 'statives' is undergoing change in terms of the way in which certain verbs of this type are being used in everyday speech is nothing new to the field of linguistics. Much has been written about it, and the author of this paper alone has been preoccupied with the subject for many years now. However,…

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this…

This study aims to analyze the derivation of weak active participles (APs) from triconsonantal imperfective verbs within the X-slot model of autosegmental phonology. The first stage of the research involves building a corpus of APs from a well-established corpus-based dictionary, namely [characters omitted] 'Dictionary of Modern Arabic Language'.…

The paper focuses on the semantic derivation models of irrational vocabulary -- a semantic class of words that denote the situation of experience that is not based on logical reasoning or clear thinking. The study shows the characteristics of the development of an irrational vocabulary semantic paradigm and reveals semantic derivation models of…

In Germanic and Slavic languages, the Verb is the most extensive grammatical item, which causes most of the troubles for second language learners. It has been noticed that Slavic L1 learners of English make mistakes in using verb forms due to the transfer of their L1 grammatical system (grammar concepts) onto the English language. The goal of the…

Cognitive linguists claim that verb-particle constructions are compositional and analyzable, and that the particles contribute to the overall meaning in the form of image schemas. This article examined this claim with a behavioral experiment, in which participants were asked to judge the sensibility of short sentences primed by image-schematic…

This paper argues that in interpreting literary pieces, language and literature should team up for their mutual benefit. Based on this assumption, this study explores the interface between language and literature by examining along stylistic lines the flash fiction piece "When It's A Grey November In Your Soul" written by Cristina…

Negation in modern Mongolian was analyzed by scholars namely: Luvsanvandan Sh (1968, 2000), Wonsoo Yu (1991), Mönkh-Amgalan Yu (1998), Purev-Ochir B. (1998, 2001), Byambasan P. (2006), Kunihiko Hasimoto (2008), BatIreedui J.(2009), Ravdan E. (2009), Mönkh-Amgalan Yu & Kan Shin (2014). Sentential negation in modern Mongolian is not sufficiently…

There has been considerable research both intra- and inter-linguistically on hedging in a variety of languages (e.g. Myers 1989; Markannen & Schroder 1997; Hyland 2005), primarily concentrating on its use in academic writing and identifying cultural differences in the propensity to hedge between different communities of practice. Furthermore,…

We investigated the on-line processing of unaccusative and unergative sentences in a group of eight Greek-speaking individuals diagnosed with Broca aphasia and a group of language-unimpaired subjects used as the baseline. The processing of unaccusativity refers to the reactivation of the postverbal trace by retrieving the mnemonic representation…

Subject-verb concord in English existential constructions is often viewed as problematic from both prescriptive and descriptive approaches to grammar and causes considerable confusion among teachers and learners of English as a second language (ESL). This paper aims to disentangle debates over the curious usage of the "there" + plural noun phrase…

An event-related potential experiment was conducted to investigate the temporal neural dynamics of animacy processing in the interpretation of classifier-noun combinations. Participants read sentences that had a non-canonical structure, "object noun" + "subject noun" + "verb" + "numeral-classifier" + "adjective". The object noun and its classifier…

Nouns are generally easier to learn than verbs (e.g. Bornstein, 2005; Bornstein et al., 2004; Gentner, 1982; Maguire, Hirsh-Pasek & Golinkoff, 2006). Yet, verbs appear in children's earliest vocabularies, creating a seeming paradox. This paper examines one hypothesis about the difference between noun and verb acquisition. Perhaps the advantage…

Much recent work argues that lexical frequency plays a central explanatory role in linguistic theory, but the status, predicted effects, and methodological treatment of frequency are controversial, especially so in the less-investigated area of syntactic variation. This article addresses these issues in a case study of lexical frequency effects on…