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During the second year of his daughter's life, Michael Tomasello kept a detailed diary of her language, creating a rich database. He made a careful study of how she acquired her first verbs and analysed the role that verbs played in her early grammatical development.
The topic of this book fits in with the recently growing interest in phraseology and fixedness in English. It offers a description of multi-word verbs in the language of the 17th and 18th centuries, an important formative period for Modern English. For the first time, multi-word verbs are treated together as a group, as it is argued that phrasal verbs, prepositional verbs, phrasal-prepositional verbs, verb-adjective combinations and verbo-nominal combinations share defining characteristics. These characteristics are also reflected in similar possibilities of usage, in particular the subtle modification of verbal meaning and these verbs' potential for topicalization structures, both leading to a greater expressiveness. Using a new text collection, the Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640-1740), the study provides a description of the multi-word verb types found, their syntactic behaviour, and their semantic structure. The composition of the corpus also allowed the examination of the development of these verbs over time and in different registers. The corpus study is supplemented by an investigation of attitudes towards multi-word verbs with the help of contemporary works on language, leading to a more speculative discussion of the factors influencing the choice between multi-word and simplex verbs.
In a revision of her doctoral thesis (no date or institution cited), which itself grew out of the project to compile the database Lampeter Corpus of Early Modern English Tracts (1640-1740), Claridge looks at the use of such multi-word verbs as get clear, wish for, and make merry as they appear in the database. She considers both syntax and semantics, which she shows merge to some extent, but takes semantics to be the primary and thus the more important level because people know how they are going to say something before they know what they are going to say. Annotation copyrighted by Book News Inc., Portland, OR
In this rich reference work, Beth Levin classifies over 3,000 English verbs according to shared meaning and behavior. Levin starts with the hypothesis that a verb's meaning influences its syntactic behavior and develops it into a powerful tool for studying the English verb lexicon. She shows how identifying verbs with similar syntactic behavior provides an effective means of distinguishing semantically coherent verb classes, and isolates these classes by examining verb behavior with respect to a wide range of syntactic alternations that reflect verb meaning. The first part of the book sets out alternate ways in which verbs can express their arguments. The second presents classes of verbs that share a kernel of meaning and explores in detail the behavior of each class, drawing on the alternations in the first part. Levin's discussion of each class and alternation includes lists of relevant verbs, illustrative examples, comments on noteworthy properties, and bibliographic references. The result is an original, systematic picture of the organization of the verb inventory. Easy to use, English Verb Classes and Alternations sets the stage for further explorations of the interface between lexical semantics and syntax. It will prove indispensable for theoretical and computational linguists, psycholinguists, cognitive scientists, lexicographers, and teachers of English as a second language.
A journey through linguistic time and space, from Aristotle through the twentieth century's “era of syntax,” in search of a dangerous verb and its significance. Beginning with the early works of Aristotle, the interpretation of the verb to be runs through Western linguistic thought like Ariadne's thread. As it unravels, it becomes intertwined with philosophy, metaphysics, logic, and even with mathematics—so much so that Bertrand Russell showed no hesitation in proclaiming that the verb to be was a disgrace to the human race. With the conviction that this verb penetrates modern linguistic thinking, creating scandal in its wake and, like a Trojan horse of linguistics, introducing disruptive elements that lead us to rethink radically the most basic structure of human language—the sentence—Andrea Moro reconstructs this history. From classical Greece to the dueling masters of medieval logic through the revolutionary geniuses from the seventeenth century to the Enlightenment, and finally to the twentieth century—when linguistics became a driving force and model for neuroscience—the plot unfolds like a detective story, culminating in the discovery of a formula that solves the problem even as it raises new questions—about language, evolution, and the nature and structure of the human mind. While Moro never resorts to easy shortcuts, A Brief History of the Verb To Be isn't burdened with inaccessible formulas and always refers to the broader picture of mind and language. In this way it serves as an engaging introduction to a new field of cutting-edge research.
This book explores the nature of stative verbs, their eventuality structure, and the patterns of argument realization. The study shows that there is no single class of stative verbs. Rather, several distinct groups of verbs are found: Verbs that undergo a systematic stative/eventive ambiguity; verbs that allow for a stative reading only; and verbs that seem to have an intermediate status (verbs of position and verbs of internal causation). The study concludes that there is a discrete boundary between stative and eventive verbs, excluding any intermediate status. Stativity arises because the aspectual operators DO and BECOME are absent in the lexical-semantic structure. Eventivity arises if one of these is present. A minimalist view on argument realization and event structure completes the book: Theta features on the arguments are checked against the aspectual heads within the verb phrase.
This book presents empirical research of grammatical collocations of the type: verb and the prepositions «of» and «to». It is based on comparisons of English and Czech sentences containing verbs and prepositions that are followed by the object. The author creates English-Czech verbal prepositional counterparts and groups on the grounds of the similar semantic, syntactic features. She identifies the features that are the same for each verb group and generalizes them. The book determines trends and tendencies for verbs when they collocate with a certain preposition.