Stative Inquiries

This monograph studies stative predicates from a neo-constructionist perspective and integrates them in a comprehensive theory of event and argument structure. It focuses on two sets of stative verbs: govern-type verbs and object experiencer psychological verbs. For govern-verbs, it shows how notions such as causativity and resultativity can also be ingredients of stative predicates and be derived syntactically. The consequences of this proposal are further pursued in a crosslinguistic investigation of adjectival passives, which are stative predicates of sorts. For object-experiencer psychological verbs, it is shown that their Experiencer theta-role can and should be derived as an aspectual entailment mediated by prepositional structure. In defending this view, this monograph reveals a syntactic parallelism between location verbs and object-experiencer psychological verbs in many languages that has hitherto gone unnoticed. This book will primarily appeal to researchers interested in lexical aspect and its connection to morphosyntax.

The study of the linguistic reflexes of aspect has been an active field of research in various sub-disciplines of linguistics, such as syntax, semantics (including discourse theory) and acquisition studies. However, communication and dissemination of results across these various subfields has often been indirect. The different angles brought together give us a comprehensive picture of the representation of aspect in the mind/brain of the speaker. The papers in this volume represent the results of a workshop on the syntax, semantics and acquisition of aspect held in 2002 whose purpose was to foment active cross-disciplinary communication. A number of the papers examine the syntactic representation of lexical or situation aspect, while others focus on the syntactic interaction of lexical aspect with grammatical aspect, and of grammatical aspect and tense. Other papers examine the role of aspect in discourse representations, while a third group of papers reports on results of empirical studies on the acquisition of aspect in both first and second language acquisition, and patterns of loss of morphosyntactic reflexes of aspect in language attrition.

This study aims at developing a unified perspective on nonfiniteness, encompassing its morphological, syntactic and semantic aspects. It puts the emphasis on clause types distinct from standard infinitives (gerund clauses, Celtic verbo-nominal structures, Portuguese inflected infinitives, Latin dominant participle constructions) and takes advantage of the most recent developments in syntactic theory. The notions of defectiveness and completeness, the inheritance hypothesis, the labeling requirement, the syntactic definition of lexical categories, once combined together, appear to make accessible tighter and more elegant analyses than previous accounts.

The authors present current work on language acquisition which further investigates several themes developed by White's research.

Morphosyntactic disambiguation and shallow parsing in computational processing in Basque. The transitivity of borrowed verbs in Basque: an outline. Patrixa: a unification-based parser for Basque and its application to the automatic analysis of verbs. Learning argument/adjunct distinction for Basque. Analyzing verbal subcategorization aimed at its computation application. Automatic extraction of verb paterns from ?hauta-lanerako euskal hiztegia?. The case of an enlightening, provoking an admirable Basque derivational siffux with implications for the theory of argument structure. Verb-deriving processes in Basque. Lexical causatives and causative alternation in Basque. Causation and semantic control; diagnosis of incorrect use in minorized languages.

This volume, republished without revision from the 1978 edition, offers an analysis of the development of usage of the Hebrew term hesed. Judgments are made about the relative age of the texts in which the term appears, and connotations of the word are traced chronologically from earlier to later texts. The study encompasses secular usage, human religious behavior called hesed, and the hesed of God.