Intensional Transitive Verbs

Schwarz, Florian

doi:10.1002/9781118788516.sem113

Cited by 5 publications

(3 citation statements)

References 33 publications

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“…A predicate is taken to be intensional if a sentence containing it exhibits at least one of the following characteristics: (i) substituting an expression with a coreferential term need not preserve truth-value; (ii) an expression which has no extension in the actual world (i.e. non-existential expression) need not induce falsity of the sentence; (iii) there appears a so-called non-specific reading (in addition to a specific reading) with an indefinite expression (Forbes 2000(Forbes , 2006Pearson 2015;Cheung & Larson 2015;den Dikken et al 2018;Schwarz 2020;a.o.). Let me expound on each of the diagnostics.…”

Section: Three Diagnostics For Intensionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The subject of a stative object experiencer verb is an intensional Cause

Kim

2024

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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In the domain of experiencer verbs, little attention has been paid to the potential intensionality of object experiencer (OE) verbs (but see Cheung & Larson 2015). Relying on diagnostics identified in the literature (Dowty 1979; Schwarz 2020), I argue that the intentionality of OE verbs is correlated with their aspectual properties: they are intensional in their subject when stative but not when eventive. I then consider whether this finding can help us choose between competing theories of the argument structure of OE verbs (Arad 2000; Landau 2010). I will argue that the answer is negative.

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Section: Three Diagnostics For Intensionalitymentioning

confidence: 99%

The subject of a stative object experiencer verb is an intensional Cause

Kim

2024

Proc Ling Soc Amer

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“…In general, object arguments of intensional verbs are understood more in terms of their meaning than of their reference and thus the objects of intensional verbs are potentially non-existent or nonspecific (Forbes, 2020). This understanding poses challenges for conceptions of meaning in which reference plays a central role (Moltmann, 2020;Schwarz, 2020) and has led to arguments that a satisfactory definition of meaning in natural language may depend primarily on the analysis of intensional verbs (D'Ambrosio, 2019). 3 Significance values for coefficients from linear models here and throughout were obtained using the lmerTest package.…”

Section: Open Research Badgesmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effects of Iconicity and Conventionalization on Word Order Preferences

et al. 2022

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Of the six possible orderings of the three main constituents of language (subject, verb, and object), two—SOV and SVO—are predominant cross‐linguistically. Previous research using the silent gesture paradigm in which hearing participants produce or respond to gestures without speech has shown that different factors such as reversibility, salience, and animacy can affect the preferences for different orders. Here, we test whether participants’ preferences for orders that are conditioned on the semantics of the event change depending on (i) the iconicity of individual gestural elements and (ii) the prior knowledge of a conventional lexicon. Our findings demonstrate the same preference for semantically conditioned word order found in previous studies, specifically that SOV and SVO are preferred differentially for different types of events. We do not find that iconicity of individual gestures affects participants’ ordering preferences; however, we do find that learning a lexicon leads to a stronger preference for SVO‐like orders overall. Finally, we compare our findings from English speakers, using an SVO‐dominant language, with data from speakers of an SOV‐dominant language, Turkish. We find that, while learning a lexicon leads to an increase in SVO preference for both sets of participants, this effect is mediated by language background and event type, suggesting that an interplay of factors together determines preferences for different ordering patterns. Taken together, our results support a view of word order as a gradient phenomenon responding to multiple biases.

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“…This has as a consequence that the objects of intensional verbs are potentially non-existent or nonspecific (Forbes, 2020), although there are several potential ways to distinguish intensionals from other verbs (Saul, 2002). The class of verbs has caused semanticists to rethink how verbs and their arguments combine, and has challenged conceptions of meaning in which reference plays a central role (Moltmann, 2020;Schwarz, 2020). Some participants from both language backgrounds produced gesture sequences with different orders, conditioned on the semantics of the eventextensional events were produced most frequently with SOV-like order, while intensional events were produced with SVO-like order.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

From improvisation to learning: how naturalness and systematicity shape language evolution

Motamedi¹,

Wolters²,

Naegeli³

et al. 2021

Preprint

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Silent gesture studies, in which hearing participants from different linguistic backgrounds produce gestures to communicate events, have been used to test hypotheses about the cognitive biases that govern cross-linguistic word order preferences. In particular, the differential use of SOV and SVO order to communicate, respectively, extensional events (where the direct object exists independently of the event; e.g., girl throws ball) and intensional events (where the meaning of the direct object is potentially dependent on the verb; e.g., girl thinks of ball), has been suggested to represent a natural preference, demonstrated in improvisation contexts. However, natural languages tend to prefer systematic word orders, where a single order is used regardless of the event being communicated. We present a series of studies that investigate ordering preferences for SOV and SVO orders using an online forced-choice experiment, where participants select orders for different events i) in the absence of conventions and ii) after learning event-order mappings in different frequencies in a regularisation experiment. Our results show that natural ordering preferences arise in the absence of conventions, replicating previous findings from production experiments. In addition, we show that participants regularise the input they learn in the manual modality in two ways, such that, while the preference for systematic order patterns increases through learning, it exists in competition with the natural ordering preference, that conditions order on the semantics of the event. Using our experimental data in a computational model of cultural transmission, we show that this pattern is expected to persist over generations, suggesting that we should expect to see evidence of semantically-conditioned word order variability in at least some languages.

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Intensional Transitive Verbs

Cited by 5 publications

References 33 publications

The subject of a stative object experiencer verb is an intensional Cause

The subject of a stative object experiencer verb is an intensional Cause

The Effects of Iconicity and Conventionalization on Word Order Preferences

From improvisation to learning: how naturalness and systematicity shape language evolution

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