What is a verb?

Abstract

Verbs constitute one of the basic building blocks of a clause, setting the structure of arguments and expressing the relationships among nouns in various thematic roles. In general terms, verbs are lexical items expressing verb-oriented notions such as activities, processes, and states. In morphology-rich languages, the syntactic and lexical roles of verbs are mediated by typologically-oriented morphological means. The current Special Issue contrasts the structure and functions of verbs in languages from two morphologically rich, yet typologically different families. The articles in the Special Issue present spoken and written aspects of verbs in usage and development in German (a Germanic language) on the one hand, in Hebrew, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic (Semitic languages), on the other. From a theoretical linguistic perspective, we ask how the different typological features of these languages affect the function of verbs in sentences, and from a psycholinguistic perspective, we ask how typological differences affect the processing of verbs in the mature minds of adults and in the developing minds of children.

German Language Adaptation of the NAVS (NAVS-G) and of the NAT (NAT-G): Testing Grammar in Aphasia

“…The error analysis in patients with aphasia supports the idea that verbs are lexical items, which possess syntactic argument valence [6][7][8][9][10][11]. Patients' low accuracy on the VNT, the significant effect of argument structure complexity (in particular within the obligatory verbs, Table 4), and the finding of frequent omission errors (Table 9), in conjunction with the near to perfect performance in the comprehension of the same verbs (see also Table 11: the difference between VNT and VCT was significant) point to a deficit in accessing verb representations and not to an impairment of the stored verb representation.…”

“…To assess the canonicity effect, we compared data from passive, OWQ and OR (sentence types with non-canonical order) to active, SWQ, and SR (sentence types with canonical order). In order to check if the effect of canonicity was limited to the comparison OR > SR (as described in HP [1,11], or whether this effect extends to other sentence types, we compared data from passive and OWQ (non-canonical order) to active and SWQ (canonical order). A third analysis was then conducted using sentence type as the main predictor of interest, with six levels.…”

“…From linguistic and psycholinguistic data, it is well known that verbs are lexical items that possess syntactic argument valence, constituting one of the basic building blocks of grammatical clauses [6][7][8][9][10][11]. Argument valence sets the structure of arguments and expresses the relationships among nouns in various thematic roles (see the Projection Principle and the theta criterion [9,11]). Each verb-argument assigns a specific so-called thematic role, for example, the agent (corresponding to the noun phrase (NP) in subject position), the theme (e.g., NP in object position that is affected by the action), and the goal that the action leads to [12].…”

Morphosyntactic underspecification affects the processing of verbal forms at different levels of abstraction in L1 and L2 German

“…In future research, investigations should be extended to other linguistic forms and languages. Both experimental (see Smolka & Ravid, 2019;Milin et al, 2017, for overviews) and computational (Günther et al, 2019) evidence suggest that typological differences between languages may result in differences in morphological representation and processing. It needs to be clarified whether or to what degree the present findings are generalisable to other languages and other linguistic domains such as noun inflection.…”