Escape games are an increasingly popular leisure activity involving a group of players completing tasks to achieve a pre-defined goal, which is usually escaping from a room. In this chapter, I briefly outline the educational potential of escape game activities in language classes within the frameworks of gamification, pervasive learning, and…

This article describes the development of a tense and aspect identifier, an online tool designed to help learners of English by harnessing a natural language processing pipeline to automatically classify verb groups into one of 12 grammatical tenses. Currently, there is no website or application that can automatically identify tense in context,…

Deep cases representing the significant meaning of nouns in sentences play a crucial role in semantic analysis. However, a case tends to be manually identified because it requires understanding the meaning and relationships of words. To address this problem, we propose a method to predict deep cases by analyzing the relationship between nouns,…

Monolingual and parallel concordancers have both been found to benefit second-language (L2) grammatical development. However, the relative benefits of these two concordancer types remains unclear. The present study compares learning outcomes and learners' perceptions of a monolingual English (Corpus of Contemporary American English, COCA) and a…

This paper presents an electronic dictionary and translation system for the Australian language Murrinh-Patha. Its complex verbal structure makes learning Murrinh-Patha very difficult. Design learning materials or a dictionary which is easy to understand and to use also presents a challenge. This paper discusses some of the difficulties posed by…

A case study of the use of reflexive constructions by a Spanish-speaking child from age 2;5.2 to 3;5.2 is presented. Sixty hours of audiotaped utterances were recorded monthly over a one year period. The utterances are analyzed in terms of self-induced actions, impersonal constructions, and two-argument predicates. The data show the regular…

A discussion of verb intransitivization in English grammar looks at different verb classes that allow or do not allow this phenomenon. The semantic primitive of involvement is a phenomenon that attempts to find related features in sentences where intransitivization occurs. Semantic involvement patterns are assigned in the subject or direct object…

This semantic analysis assumes the overall framework of an extended standard theory of grammar, focusing on the lexicon and making a case for semantic mapping. It assumes Chomsky's (1986) theory that the projection of a verb and its arguments into syntax is determined by its lexical specifications. It further accepts the arguments of Williams…

Two instances of unaccusative verb mismatches in Japanese are examined. An unaccusative mismatch is the situation in which a different accusative diagnostic singles out different classes of intransitive verbs within and across languages. One type of unaccusative mismatch has to do with group C verbs, or verbs of manner with protagonist control.…

The loss of the copula in Black English Vernacular (BEV) is demonstrably traceable to norms of pidginization that have their roots in West African languages and in contact among those languages. An extensive examination of the verb systems of a number of West African languages reveals that in every case a variety of verbal forms serves the many…

Analysis of two Restructuring constructions in Italian, "equi" and "raising" structures, suggests that while lexical functional grammar (LFG) does not offer the kind of analysis previously used on this kind of structure, it does offer an insightful and interesting analysis of Restructuring in Italian. This approach treats…

A study of reciprocals in Japanese compares two kinds: (1) a verbal suffix "aw"; and (2) an NP argument "otagai." Although "otagai" appears to be taken care of by syntactic binding theory, it is proposed that there is no evidence for the existence of a syntactic position of the object NP in the case of "aw." The suffix can be characterized as…

This paper studies the variety of Arabic imperative sentences, which are seen as the result of an interrelated set of choices made from a limited number of binary systems, and analyzes their occurrence in different situations. Where possible, relevant features of Arabic imperative structures are compared with their nearest English equivalents. The…

In Black English (BE), in addition to the motion verb "come," there exists a modal-like "come" which expresses speaker indignation. This "come" is comparable to other modal-like forms, identical to motion verbs, which occur in Black and non-Black varieties of English, and which signal various degrees of disapproval.…

This research is the result of 10 weeks of field work in Taiwan during the summer of 1972. It consists of a description, analysis, and comparison of the morphologically marked causative verbs in Rukai, Bunun, Tsou, Anis, Seedig, and Saisiyat. The theoretical framework employed is a type of case grammar referred to as "lexicase," a…