We present a visual world eye-tracking study on Tseltal (a Mayan language) and investigate whether verbal information can be used to anticipate an upcoming referent. Basic word order in transitive sentences in Tseltal is Verb--Object--Subject (VOS). The verb is usually encountered first, making argument structure and syntactic information…

Despite having different semantic profiles, near synonyms are usually presented in dictionaries as being contextually interchangeable, which may lead EFL learners to assume their contextual interchangeability. Nevertheless, there is a scarcity of studies on how near synonyms are similar or different in their semantic and grammatical preferences.…

The field of Linguistics has long been interested in the verb meanings of intransitive verbs and their argument structure, specifically the breakdown of intransitive verbs into unaccusative and unergative verb types. Despite extensive research, a universally applicable explanation for this breakdown remains elusive due in part to the variability…

"A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor" (2024) upgrades ED628218 (ERIC) with labels and analysis and brings the work up to date to reflect language change at the speed of the internet, ChatGPT, social discord, and bloody wars. The dictionary identifies language used figuratively in everyday…

All accounts of language acquisition agree that, by around age 4, children's knowledge of grammatical constructions is abstract, rather than tied solely to individual lexical items. The aim of the present research was to investigate, focusing on the passive, whether children's and adults' performance is additionally semantically constrained,…

"A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor" (2023) upgrades ED619049 (ERIC) and finishes its work. The dictionary identifies language used figuratively in everyday contemporary English--to include the language of "inclusion & exclusion" and "contempo-speak"--along with its…

In two visual priming experiments, we investigated the relation of form-identical word forms with different grammatical functions in L1 and L2 German. Four different grammatical types (inflected verbs, infinitives, deverbal conversion forms, and countable nouns) were used as primes and their influence on the processing of form-identical inflected…

This paper explores the nature of copula omission in Cypriot Greek individuals with Down Syndrome (DS). Previous studies on DS have attributed high rates of copula omission to an overall grammatical/inflectional impairment without offering further analysis. In order to identify relevant conditioning factors, we examined copula productions and…

Neural network models have recently made striking progress in natural language processing, but they are typically trained on orders of magnitude more language input than children receive. What can these neural networks, which are primarily distributional learners, learn from a naturalistic subset of a single child's experience? We examine this…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

Natural languages contain systematic relationships between verb meaning and verb argument structure. Artificial language learning studies typically remove those relationships and instead pair verb meanings randomly with structures. Adult participants in such studies can detect statistical regularities associated with words in these languages and…

The present study aims to reveal the use of high-frequency verbs "make" and "do" when they occur in a verb+noun combination in the argumentative essays of Turkish learners of English. In this context, the present study investigated the grammatical and semantic patterns and erroneous productions in the learner corpus. The…

One of the reasons why EFL learners have difficulties with the English present perfect tense is that little attention has been paid to the relationship between patterns and meanings of the tense (Yoshimura et al., 2014). To fill this gap, the present study takes a corpus-driven approach to the pattern-meaning interface of the present perfect,…

This mixed methods study draws upon theoretical perspectives from usage-based linguistics (UBL) and variationist sociolinguistics to explore four learners' use of second language (L2) Spanish present tense indicative verbal inflectional morphology (i.e., simple present conjugations). The study compares the frequency and distribution of students'…

Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…