Issues in the phonology of Tiberian Hebrew

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Linguistics and Philosophy, 1984.MICROFICHE COPY AVAILABLE IN ARCHIVES AND HUMANITIES.Bibliography: leaves 254-257.by Malka Rappaport.Ph.D

Change of State Verbs: Implications for Theories of Argument Projection

Recent work in argument expression has focused on verbs showing multiple argument projection options, often with concomitant shifts in aspectual classification or assignment of so-called "aspectual roles" (e.g., measure or incremental theme). Theories of argument projection generally adopt one or both of the following hypotheses: (1) argument projection is aspectually determined; (2) argument expression is not lexically determined. Although much recent work incorporates the conjunction of the two hypotheses, they represent two distinct issues: whether argument expression is aspectually driven and whether argument expression is lexically or syntactically determined. It is possible to argue that argument projection is lexically determined and aspectually driven (e.g., Tenny 1987, 1992, 1994) or to argue that projection is not completely lexically determined but not completely aspectually driven either (e.g., Jackenoff 1990). We argue against each individual hypothesis, as well as against their conjunction. We do this through a close examination of the argument expression properties of change of state verbs and a comparison of these properties with those of aspectually-related verbs

Nominalization and Alternations in Biomedical Language

Background: This paper presents data on alternations in the argument structure of common domain-specific verbs and their associated verbal nominalizations in the PennBioIE corpus. Alternation is the term in theoretical linguistics for variations in the surface syntactic form of verbs, e.g. the different forms of stimulate in FSH stimulates follicular development and follicular development is stimulated by FSH. The data is used to assess the implications of alternations for biomedical text mining systems and to test the fit of the sublanguage model to biomedical texts. Methodology/Principal Findings: We examined 1,872 tokens of the ten most common domain-specific verbs or their zerorelated nouns in the PennBioIE corpus and labelled them for the presence or absence of three alternations. We then annotated the arguments of 746 tokens of the nominalizations related to these verbs and counted alternations related to the presence or absence of arguments and to the syntactic position of non-absent arguments. We found that alternations are quite common both for verbs and for nominalizations. We also found a previously undescribed alternation involving an adjectival present participle. Conclusions/Significance: We found that even in this semantically restricted domain, alternations are quite common, and alternations involving nominalizations are exceptionally diverse. Nonetheless, the sublanguage model applies to biomedica