Mutual attraction between high-frequency verbs and clause types with finite verbs in early positions: corpus evidence from spoken English, Dutch, and German

Abstract

We report a hitherto unknown statistical relationship between the corpus frequency of finite verbs and their fixed linear positions (early vs. late) in finite clauses of English, Dutch, and German. Compared to the overall frequency distribution of verb lemmas in the corpora, high-frequency finite verbs are overused in main clauses, at the expense of nonfinite verbs. This finite versus nonfinite split of high-frequency verbs is basically absent from subordinate clauses. Furthermore, this "main-clause bias" (MCB) of high-frequency verbs is more prominent in German and Dutch (SOV languages) than in English (an SVO language). We attribute the MCB and its varying effect sizes to faster accessibility of high-frequency finite verbs, which (1) increases the probability for these verbs to land in clauses mandating early verb placement, and (2) boosts the activation of clause plans that assign verbs to early linear positions (in casu: clauses with SVO as opposed to SOV order).

A novel corpus‐based computing method for handling critical word‐ranking issues: An example of COVID‐19 research articles

“…Prior studies believed high-frequency words may reflect specific linguistic patterns in certain domains which would benefit EFL speakers in more effective acquisition of domain knowledge when reading English texts. 3,5,6,43,44 Thus, with rapid information flow of COVID-19, establishing COVID-19 specialized corpus for timely acquisition of updated medical knowledge is especially critical for medical care personnel. 7,9,11,14,32 Certainly, as of the end of October 2020, more than 38,000 RAs on COVID-19-related topics had been published in the WOS database; this phenomenon indicated that a large number of research results were produced by leading researchers globally.…”

“…Traditional corpus‐based computing methods for critical word ranking mainly calculate words' frequency values and rank them. Prior studies believed high‐frequency words may reflect specific linguistic patterns in certain domains which would benefit EFL speakers in more effective acquisition of domain knowledge when reading English texts 3,5,6,43,44 . Thus, with rapid information flow of COVID‐19, establishing COVID‐19 specialized corpus for timely acquisition of updated medical knowledge is especially critical for medical care personnel 7,9,11,14,32 .…”

“…The traditional frequency-based approach 30 The refined traditional frequency-based approach 44 The proposed approach…”

“…The traditional frequency-based approach 30 The refined traditional frequency-based approach 44 The proposed approach According to Table 8, there were significant differences in token ranking between the traditional corpus-based computing approaches 30,46 and the proposed approach. The traditional corpus-based computing approaches 30,46 only calculated a token's total frequency values to define its rank and importance; however, the frequency dispersion criteria were not taken into consideration; that is, a token with high frequency may not be widely adopted or used by the RA authors, or may be concentrated in very few RAs or even possibly occur in only one RA.…”

Constructivist Approaches to First Language Acquisition

“…This corresponds to recent findings from spoken adult corpora in German, Dutch, and English, where finite forms are much more frequent than nonfinite forms, but also lexically restricted to a small set of high-frequency, but semantically light verbs or auxiliaries. Kempen and Harbusch (2019) argue that the predominance of only a few high-frequency verbs early in the utterance facilitates processing. When looking at their list of the 50 most frequent German finite verbs in written corpora, it seems that many of them are not typical in CDS such that the set of high-frequency finite verbs addressed to children should be even smaller.…”