Verb subcategorization frequencies: American English corpus data, methodological studies, and cross-corpus comparisons

Gahl, Susanne; Jurafsky, Dan; Roland, Douglas

doi:10.3758/bf03195591

Cited by 60 publications

(62 citation statements)

References 36 publications

(57 reference statements)

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“…For example, try tends to occur with a non-finite clausal complement (e.g., try to fix the car), and report tends to occur with a finite clausal complement (e.g., report that the battle was over). These differences are glossed over in computing overall transitivity preference, both in our own experiment and, frequently, in others in which verb transitivity bias is studied (see Gahl et al, 2004, for discussion of related issues). We acknowledge that these differences may be relevant to the comprehension of heavy NP shift; Stallings et al (1998) present evidence that they play a role in the production of heavy NP shift.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 85%

“…These 12 verbs appeared in both the Connine, Ferreira, Jones, Clifton, and Frazier (1984) production norms and the Gahl, Jurafsky, and Roland (2004) corpus-based norms. We calculated the transitivity bias of each verb as the mean of the scores obtained from these two sources, using scoring categories that were common to both sets of norms.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

“…As in Experiment 1, we obtained transitivity preferences for these verbs from the Connine et al (1984) and Gahl et al (2004) norms. Twelve of the verbs were included in the Connine et al norms, and 13 were included in the Gahl et al norms.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Heavy NP shift is the parser’s last resort: Evidence from eye movements☆

Staub

Clifton

Frazier

2006

Journal of Memory and Language

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Two eye movement experiments explored the roles of verbal subcategorization possibilities and transitivity biases in the processing of heavy NP shift sentences in which the verb's direct object appears to the right of a post-verbal phrase. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences in which a prepositional phrase immediately followed the verb, which was either obligatorily transitive or had a high transitivity bias (e.g., Jack praised/watched from the stands his daughter's attempt to shoot a basket). Experiment 2 compared unshifted sentences to sentences in which an adverb intervened between the verb and its object, and obligatorily transitive verbs to optionally transitive verbs with widely varying transitivity biases. In both experiments, evidence of processing difficulty appeared on the material that intervened between the verb and its object when the verb was obligatorily transitive, and on the shifted direct object when the verb was optionally transitive, regardless of transitivity bias. We conclude that the parser adopts the heavy NP shift analysis only when it is forced to by the grammar, which we interpret in terms of a preference for immediate incremental interpretation. KeywordsSentence comprehension; Parsing; Heavy NP shift; Argument structure; Eye movements Consider the comprehension of sentences in which a direct object is separated from the verb by intervening material, as in (1) below: (1) Lucy ate t i with a fork [the extremely delicious, bright green broccoli] i . This construction is known as heavy NP shift. According to the classic syntactic account (Ross, 1967; but cf. Kayne, 1998;Rochemont & Culicover, 1997), heavy NP shift involves a movement operation that displaces the verb's direct object from its underlying position adjacent to the verb, where it receives both accusative case and a thematic role, to an adjoined position to the right of other verbal arguments and/or adjuncts. As in other movement operations, a trace of the moved constituent remains in the pre-movement position. Notably, heavy NP shift is typically able to apply only when the direct object noun phrase is relatively long or "heavy" relative to the intervening constituent, as evidenced by the comparative awkwardness of (2a) and the unacceptability of (2b):

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Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 85%

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 98%

See 1 more Smart Citation

Heavy NP shift is the parser’s last resort: Evidence from eye movements☆

Staub

Clifton

Frazier

2006

Journal of Memory and Language

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“…For those items in which the initial verb did allow a direct object in principle, the critical verb also tended to be intransitive-biased. Nine of these verbs appear in the corpus-based norms collected by Gahl, Jurafsky, and Roland (2004) or the production norms collected by Connine, Ferreira, Jones, Clifton, & Frazier (1984) or Pickering and Traxler (2003), and based on these sources, they have a mean probability of appearing with a direct object of .09, ranging from 0 to .23.…”

Section: Methodsmentioning

confidence: 99%

The return of the repressed: Abandoned parses facilitate syntactic reanalysis☆

Staub

2007

Journal of Memory and Language

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Two eye movement experiments examined effects on syntactic reanalysis when the correct analysis was briefly entertained at an earlier point in the sentence. In Experiment 1, participants read sentences containing a noun phrase coordination/clausal coordination ambiguity, while in Experiment 2 they read sentences containing a subordinate clause object/main clause subject ambiguity. The critical conditions were designed to induce readers to construct the ultimately correct analysis just prior to being garden-pathed by the incorrect analysis. In both experiments, the earliest measures of the garden path effect were not modulated by this manipulation. However, there was significantly less regressive re-reading of the sentence in those conditions in which the correct analysis was likely to have been constructed, then abandoned, at an earlier point. These results suggest that a syntactic analysis that is abandoned in the course of processing a sentence is not lost altogether, and can be re-activated or retrieved from memory. Implications for models of initial syntactic analysis and reanalysis are discussed.

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“…The impact of a writing system's grapho-phonological characteristics on reading and writing performance led several investigators to make use of published wordfrequency counts to derive new sets of computations geared to specialized research (e.g., Berndt, D'Autrechy, & Reggia, 1994;De Cara & Goswami, 2002;Gahl, Jurafsky, & Roland, 2004;Jones & Mewhort, 2004;Kessler & Treiman, 1997;Novick & Sherman, 2004;Peereman & Content, 1999;Stanback, 1992;Tamaoka & Makioka, 2004). Unfortunately, there are very few quantitative descriptions of the orthographic and phonological properties of French words that are suitable for studying literacy acquisition.…”

Section: Lexical Databases For the Study Of Literacy Acquisitionmentioning

confidence: 99%