The Mental Lexicon - Volume 14, Issue 2, 2019

Verbs constitute one of the basic building blocks of a clause, setting the structure of arguments and expressing the relationships among nouns in various thematic roles. In general terms, verbs are lexical items expressing verb-oriented notions such as activities, processes, and states. In morphology-rich languages, the syntactic and lexical roles of verbs are mediated by typologically-oriented morphological means. The current Special Issue contrasts the structure and functions of verbs in languages from two morphologically rich, yet typologically different families. The articles in the Special Issue present spoken and written aspects of verbs in usage and development in German (a Germanic language) on the one hand, in Hebrew, Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic (Semitic languages), on the other. From a theoretical linguistic perspective, we ask how the different typological features of these languages affect the function of verbs in sentences, and from a psycholinguistic perspective, we ask how typological differences affect the processing of verbs in the mature minds of adults and in the developing minds of children.

The Jewish Neo-Aramaic Dialect of Zakho is a highly endangered dialect of North-Eastern Neo-Aramaic which was spoken by the Jews of Zakho (northern-Iraq) up to the 1950s, when virtually all of them left Iraq for Israel. Thanks to documentation efforts which started in the ’40s at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, as well as the interest of native speakers, we possess a rich textual documentation of this dialect today (Cohen, 2012; Y. Sabar, 2002; Avinery, 1988). These resources, together with recently conducted fieldwork, are used in order to analyze the linguistic status of the verbal personal indices in this dialect, following the concepts presented by Bresnan & Mchombo (1987) as well as Corbett (2003). For each person marker, its status as a pronominal affix or as an agreement marker is established. The synchronic situation is compared with the known historic situation in older strata of Aramaic, such as Classical Syriac. The resulting analysis shows that the same apparent person marker may behave differently in different syntactic environments. Another conclusion is that there is no clear-cut dichotomy between pronominal affixes and agreement markers, as transitional cases exist.

The study examines the distribution of verbal patterns and their semantic-syntactic functions as they are used in spoken narrative text production by adult native speakers of Palestinian Arabic. 30 native Palestinian Arabic adult speakers from Kufur Qareʕ, a village in Central Israel, were shown a clip demonstrating conflicts and were asked to produce an oral narrative text based on it. The verbs used in these narratives were examined according to root, pattern, transitivity and semantic class. The results revealed strong tendencies with regard to the distribution of the patterns that were used. CaCaC was the most productive pattern by type and token counts. This stands in contradiction to the results for verb innovation, where the CaCCaC and tCaCCaC patterns are selected almost exclusively, and it highlights the gap between productivity based on new formations and productivty based on basic forms in use. In addition, some verbal patterns were extermely rarely used. The results also show that there was no transparent form-function relation with respect to the semantic functions of verbal patterns. Most semantic functions were delivered in a small number of patterns (between 1–3) and the majority of them were in were found in one pattern, CaCaC. The results shed light on the actual usage of Arabic verbal patterns in text production and their semantic and syntactic features.

Hebrew verbs were analyzed in the peer talk produced by 36 Hebrew-speaking children in two age/schooling groups (4;0–5;0 and 5;0–6;0 years), and from two socio-economic backgrounds (SES), mid-high and low. Each of the four age/SES groups consisted of nine children in three triads, where each triad was recorded for 30 minutes while playing. The interface of lexical and morphological growth was demonstrated in the developing organization of verbs in terms of roots, binyan conjugations and derivational families. SES was found the major source of variation in all measures, indicating a smaller and less specific verb lexicon in the low SES groups. Network analyses, a novel methodological approach, revealed the internal structure of the verb category in each age/SES cell, pointing to a scarce and less complex verb lexicon of the low SES groups. These measures also accounted for the growth potential of the network, increasing from the younger low SES group at one pole and peaking in the older mid-high SES at the other pole. These quantitative and qualitative differences in the morphological make-up of the verb lexicon and its usage patterns in preschool peer talk have implications for the impact of SES on verb learning in Hebrew.

Not much is known about how children cope with the task of acquiring the complex, polyfunctional, and often abstract and idiosyncratic system of German verbal prefixes. This paper presents an experimental study on children’s knowledge, i.e. their morphological and semantic awareness, of the five verbal prefixes be‑, ent‑, er‑, ver‑, and zer‑ in preschool age and early school age. The experiment combines a decision and a definition task involving canonical and novel prefix verbs, and it examines the influence of context on the recognition of the verbs.

The results of the study show that, in general, the knowledge of prefix verbs increases significantly between 6 and 8 years. Preschoolers have preliminary, but still very labile representations of the five verbal prefixes, school children have established much more independent representations, however, the lexical knowledge they have about prefixes and prefixed verbs is still fragmentary. The five prefixes under investigation differ considerably with respect to their morpho-semantic transparency. Higher transparency results in good passive knowledge of the prefixes, even when they are rarely used by the children spontaneously, such as the infrequent, but semantically salient prefix ent- (ent-kommen ‘escape’), that is much better known to children than spontaneous speech data would suggest.

This study examines whether the lexical processing of German particle verbs differs from their processing in a semantic network. To this end, we explored whether the processing of particle verbs induces access to the stem (Experiment 1) and to a semantic associate of the stem (Experiment 2). In two cross-modal priming experiments, participants listened to particle verbs that were (a) semantically transparent (e.g. anhören, ‘listen to’), (b) semantically opaque (e.g. aufhören, ‘stop’), or (c) form-related (e.g. aushöhlen, ‘mold’) with respect to their stem (e.g., hören, ‘hear’). Participants made lexical decisions about visually presented stems (e.g., hören, ‘hear’) and about semantic associates to the stem (e.g., Musik, ‘music’) in Experiments 1 and 2, respectively.

Relative to form controls, semantically transparent and opaque particle verbs induced equivalent stem priming (Experiment 1), indicating that the lexical processing of particle verbs occurs via the stem regardless of semantic transparency. However, neither semantically transparent nor opaque particle verbs primed semantic associates of the stem (Experiment 2). These findings indicate that stem access during lexical processing does not extend to a semantic level where the meaning of the stem is processed. We discuss these findings regarding present models of lexical processing.

An important task of the verb in German is to indicate sentence type. Depending on where the verb is positioned, the clause is a declarative (verb after the first constituent, which can be any constituent), wh-interrogative (verb after the first constituent, being the wh-phrase), yes/no-interrogative (verb in first position, bearing indicative or subjunctive mood) or imperative clause (verb in first position, bearing imperative mood). This system developed out of a system in which sentence type was indicated by clause-final sentence mood particles, as is usual in older Indo-European (and Semitic) languages. In declarative sentences, the verb-second syntax only came about shortly before the Old High German attestation sets in. We can trace the gradual development of the modern German verb-second syntax with variable prefield from a clear topic-comment structure to a more flexible structure.