Languages vary in the mapping of relational terms onto events. For instance, English motion descriptions favor manner (how something moves) verbs over path (where something move) verbs, whereas those of other languages, like Spanish, show the opposite pattern. While these lexicalization biases are malleable, adopting a novel lexicalization pattern can be slow for second language learners. One potential mechanism for learning non-native verb mappings is cross-situational statistical learning (CSSL). However, the application of CSSL to verbs is limited and does not explicitly examine how lexicalization biases may complicate adults’ ability to resolve the referential uncertainty of multiple referents. We ask English-speaking monolingual adults to learn the mappings of ten verbs via CSSL. Verbs mapped onto either manner or path of motion, with the other event component held constant. Adults in both conditions demonstrated successful learning of novel verbs, with adults learning the manner verbs showing more consistent performance across accepting correct referents and rejecting incorrect ones. Our results are the first to demonstrate adults’ use of CSSL to acquire verb meanings that both align with and cut against native lexicalization biases and suggest a limited influence of lexicalization biases on adults’ learning in idealized CSSL conditions.

What does it take to run a full substance-free phonology (SFP)? Because in classical approaches only items below the skeleton have phonetic properties that, according to SFP, need to be expunged, current work in SFP only ever concerns segmental aspects. If substance is removed from segmental representation and primes and computation are therefore arbitrary, the non-trivial question arises: how can such a system communicate with a system where primes and computation are not arbitrary (at and above the skeleton)? The two phonologies below and at / above the skeleton that exist in production are complemented with a third phonology that occurs upon lexicalization, that is, when L1 learners or adults transform the acoustic signal into a stored representation. The core of this article argues that this broad architecture is inhabited by three distinct computational systems along the classical feature geometric divisions: Son(ority) is located at and above the skeleton, while Place and Lar(yngeal) live below the skeleton. The question then is how a multiple-module spell-out works, that is, how ingredients from three distinct vocabularies can be mapped onto a single phonetic item. It is argued that the skeleton plays a central role in this conversion.

This corpus study explores how sound events are communicated in English and Spanish. The aims are to (i) contribute production data for a better understanding of the couplings of meanings and their realizations, (ii) account for typological differences between the languages, and (iii) further the theoretical discussion of how sound is conceptualized through the window of language. We found that, while there are significant differences between the languages with respect to how sound events are communicated, they are similar with respect to what domains the sound descriptions are instantiated in, namely perception, motion, manipulation, emotion-reaction, consumption, and cognition. One striking difference has to do with the conflation of sound for action, e.g., creak, squeak, and sound for motion, e.g., slam, crash. This finding supports the received view of English as a language that may lexicalize manner in those kinds of verbs, while Spanish expresses manner through qualifiers outside the verb. Moreover, both languages employ three different perspectives on the soundscapes: Producer-, Experiencer-, and Phenomenon-based. While English favours the Producer perspective, Spanish features an even distribution between Producer and Experiencer. Phenomenon-based descriptions are relatively few in both languages.

This paper investigates the underlying cognitive processes of sound–color associations by connecting perceptual evidence from research on cross-modal correspondences to sound symbolic patterns in the words for colors in natural languages. Building upon earlier perceptual experiments, we hypothesized that sonorous and bright phonemes would be over-represented in the words for bright and saturated colors. This hypothesis was tested on eleven color words and related concepts (red–green, yellow–blue, black–white, gray, night–day, dark–light) from 245 language families. Textual data was transcribed into the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), and each phoneme was described acoustically using high-quality IPA recordings. These acoustic measurements were then correlated with the luminance and saturation of each color obtained from cross-linguistic color-naming data in the World Color Survey. As expected, vowels with high brightness and sonority ratings were over-represented in the words for colors with high luminance, while sonorous consonants were more common in the words for saturated colors. We discuss these results in relation to lexicalization patterns and the links between iconicity and perceptual cross-modal associations.

This study provides an empirical analysis of light verb constructions in Old Swedish. These constructions contain a semantically light verb, such as giva ‘give’ or göra ‘make’, that may be paired with an abstract nominal object, as in giva radh ‘give advice’ or giva hiälp ‘give help’. Using a corpus of nine Old Swedish texts written in the 13th, 14th, and 15th centuries, I track the frequency of light verb constructions and analyze the range of transitive light verb + object pairings. I consider the effects of time, genre, and the type of modification to the nominal object in the quantitative analysis. The results contribute to ongoing discussions in crosslinguistic, diachronic research on the reasons for the increase in frequency of light verb constructions as well as the possibility that this construction exhibits characteristics of grammaticalization or lexicalization.

In this study, we explore how direct speech is portrayed in English and Spanish Speech Framing Expressions (SFEs). The study has two aims. Firstly, we survey the use of verbs in SFEs and offer a comprehensive inventory of those verbs in English and Spanish as representatives of Germanic and Romance languages respectively in order to determine what verb meanings are used to cue direct speech, what lexical resources express these meanings, and how rich and varied these vocabularies are in the two languages. Secondly, the comparisons across the languages provide the basis for a theoretical contribution to the debate about general typological differences in the semantics and lexicalization patterns of verbs in Germanic and Romance languages to the area of verbs for speech and to meaning modelling in general. Five main semantic categories of verbs were identified: speech, activity, perception, cognition and emotion. We show that Spanish features a much more varied repertoire than English and makes more use of verbs related to the domains of thinking and reasoning, while the physical domain is the preferred one in the English data set. It emerges that even though the same types of lexical resources are available in both languages, the ways of describing direct speech vary greatly.

Deverbal nouns are often referred to as hybrids, containing both verbal and nominal features. In many languages deverbal nouns tend to develop into what Vendler (1967) called perfect nouns. Various stages of this development in Norwegian are proposed, drawing on Grammaticalization Theory and Lexicalization Theory. Frequency data are provided from a large newspaper corpus. The deverbal nouns are analyzed as going through a process of lexicalization where reduction in compositionality, reduced token frequency and increased idiosyncrasy are central elements. This process is triggered by relevance to the root, language use, isomorphism and the maximal difference principle. The article shows that Norwegian deverbal nouns are in a state of flux and that even different members of the same morphological type may behave quite differently syntactically and semantically.