Original scientific paper

Lexical Decomposition in Understanding Italian and English Motion Verb

Valeria Bandecchi ; School of Languages & Literature University College Dublin
Mark T. Keane ; School of Computer Science & Informatics, University College Dublin

Abstract

In this paper, we combine linguistic analyses based on Event Templates (Rappaport Hovav
and Levin 1998a) and psychological proposals on the complexity of verb meanings to
develop an analysis of the proposed complexity differences in motion verbs in English (as
a satellite–framed language) and Italian (as a verb–framed language). The key prediction
from this analysis is that for both languages manner–of–motion verbs take longer to be
processed than path–motion verbs: that is to say, independently of the language specific
lexicalization patterns, the more complex the structure, the longer the time to process it.
We also outline some recent findings that have a bearing on this prediction.

Keywords

Motion Verbs; Lexical Decomposition; Lexical Semantics; Cognitive Psychology; English; Italian

Hrčak ID:

114359

URI

https://hrcak.srce.hr/114359

Publication date:

31.12.2013.

Article data in other languages: croatian

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