Contrastive Pragmatics and Corpora

Contrastive Linguistics and Corpora

A New Approach to Contrastive Topic: Partition Semantics and Pragmatics

The purpose of the current work is to propose a more comprehensive approach to Contrastive Topic (henceforth, CT) than the existing ones. In the literature, there have been two approaches to CT proposed: one is to take CT as an information-structural discourse-regulating notion on a par with focus and the other is to analyze CT as an focus-sensitive operator with its inherent semantic and pragm...

Using sign language corpora as bilingual corpora for data mining: Contrastive linguistics and computer-assisted..

More and more sign languages nowadays are now documented by large scale digital corpora. But exploiting sign language (SL) corpus data remains subject to the time consuming and expensive manual task of annotating. In this paper, we present an ongoing research that aims at testing a new approach to better mine SL data. It relies on the methodology of corpus-based contrastive linguistics, exploit...

The pragmatics of expressive content: Evidence from large corpora

We use large collections of online product reviews, in Chinese, English, German, and Japanese, to study the use conditions of expressives (swears, antihonorifics, intensives). The distributional evidence provides quantitative support for a pragmatic theory of these items that is based in speaker and hearer expectations.

Corpus-based Lexicographic Pragmatics: On 'transforming' dirty corpora

Just over one decade ago, corpus-based pragmatics labelling made its way into a major dictionary for the first time. In the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (COBUILD 2, Sinclair 1995), the compilers started to insert the novel 'PRAGMATICS' sign into the Extra Column, whenever the 'statement of meaning' for certain senses of words had to be supplemented by an 'added meaning'. In the latest edi...