Contrastive Pragmatics in a Diachronic Perspective: Insights from Othello

Contrast from a Contrastive Perspective

The main concern of the paper is to address some problems that arise when defining the concept of contrast and to clarify the relation between contrast and other concepts of information structure. As to the definition of the notion of contrast, we need to separate the semantic and pragmatic aspects of contrastiveness as well as identify different types within these two main categories. There is...

Investigating Lexico-grammaticality in Academic Abstracts and Their Full Research Papers from a Diachronic Perspective

Development of science and academic knowledge has led to changes in academic language and transfer of information and knowledge. In this regard, the present study is an attempt to investigate lexico-grammaticality in academic abstracts and their full research papers in Linguistics, Chemistry and Electrical engineering papers published during 1991-2015 in academic journals from a diachronic pers...

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...

MUC vs HAREM: a contrastive perspective

Perfect Adjective Positions in French: a Diachronic Perspective

Introduction In a series of recent talks and papers, Denis Bouchard (1998, 1999, 2002) has challenged so-called 'transformational' analyses of adjective positions such as which involve movement of N to the head of some functional projection between D and N. In Cinque's analysis, the difference in the position of Ns relative to As in Romance as opposed to Germanic is due to an N-raising mechanis...