Contrastive topics decomposed

Contrastive Focus and Contrastive Topics in Greek

This paper puts forward the idea that in Greek contrast is an independent feature, represented in syntax by a preverbal position. Contrast can be assigned to diierent sorts of entities, topics and foci, once a set/list of contrasting alternatives/entities has been introduced or directly implied by the discourse. Evidence for an independent treatment of contrast is provided by similarities in th...

Coherence Relations, Ellipsis and Contrastive Topics

A highly pervasive phenomenon in natural languages is ellipsis. It is commonly believed that the presence of ellipsis is one of the main reasons why natural language is as ambiguous as it is. If lexical material is left unpronounced, a hearer must rely on other parts of the sentence, on contextual information and on intonation to recover the unpronounced material. Because there may be different...

The prosody of contrastive topics in Southern Swedish

This paper presents a pilot study on the prosodic marking of a contrastive topic in Southern Swedish. A test sentence was elicited in three experimental conditions: initial focus; final focus; contrastive topic (initial word) plus focus (final word). F0 patterns were analysed in recordings of 10 speakers. A majority of the speakers distinguished clearly between the conditions, but speakers empl...

Contrastive Topic and/or Contrastive Focus

Contrastive Summarization

With the continual growth of the internet as a source of information, where a great amount of data is being uploaded every minute, the need for data compression is getting more important. This applies also to textual documents. As the amount of data grows, the probability of multiple similar documents is increasing. One way how to deal with this is to reduce the text, i.e. to use document summa...