The meaning of an idiomatic expression cannot be transparently worked out from the meanings of its constituent words due to its figurative and unpredictable nature. Consequently, the syntactic composition and the structural paradigm of an idiomatic expression are supposed to be the same in every context. However, this is not the case in the institutionalized second language varieties of English...

Recent research in the area of Second Language Acquisition has proposed that bilinguals and L2 learners show syntactic indeterminacy when syntactic properties interface with other cognitive domains. Most of the research in this area has focused on the pragmatic use of syntactic properties while the investigation of compliance with a grammatical rule at syntax-related interfaces has not received...

It holds true that a flourishing fieldof Contrastive Rhetoric (CR) research has begun to address theway various text types and/or genres may differ across culturesand languages (Corner, 1996).  Very much in line withthis development, this study was an attempt to characterizethe linguistic structures of headlines in the sports section of 2 English newspapers: one non-Iranian (The Times) and one ...

O B J E C T I V E The m~n objective is basic research and system development leading to (1) characterization of information carried by (a) syntax, semantics, and discourse structure, (b) their relation to information carried by intonation, and (c) development of methods for using this information for generation and understanding; (2) development of architectures for integration of utterance pla...

Our work addresses the automatic detection of paraphrastic reformulation in French spoken corpora. The proposed approach is syntagmatic. It is based on specific markers and the specificities of the spoken language. Manual multi-dimensional annotation performed by two annotators provides fine-grained reference data. An automatic method is proposed in order to decide whether sentences contain or ...

Recent developments in the theory of finite splicing systems have revealed surprising connections between long-standing notions in the formal language theory and splicing operation. More precisely, the syntactic monoid and Schützenberger constant have strong interaction with the investigation of regular splicing languages. This paper surveys results of structural characterization of classes of ...

The problem of finding palindromes in strings appears in many variants: find exact palindromes, ignore punctuation in palindromes, require space around palindromes, etc. This paper introduces several predicates that represent variants of the problem of finding palindromes in strings. It also introduces properties for palindrome predicates, and shows which predicates satisfy which properties. Th...

If we consider words over the alphabet which is the set of all elements of a semigroup S, then such a word determines an element of S: the product of the letters of the word. S is strongly locally testable if whenever two words over the alphabet S have the same factors of a fixed length k, then the products of the letters of these words are equal. We had previously proved [19] that the syntacti...