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...

In this paper we introduce a theoretical framework and a logical application for analyzing the semantics and pragmatics of contrastive conjunctions in natural language. It is shown how expressions like although, nevertheless, yet and but are semantically definable as connectives using an operator for implication in natural language and how similar pragmatic principles affect the behaviour of bo...

Imagine Mary asks Jack to buy her a rose or a book and he in fact gets her both. In doing so, he indicates that he interpreted or inclusively (i.e., a rose, or a book, or both). However, had he been asked to buy a rose OR a book (with contrastive accent), Jack might have inferred that Mary intended him to buy one gift or the other, but not both; in this case he interpreted the utterance exclusi...

Speakers may use pitch accents as pointers to new information, or as signals of a contrast relation between the accented item and a limited set of alternatives. Some people claim that contrastive accents are more emphatic than newness accents and have a different melodic shape. Others, however, maintain that contrastiveness can only be determined by looking at how accents are distributed in an ...

In two eye-tracking experiments the role of contrastive pitch accents during the on-line determination of referents was examined. In both experiments, German listeners looked earlier at the picture of a referent belonging to a contrast pair (red scissors, given purple scissors) when instructions to click on it carried a contrastive accent on the color adjective (L + H*) than when the adjective ...

L+H* is claimed to evoke contrast between discourse entities in English. To test whether this prominent accent projects a contrastive relation for the discourse foreground, spontaneous continuations of short stories were examined. For both subject and object positions, participants mentioned contrastive alternatives more often when the corresponding discourse entity was introduced with L+H* in ...