A read speech corpus was collected in order to study the tonal targets alignment of two Pisa Italian peak accents. The production of the two accents was forced by inducing a broad and a contrastive interpretation of the target words inserted in small paragraphs. Results of latency and F0 measurements reveal that the contrastive accent has a low target at a 'fixed' distance after the peak wherea...

This study explored the effect of contrastive phrase resynthesis instruction ongaining the teachability hypothesis stages in self-paced versus time-constrained oralproduction and recognition. Three groups (i.e., 23 learners) of high beginner femalelearners in an English language institute were randomly selected from a cohort oflearners. One group received contrastive metalinguistic instruction ...

Introduction. This paper constitutes merely an initial exploration into the field of rhetoric, a field that is quite new to me. Its stimulus was the realization, while working with Aquinas, of how rhetorical some of his arguments were despite his apparent rejection of rhetoric. 1 A little reading indicated the perilous state of the relationship between philosophy and rhetoric. Yet the practice ...

the knowledge of rhetoric has ever been in common, among all the knowledge of humankind during the history, throughout which, all nations have paid attention to it. a part from being in common, the knowledge of rhetoric, in the countries, in which ‘islam’ have been the official religion has gloried very remarkably. relying upon the testimony of ups and downs of the history ,the  iranian moslem ...

In his The Rhetoric of Reaction, Albert Hirschman (1991) argues that each major advance in the development of citizenship in Western democracies has provoked three common forms of reactionary rhetoric by opponents of reform which, in turn, have been met by their three “progressive counterparts” advanced by advocates of reform. In this short note, we apply Hirschman’s taxonomies of rhetoric to t...

We present an eye-tracking experiment investigating the time course with which listeners derive pragmatic inferences from contextual information. We used as a test case the construction “It looks like an X” pronounced either with (a) a nuclear pitch accent on the final noun, or (b) a contrastive L+H* pitch accent and a rising boundary tone, a contour that can support a complex contrastive infer...

The work presented in this paper proposes to identify contrast in the form of contrastive word pairs and prosodically signal it with emphatic accents in a Text-to-Speech (TTS) application using a Hidden-Markov-Model (HMM) based speech synthesis system. We first describe a novel method to automatically detect contrastive word pairs using textual features only and report its performance on a corp...

this study explored the effect of contrastive phrase resynthesis instruction ongaining the teachability hypothesis stages in self-paced versus time-constrained oralproduction and recognition. three groups (i.e., 23 learners) of high beginner femalelearners in an english language institute were randomly selected from a cohort oflearners. one group received contrastive metalinguistic instruction ...

This paper presents a new model for the task of contrastive opinion summarization (COS) particularly for controversial issues. Traditional COS methods, which mainly rely on sentence similarity measures are not sufficient for a complex controversial issue. We therefore propose an Expert-Guided Contrastive Opinion Summarization (ECOS) model. Compared to previous methods, our model can (1) integra...