We describe results of a study of perceptually based predictions of upcoming prosodic breaks in spontaneous Swedish speech materials by native speakers of Swedish and of standard American English. The question addressed here is the extent to which listeners are able, on the basis of acoustic and prosodic features, to predict the occurrence of upcoming boundaries, and if so, whether they are abl...

In recent years, increasing emphasis has been put on pragmatic competence as part of foreign language curricula. This article analyzes the devices used by learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in order to perform the speech act of disagreement in their L2. Data from 27 ESL learners were gathered by means of Discourse Completion Tests and compared to baseline data from 27 native speaker...

The problem of automatic text segmentation is subcategorized into two different problems: thematic segmentation into rather large topically selfcontained sections and splitting into paragraphs, i.e., lexico-grammatical segmentation of lower level. In this paper we consider the latter problem. We propose a method of reasonably splitting text into paragraph based on a text cohesion measure. Speci...

Research in generic unsupervised learning of language structure applied to the Search for ExtraTerrestrial Intelligence (SETI) and decipherment of unknown languages has sought to build up a generic picture of lexical and structural patterns characteristic of natural language. As part of this toolkit a generic system is required to facilitate the analysis of behavioural trends amongst selected p...

Computational approaches to metonymy resolution have focused almost exclusively on the local context, especially the constraints placed on a potentially metonymic word by its grammatical collocates. We expand such approaches by taking into account the larger context. Our algorithm is tested on the data from the metonymy resolution task (Task 8) at SemEval 2007. The results show that incorporati...

В статье раскрывается специфика языка жителей Германии турецкого происхождения на материале художественных текстов «Берлин, город птиц» Э.С. Оздамар, «Канак шпрак» Ф. Займоглу, «Страница знакомств в Хюрриет» И. Аяты. Обнаруживаются соответствия между выявленными лексико-грамматическими и стилистическими особенностями языкового портрета говорящих определяющими чертами языковых вариантов, порожда...

Cypriot Arabic (CyAr) is a severely endangered Semitic variety spoken by Maronites. It belongs to the group of “peripheral varieties” that were separated from core Arabic-speaking area and came into contact with non-Semitic languages. Although there has been renewed interest since turn century for study CyAr, some aspects its structure are still not well known. In this paper, we present analyze...

Finding out which lexico-semantic features of cognates are critical in cross-language studies and comparing these features with noncognates helps researchers to decide which features to control in studies with cognates. Normative databases provide necessary information for this purpose. Such resources are lacking in the Persian language. We created a dataset and determined norms for the essenti...

Communication in natural languages between computational systems and humans is an area that has attracted researchers for long. This type of communication can have wide ramification as such a system could find wide usage in several areas. WebBrowsing via input given as textual commands/sentences in natural languages is one such area. However, the enormous amount of input that could be given in ...