CONTRASTIVE TOPIC: MEANINGS AND REALIZATIONS

Routine formulae are significant linguistic phenomena in the areas of foreign language teaching and bilingual lexicography. Nevertheless, few contrastive analysis these units exist for German-Italian pair. The aim this paper is a pragmalinguistic ‘wishing formulas’. main criterion contrasting pragmatic value units, i.e. speech acts that can be performed through them, as well situational socioli...

This paper introduces Ranking Info Noise Contrastive Estimation (RINCE), a new member in the family of InfoNCE losses that preserves ranked ordering positive samples. In contrast to standard loss, which requires strict binary separation training pairs into similar and dissimilar samples, RINCE can exploit information about similarity ranking for learning corresponding embedding space. We show p...

Newspaper editorials constitute a part of media discourse, which is an extremely important field of research in both intercultural rhetoric analysis and EFL/ESL studies. Specifically, certain features of editorial headlines and also their important role in monitoring and directing readers' attention have made the interface between the linguistic analysis of newspaper editorial headlines and tea...

The referring expressions (REs) produced by a natural language generation (NLG) system can be misunderstood by the hearer, even when they are semantically correct. In an interactive setting, the NLG system can try to recognize such misunderstandings and correct them. We present an algorithm for generating corrective REs that use contrastive focus (“no, the BLUE button”) to emphasize the informa...

This paper aims to provide a unified explanation for Contrastive Topic (CT) and Rise-Fall-Rise (RFR) construction by establishing a theory of ‘Semantic Contrast’. This will require us to depart from the conventional idea of putting Contrastive Topic under the category of Topic in the information structure and to have a new idea that the meaning of CT is derived from the interaction of Contrast ...

This pilot study investigates the effects of focus (broad, narrow and contrastive) on tonal patterns, f0 scaling and duration of accented syllables and rhythmic feet for a controlled dataset in Donegal Irish. Results show differences in pre-focal tonal patterns between broad focus and the other focus types. Narrow and contrastive focus renditions are implemented by largely the same phonetic mea...

Many studies on developmental speech perception (e.g. Werker & Tees 1984, Kuhl et al. 1992) have documented changes in speech perception that occur during an infant’s first year of life. These changes are generally understood to reflect the phonemic structure of the native language (Best et al. 1988, Liberman et al. 1957). There is little research, however, on the phonological abstractness of t...

due to the significance of multiculturalism in politics, and the central role linguistic devices play in organizing the political discourse, this text-based qualitative study was carried out to compare political interviews in the iranian and english contexts to find out the probable similarities and differences in the use of discourse markers (dms) between the two cultures. to this end, three s...