In this paper, we propose an online clustering method called Contrastive Clustering (CC) which explicitly performs the instance- and cluster-level contrastive learning. To be specific, for a given dataset, positive negative instance pairs are constructed through data augmentations then projected into feature space. Therein, learning respectively conducted in row column space by maximizing simil...

An interesting issue for any mentalist approach to pragmatics is whether the utterance comprehension system is an autonomous processor within the overall cognitive system or consists of processes carried out by an unencapsulated central inferencing system. Two approaches to pragmatics which claim to involve modular subsystems in utterance understanding are discussed (Barton's contextual submodu...

The article puts forward a discourse-semantic account of the notoriously evasive phenomena of contrastivity and emphasis. Based on new evidence from Chadic, it is argued that occurrences of focus that are treated in terms of ‘contrastive focus’, ‘kontrast’ (Vallduví & Vilkuna 1998) or ‘identificational focus’ (É. Kiss 1998) in the literature should not be analyzed in familiar semantic terms as ...

BACKGROUND The aim of this study was to analyze how formal thought disorders (FTD) affect semantics and pragmatics in patients with schizophrenia. METHODS The sample comprised subjects with schizophrenia (n = 102) who met the criteria for the disorder according to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 4th Edition Text Revision. In the research process, the following scale...

The outline of a unified theory of local pragmatics phenomena is presented, including an approach to the problems of reference resolution, metonymy, and interpreting nominal compounds, and the TACITUS system embodying this theory is described. The theory and system are based on the use of a theorem prover to draw the appropriate inferences from a large knowledge base of commonsense and technica...

This article presents new evidence from English that the theory of grammar makes a distinction between the contrastive focus and discourse-new status of constituents. The evidence comes from a phonetic investigation which compares the prosody of all-new sentences with the prosody of sentences combining contrastive focus and discourse-new constituents. We have found that while the sentences of t...

A traditional approach to contrastive rhetoric has emphasized cultural difference in rhetorical patterns among various languages. Despite its laudable pedagogical intentions to raise teachers’ and students’ cultural and rhetorical awareness in second language writing, traditional contrastive rhetoric has perpetuated static binaries between English and other languages and viewed students as cult...

Despite the growing number of studies on the acoustics of non-modal phonation, little is known about how two distinct non-modal phonations can interact acoustically when coarticulated. This study investigates the acoustics of breathy-to-creaky phonation contours in vowels from a production study of native speakers of English and White Hmong. These languages differ in the nature of the non-modal...

The major purpose of college English teaching is to cultivate and develop student’s pragmatic competence. Interlanguage pragmatics is a new interdisciplinary branch of study based on the theories of pragmatics and second language acquisition which has direct guide significance for foreign language teaching. This paper firstly introduces the theoretical models of the two theories and then focuse...

The article provides an overview of text creation and the importance pragmatics in creation. At same time, also insights into functional aspects pragmatics. In addition, all features were analyzed using comprehensive examples.