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 ...

Automatic dialog systems tested with naive users are often confronted with special speaking styles, as e.g. words produced with emphatic or contrastive accent. Such utterances usually cause problems for word recognizers, because they were not included in the training data. It is thus important for the improvement of future systems to be able to collect utterances containing contrastive accents ...

Teachers can influence the complex process of learning in education, in general, and in second/foreign language (L2) learning in particular. In this light, understanding the factors influencing teachers’ pedagogical success can help L2 teachers achieve more effective teaching. This study then investigated the role of spiritual intelligence (SI) in L2 teachers’ pedagogical success. In so doing, ...

This article aims at contrasting aspectual oppositions in English and Persian in the context of the novel The Old Man and the Sea, and its translation by Daryabandari (1983) as the data. Unlike English, in Persian perfective and imperfective forms are morphologically marked. While the vast majority of English simple past forms are translated into Persian by past perfective forms, only less than...

There are a lot of learners all around the world, who are studying in the field of English, but not all of them are proficient in any field of English such as (literature-teaching-translation), and especially in the field of translation which requires a considerable knowledge of two languages such as English and Persian. The present article intended to consider the contrastive of English and Pe...