We investigate from the competence standpoint two recent models of lexical semantics, algebraic conceptual representations and continuous vector models. Characterizing what it means for a speaker to be competent in lexical semantics remains perhaps the most significant stumbling block in reconciling the two main threads of semantics, Chomsky’s cognitivism and Montague’s formalism. As Partee (19...

The importance of deciphering lexical knowledge, especially the eventive information encoded on verbs, has been highly recognized and various approaches have been proposed to represent lexical information that plays a crucial role in grammatical realization. In this paper, a subset of Mandarin verbs of communication —verbs of discussion—is explored in detail, with reference to the semantic prop...

In stress-accent languages such as English and Dutch, pitch accent is used as the primary cue for contrastive focus, a mechanism to indicate correction or emphasis in discourse. A well-known fact about Chinese is that pitch change is used to indicate tones for lexical contrasts. This study examines how an alternative acoustic cue duration – is used to signal contrastive focus in Beijing Mandari...

This special issue of Linguistics and the Human Sciences offers a collection of original contributions to the study of languages in contrast from discourse, corpus, and functional perspectives. The papers were presented at the Sixth International Conference on Contrastive Linguistics, held in Berlin 29 September–3 October 2010, in the context of two panels: ‘Discourse analysis and contrastive l...

this study compares and contrasts lexical cohesion in english and persian abstracts of iranian medical students’ theses to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages. for this purpose, one hundred english and persian abstracts were selected randomly and analyzed based on seddigh and yarmohamadi’s (1996) lexical cohesion framework, a version of halliday and hasan’s (1976) and halli...

This paper presents a set of rules which form the prototype lexical selection component of a rule-based machine translation system between two closely-related minority languages, North Sámi and Lule Sámi. While the languages have comprehensive monolingual computational linguistic resources, they lack bilingual resources. One-to-one relations in the lexicon dominate, but there are also more comp...

This paper presents a set of rules which form the prototype lexical selection component of a rule-based machine translation system between two closely-related minority languages, North Sámi and Lule Sámi. While the languages have comprehensive monolingual computational linguistic resources, they lack bilingual resources. One-to-one relations in the lexicon dominate, but there are also more comp...

Despite their relatedness, Dutch and German differ in the interpretation of a particular intonation contour, the hat pattern. In the literature, this contour has been described as neutral forDutch, and as contrastive forGerman. A recent study supports the idea that Dutch listeners interpret this contour neutrally, compared to the contrastive interpretation of a lexically identical utterance rea...

Linguistic competence is a term we associate with Chomsky (e.g. 1965: Ch 1), who made the distinction between people’s knowledge of language (competence), and that knowledge put to use in real situations (performance). Competence is an aspect of our mental capacity underlying our use of language. Chomsky’s conception of linguistic competence is purely syntactic, while it is a more comprehensive...

This paper presents an implemented model of spoken language processing that accounts for intonational phenomena associated with semantic contrasts. The model determines accentual patterns based on sets of alternative properties from a knowledge base and a contrastive stress algorithm. The results of applying the model to a natural language generation program illustrate the advantages over previ...