Numerous studies have reported an effect of prosodic information on initial parsing decision. However, whether prosody functions in the same way in adult second language (L2) sentence processing is not known. In visual world eyetracking experiments, we investigated the influence of contrastive intonation and visual context on processing locally ambiguous sentences with L1 speakers (native Engli...

Contrastive topic is an information structural category that is usually associated with a specific intonation, which tends to be similar across languages (a rising pitch accent). The aim of the present study is to examine whether this also true of Estonian. Three potential prosodic correlates of contrastive topics are examined: marking with a particular pitch accent type, an emphatic realizatio...

Listeners are sensitive to contrastive alternatives in online language comprehension (e.g., Braun & Tagliapietra, 2010). Such alternatives play a crucial a role in the definition of particles like only which have been found (i) to facilitate recall of contextual alternatives (Spalek, et al., in revision) and (ii) to hamper the rejection of unmentioned alternatives (Gotzner et al., in preparatio...

contrastive rhetorical analysis as a way of understanding different ways through which writers from various cultural backgrounds shape their discourse was officially initiated by the works of kaplan (1966). this study tries to use the methodology to investigate the news reports in two american and iranian widely published newspapers. using the analytical methodologies of contrastive rhetoric an...

With ever increasing international exchange and accelerated globalisation, translation and contrastive studies are more popular than ever. As part of this new wave of research on translation and contrastive studies, corpora, and multilingual corpora in particular, have a prominent role. In this chapter, we will illustrate the value of parallel and comparable corpora to translation and contrasti...

This paper attempts to provide a sketch of formalism for Contrastive Topic in Korean and English. Based on the idea that a discourse structure basically consists of question/answer pairs, the proposed formalism shows 1) Korean contrastive topic corresponds to a certain prosody in English and the information structure for contrastive topic in both languages is essentially same, 2) Contrastive to...

This paper is made up of two parts: the first part continues the theoretical investigations on Information Structure (IS), linguistic, and computational approaches suitable to provide solutions to the prosody prediction problem of Implicit Contrastive Focus (ICF) concept, introduced in our previous papers. ICF is meant to be the particular case but also the counterpart of the classical category...

Contrastive rhetoric examines differences and similarities in writing across cultures. Although mainly concerned with student essay writing in its Ž rst 30 years, the area of study today contributes to knowledge about preferred patterns of writing in many English for speciŽ c purposes situations. This article discusses some of the new directions contrastive rhetoric has taken. Following a brief...

This study investigates the process of generalizing a learned sub-lexical contrast across speakers of different non-native accents of English. We examine the generalization of a novel cue (voicing-cued release) that is non-contrastive in English, but contrastive in the manipulated speech of our L2 speakers of English, to a speaker with the same or different L1 as our training speakers (Exp. 1)....

We explore alternative sets in contrastive constructions and argue that different information structural units can come with different alternative sets, more specifically, the alternatives coming with (contrastive) topics can differ from the ones coming with (contrastive) foci. This is surprising for some accounts of contrastive topics (e.g. Büring 2003) and calls for an analysis of alternative...