The article presents a study on the lexico-grammar of genre ofEnglish legal-lay language (Tiersma 1999), using English subcorpus theCorIELLS corpus (Busso forthcoming). explores four grammaticalconstructions (in Goldberg 2006’s Construction Grammar sense): nominalisationsheading prepositional phrase attachments, modal verb constructions, participialreduced relative and passive constructions. Sp...

We describe a formal framework for interpretation of words and compounds in a discourse context which integrates a symbolic lexicon/grammar, word-sense probabilities , and a pragmatic component. The approach is motivated by the need to handle productive word use. In this paper, we concentrate on compound nominals. We discuss the inadequacies of approaches which consider compound interpretation ...

Much psycholinguistic experimentation in recent years has been concerned with the nature of the human processes that give rise to the difficulties associated with sentences such as The author read the review smiled and Whilst he was writing the review flowed onto the page. The problem, of course, is that language is ambiguous, and these examples illustrate that in the face of local ambiguity, t...

Pragmatic competence includes illocutionary competence, and sociolinguistic competence. Illocutionary competence indicates a speaker's ability to combine grammatical interpretation of an utterance with its speech act, and the sociolinguistic competence indicates a speaker's ability to perform language functions in appropriate ways according to context. One must gain pragmatic knowledge before b...

We describe a formal framework for interpretation of words and compounds in a discourse context which integrates a symbolic lexicon/grammar, word-sense probabilities , and a pragmatic component. The approach is motivated by the need to handle productive word use. In this paper, we concentrate on compound nominals. We discuss the inadequacies of approaches which consider compound interpretation ...

This demo introduces a suite of web-based English lexical knowledge resources, called StringNet and StringNet Navigator (http://nav.stringnet.org), designed to provide access to the immense territory of multiword expressions that falls between what the lexical entries encode in lexicons on the one hand and what productive grammar rules cover on the other. StringNet’s content consists of 1.6 bil...

Three experiments investigated semantic and syntactic effects in the production of phrases in Dutch. Bilingual participants were presented with English nouns and were asked to produce an adjective + noun phrase in Dutch including the translation of the noun. In 2 experiments, the authors blocked items by either semantic category or grammatical gender. Participants performed the task slower when...

The title of this paper playfully contrasts two rather different approaches to language analysis. The "Noisy Channel" 's are the promoters of statistically based approaches to language learning. Many of these studies are based on the Shannons's Noisy Channel model. The "Braying Donkey" 's are those oriented towards theoretically motivated language models. They are interested in any type of lang...

Abstract In Systemic Functional Linguistics, meanings in semantic stratum could be realized by congruent/premetaphorical, metaphorical, or demetaphorical/post-metaphorical expressions lexico-grammatical stratum. This paper, evidenced from the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), explores specific pathway metaphorical to post-metaphorical ones guided principles Context-first and AS IF p...