This paper sets forth the phenomenon of Contrastive Reduplication (CR) in English relevant to the notion of contrastive focus (CF). CF differs from other reduplicative patterns in that rather than the general intensive function, denotation of a more prototypical and default meaning of a lexical item appears from the reduplicated form resulting as a semantic contrast with the meaning of the non-...

The aim of this paper is to diagnose the sufficiency first-year pedagogy students’ discoursive competence, considering lexical, reading comprehension and written competences. Whit objective, three instruments were designed adapted, one for each competence: lexical availability test, test rubric evaluate an argumentative writing task. Among main findings, it stands out that highest performance c...

This contribution investigates the interactions between the (mental) lexicon and pragmatics. It aims to give an overview about pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, effects of negative strengthening, systematic polysemy, the distribution of lexical and productive causatives, blocking phenome...

The paper focuses on regional or local variations in English in Nigeria with particular reference to spoken English in which the variations are most noticeable. The three major Nigerian languages Igbo, Yoruba and Hausa are referred to mainly in consideration of the local variations in English. The variations are seen as inevitable because of the nature of the Nigerian society. The different pho...

it holds true that a flourishing fieldof contrastive rhetoric (cr) research has begun to address theway various text types and/or genres may differ across culturesand languages (corner, 1996).  very much in line withthis development, this study was an attempt to characterizethe linguistic structures of headlines in the sports section of 2 english newspapers: one non-iranian (the times) and one ...

This paper considers whether the phonology of the lexical pitch accent of Kyungsang Korean is being maintained by younger innovative speakers. We examine the pitch-accent patterns of nouns with various suffixes by comparing the speech of innovative Kyungsang speakers to that of older conservative speakers. It will be shown that while innovative speakers maintain the underlying distinction in th...

Verbal/vocal interactions of three Japanese mother-child dyads were examined when the children were 1;0, 1;2 to 1;3, 1;6 to 1;7, and 1;8 to 1;9 to determine whether mothers provide information which may facilitate the elaboration of child lexical forms during the transition from the prelinguistic to the linguistic period. Mothers were likely to reproduce only the child's word-like utterances, b...

In the dialects of Japanese spoken in the city of Fukuoka, there are two ways in which the prosodic phonology of nouns differs from that of verbs and adjectives. First, verbs have an obligatory pitch accent, while nouns may be accented or unaccented. These dialects thus differ from dialects such as Tôkyô (McCawley 1968; Poser 1984), in which a word of any category may be either accented or unac...