INTERNATIONALISMS: CONTRASTIVE SEMANTICS

A New Approach to Contrastive Topic: Partition Semantics and Pragmatics

The purpose of the current work is to propose a more comprehensive approach to Contrastive Topic (henceforth, CT) than the existing ones. In the literature, there have been two approaches to CT proposed: one is to take CT as an information-structural discourse-regulating notion on a par with focus and the other is to analyze CT as an focus-sensitive operator with its inherent semantic and pragm...

Contrastive Topic and/or Contrastive Focus

Contrastive Focus and Contrastive Topics in Greek

This paper puts forward the idea that in Greek contrast is an independent feature, represented in syntax by a preverbal position. Contrast can be assigned to diierent sorts of entities, topics and foci, once a set/list of contrasting alternatives/entities has been introduced or directly implied by the discourse. Evidence for an independent treatment of contrast is provided by similarities in th...

A Corpus-based Contrastive Analysis for Defining Minimal Semantics of Inter-sentential Dependencies for Machine Translation

Inter-sentential dependencies such as discourse connectives or pronouns have an impact on the translation of these items. These dependencies have classically been analyzed within complex theoretical frameworks, often monolingual ones, and the resulting fine-grained descriptions, although relevant to translation, are likely beyond reach of statistical machine translation systems. Instead, we pro...

Benlai as a Relative Past Marker─ Contrastive Semantics, Anchor Time and Discontinuity Reading

Benlai can function as an adverbial and as an adjective. As an adverbial, it sometimes has a discontinuity reading while at other times it does not. As an adjective, benlai exhibits the same semantic behavior. We argue that benlai shows contrast depending on whether a proposition holds at different times; it provides an extra time located in the past of the argument time (a time taken as an arg...