abstractthe study of linguistic devices variously referred to as stance expressions is one of the best means by which the relationship between the writer, the reader, and propositional meaning could be examined. this paper looks at a particular structural group of lexical bundles encoding stance expressions. these are bundles starting with an anticipatory it followed by is, a predicative adject...

The article offers a comparative description of typological mechanisms used in political communicative practice and methods of verbal explication of its axiological and symbolic constituents determining universal mental features of individual/collective consciousness. The research position based on a systemic multilevel analysis of the component structure of discourse facilitates the identifica...

The Aymara of the Andes use absolute (cardinal) frames of reference for describing the relative position of ordinary objects. However, rather than encoding them in available absolute lexemes, they do it in lexemes that are intrinsic to the body: nayra ("front") and qhipa ("back"), denoting east and west, respectively. Why? We use different but complementary ethnographic methods to investigate t...

Relations between frames and constructions must be made explicit in FrameNet-style linguistic resources such as Berkeley FrameNet (Fillmore & Baker, 2010, Fillmore, Lee-Goldman & Rhomieux, 2012), Japanese FrameNet (Ohara, 2013), and Swedish Constructicon (Lyngfelt et al., 2013). On the basis of analyses of Japanese constructions for the purpose of building a constructicon in the Japanese FrameN...

To make sense of an utterance, people identify in its linear linguistic expression the concepts and the connections between them. A concept normally has a lexical realization; connections between concepts often do not, but they are perceived even without the benefit of lexical cues. Making these connections – called semantic relations in the field of natural language processing – relies on the ...

Why can't we say the asleep cat? There is a class of adjectives in English, all of which start with a schwa (e.g. afraid, alone, asleep, away, etc.), that cannot be used attributively in a prenominal position. A frequently invoked strategy for the acquisition of such negative constraints in language is to use indirect negative evidence. For instance, if the learner consistently observes paraphr...

How children go about learning the general regularities that govern language, as well as keeping track of the exceptions to them, remains one of the challenging open questions in the cognitive science of language. Computational modeling is an important methodology in research aimed at addressing this issue. We must determine appropriate learning mechanisms that can grasp generalizations from ex...