BACKGROUND There is no universally accepted staging system for primary brain tumors wherein prognostication is mainly based on complex composite indices. AIM To develop a simple, pragmatic, and widely applicable grouping/staging system for gliomas, the most common primary brain tumor. MATERIALS AND METHODS An expert neurooncology panel with representation from radiation oncology, neurosurge...

Information extraction tools like SMES transform natural language into formal representation, e.g. into feature structures. Doing so, these tools exploit and apply linguistic knowledge about the syntactic and morphological regularities of the language used. However, these tools apply semantic as well as pragmatic knowledge only partially at best. Automatic processing of military reports has to ...

The humour found in short jokes and their often equivalent newspaper cartoons graphic representations are often dependent on the results of ambiguity in human speech. The ambiguities can be unexpected and funny. Sometimes wellknown ambiguities cooperatively repeated can also be funny. Captioned cartoons often derive their humour from an unexpected ambiguity that can be understood by a listener ...

Most previous studies on negation have generally only focused on sentential negation (not), but the time course of processing negative meaning from different sources remains poorly understood. In an ERP study (Experiment 1), we make use of the negationsensitivity of negative polarity items (NPIs) and examine the time course of processing different kinds of negation. Four kinds of NPI-licensing ...

This  paper  focuses  on  some  pragmatic  expressions  that  are  characteristic  of  informal  spoken English, their possible equivalents in some other languages, and their use by EFL learners from different  backgrounds.  These  expressions,  called  general  extenders  (e.g.  and  stuff,  or something), are shown to be different from discourse markers and to exhibit variation in form, funct...

Hedging academic claims has been recognized as one of integral pragmatic features of academic writing in which most EFL academic writers seem to face substantial problems. Explicit instruction has been proposed by some scholars as an effective approach to make EFL writers aware of the importance, different forms, and pragmatic functions of hedging devices some of which are polysemous and polypr...

We study the logical properties that characterize pragmatic inferences and we show that classical understanding of notions such as entailment and defeasibility is not enough if one wants to explain infelicities that occur when a pragmatic inference is cancelled. We show that infelicities can be detected if a special kind of inference is considered , namely infelicitously defeasible inference. W...

This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generallyavailable scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositi...

Abstract This study traces the relationship between two erstwhile separate linguistic elements, just and so , within framework of Functional Discourse Grammar (FDG). In keeping with FDG’s form-oriented function-to-form approach, proceeds semasiologically by, first, examining uses relatively independent forms ( i.e. focus particle modifying as a degree word manner proform), then turning to more ...