This paper investigates the systematic relatedness between the concessive –to (or mo)-marked polarity phenomenon and the high tone –nun (or wa)-marked Contrastive Topic phenomenon with respect to underlying concessivity and thereby derived scalarity. I also investigate the correlations between Contrastive Topic and PA conjunction (-ciman) on one hand and between Contrastive Focus and SN conjunc...

Despite their relatedness, Dutch and German differ in the interpretation of a particular intonation contour, the hat pattern. In the literature, this contour has been described as neutral forDutch, and as contrastive forGerman. A recent study supports the idea that Dutch listeners interpret this contour neutrally, compared to the contrastive interpretation of a lexically identical utterance rea...

A visual world experiment examined the time course for pragmatic inferences derived from visual context and contrastive intonation contours. We used the construction It looks like an X pronounced with either (a) a H(*) pitch accent on the final noun and a low boundary tone, or (b) a contrastive L+H(*) pitch accent and a rising boundary tone, a contour that can support contrastive inference (e.g...

In a brief passage, David Lewis derives from quantum-theory a dilemma regarding the explanation of chance events which he tries to solve by first distinguishing plain from contrastive why-questions, and then arguing that with respect to chance events, only plain why-questions have answers. His brevity warrants elaboration and critique. I endorse his derivation, but I make a structural objection...

Both off-line and on-line comprehension studies suggest not only toddlers and preschoolers, but also older school-age children have trouble interpreting contrast-marking pitch prominence. To test whether children achieve adult-like proficiency in processing contrast-marking prosody during school years, an eye-tracking experiment examined the effect of accent on referential resolution in six- to...

Large templated factor graphs with complex structure that changes during inference have been shown to provide state-of-the-art experimental results on tasks such as identity uncertainty and information integration. However, learning parameters in these models is difficult because computing the gradients require expensive inference routines. In this paper we propose an online algorithm that inst...

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Corpora have revolutionized nearly all areas of linguistic research over the past four decades (McEnery, Xiao and Tono 2006; McEnery and Hardie 2012). Translation studies and contrastive linguistics are no exceptions. Indeed, the rapid development of bilingual parallel corpora as well as monolingual and multilingual comparable corpora since the early 1990s has been of particular relevance and c...

Learning algorithms for energy based Boltzmann architectures that rely on gradient descent are in general computationally prohibitive, typically due to the exponential number of terms involved in computing the partition function. In this way one has to resort to approximation schemes for the evaluation of the gradient. This is the case of Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBM) and its learning alg...

We present a new technique called contrastive principal component analysis (cPCA) that is designed to discover low-dimensional structure that is unique to a dataset, or enriched in one dataset relative to other data. The technique is a generalization of standard PCA, for the setting where multiple datasets are available – e.g. a treatment and a control group, or a mixed versus a homogeneous pop...