Using the technique of ”semantic mirroring” a graph is obtained that represents words and their translations from a parallel corpus or a bilingual lexicon. The connectedness of the graph holds information about the different meanings of words that occur in the translations. Spectral graph theory is used to partition the graph, which leads to a grouping of the words according to different senses...

Conversión is a well-known word-formation process which, a priori, seems relatively easy to identify. However, a cióse look at its basics brings to light some critical questions which still remain unanswered to this day. The very nature of this operation, and the concepts of full and partial conversión are therefore here examined in the light of a need for explicit criteria for recognition of a...

Speakers often overspecify their referring descriptions by including more information than what is required to uniquely distinguish a referent. Although overspecification has received a substantial amount of attention, the factors that play a role in determining this behaviour are not yet well understood. Given evidence of cross-linguistic difference between English and Spanish regarding oversp...

Five experiments looked at the effect of repeated phonemes in the production of colour adjective+noun phrases in English (“green gun”), or noun+colour adjective phrases in Spanish and French. Whereas phoneme repetition sped up naming latencies in the case of prenominal colour adjectives, it induced either no effect or inhibition in the postnominal case. We argue that this dissociation does not ...

Semantic similarity aims at establishing resemblance by interpreting the meaning of the objects being compared. The Semantic Web can benefit from semantic similarity in several ways: ontology alignment and merging, automatic ontology construction, semantic-search, to cite a few. Current approaches mostly focus on computing similarity between nouns. The aim of this paper is to define a framework...

A number of authors have claimed that indefinite pronoun constructions like everything red are formed by raising a noun (thing) over a higher prenominal adjective (red). We examine phenomena in English and other languages which appear to show that adjectives participating in the indefinite pronoun construction do not correspond to prenominal forms, but to postnominal ones. We evaluate the chall...

This paper presents a new clustering algorithm called DSCBC which is designed to automatically discover word senses for polysemous words. DSCBC is an extension of CBC (Pantel and Lin, 2002), and incorporates feature domain similarity: the similarity between the features themselves, obtained a priori from sources external to the dataset. By incorporating the feature domain similarity in clusteri...

This article presents the results of a pilot study examining the use of first-person pronouns, certain adjectives and grading adverbs in a corpus of 51 French psychology student papers written in English as a second language. These results were compared to a corpus of published psychology articles and to a sub-corpus of psychology student texts from the British Academic Written English corpus (...

The paper discusses the use of corpora for experimental studies in contrastive lexical semantics, in particular, for comparing how a state of affairs is expressed in different languages and by different translators. Three topics are addressed: (1) a lexicographic database, which is aimed at storing and maintaining contrastive descriptions of a class of lexical items in several languages; (2) an...

Recent studies using artificial language learning have argued that the cross-linguistic frequency of harmonic word order patterns–in which heads are ordered consistently before or after dependents across syntactic categories–reflects a cognitive bias (Culbertson, Smolensky, & Legendre, 2012; Culbertson & Newport, 2015a). These studies suggest that English speaking adults and children favor harm...