We investigate the effectiveness of different linguistic cues for distinguishing literal and non-literal usages of potentially idiomatic expressions. We focus specifically on features that generalize across different target expressions. While idioms on the whole are frequent, instances of each particular expression can be relatively infrequent and it will often not be feasible to extract and an...

Good command of idioms and collocations is an important ability of any natural language speaker. This ability needs to be developed not only in foreign language learners but also in people wishing to enhance their linguistic competence in the native language. Since systematic description of idiomaticity is still a very difficult issue and linguistic resources focused on idioms and collocations ...

For concrete usage scenarios there are different options of how to use AspectJ's language features, and these options deeply impact the chances for further evolution of both base classes and aspects. Aspects can use aspect-oriented as well as object-oriented features. The combination of these mechanisms provides new powerful mechanisms. Idioms can help in guiding AspectJ users through this fron...

Abstract How do people understand figurative speech in a foreign language? What strategies they use? By means of an online questionnaire, this study investigated to what extent contextual information and transfer play role the interpretation idioms second language, controlling for familiarity. Sixty-one native speakers Dutch were asked guess correct English with without equivalent, presented co...

Abstract Abstract Concrete Concrete Concrete 1 平易近人 鬼鬼祟祟 克己奉公 人流如织 鬼鬼祟祟 克己奉公 2 大义凛然 战战兢兢 坚强不屈 门庭若市 战战兢兢 坚强不屈 3 宽宏大度 风风火火 不屈不挠 万人空巷 风风火火 不屈不挠 4 意气风发 原原本本 格格不入 人头攒动 原原本本 格格不入 5 落落大方 形形色色 忐忑不安 熙熙攘攘 形形色色 忐忑不安 6 博大精深 林林总总 万无一失 水泄不通 林林总总 万无一失 Chunsheng Yang and Ying Xie Action Research: Learning Chinese Idioms through iPads Language Learning & Technology 21 NOTES 1. This study was supported by the WC...

Abstract Transactional events (TE) are an extension of Concurrent ML (CML), a programming model for synchronous message-passing. Prior work has focused on TE’s formal semantics and its implementation. This paper considers programming idioms, particularly those that vary unexpectedly from the corresponding CML idioms. First, we solve a subtle problem with client-server protocols in TE. Second, w...

This paper describes an experiment on the identification of frozen sentences (or verbal idioms) from European Portuguese on large corpus of journalistic text. It aims at identifying the main difficulties (or shortcomings) resulting from the intersection of linguistic information encoded in the lexicongrammar with finite-state transducers that are then applied to texts. The paper shows that, for...