When an idiomatic expression is encountered during natural language processing, the ambiguity between its idiomatic ~md non-idiomatic meaning has to be resolved. Rather than including both meanings in further processing, a conventionality-principle could be applied. This results in best-first processing of the idiomatic analysis. Two models are discussed fot the lexical representation of idioms...

Existing models of competence development are characterised by a fixed sequence of stages of which assessment by others and following a fixed set of competence development activities are obligatory components. This paper shows that these models do not do justice to the large diversity of learning needs among lifelong learners. It then presents a model, consisting of four non-obligatory stages t...

Idiomatic utterances contribute by virtue of their aspectual class to the temporal structure of discourse – hence it is essential that theories of aspect derivation and discourse structure should encompass them. A recent claim has been made (McGinnis 2002) that the aspectual class of idiomatic expressions can be derived compositionally, by the same process as in literal language. We examine thi...

The present study examined the role of the left (LH) and right (RH) cerebral hemispheres in processing alternative meanings of idiomatic sentences. We conducted two experiments using ambiguous idioms with plausible literal interpretations as stimuli. In the first experiment we tested hemispheric differences in accessing either the literal or the idiomatic meaning of idioms for targets presented...

In this paper, we describe the binary classification of sentences into idiomatic and non-idiomatic. Our idiom detection algorithm is based on linear discriminant analysis (LDA). To obtain a discriminant subspace, we train our model on a small number of randomly selected idiomatic and non-idiomatic sentences. We then project both the training and the test data on the chosen subspace and use the ...

Using cross-modal priming, we investigated the processing of idioms in non-native listeners in varying experimental contexts. As idiomatic processing models have presented evidence for an idiomatic mode of processing that can be activated for non-native speakers in highly figurative contexts (Bobrow & Bell, 1973), this experiment revisits those claims while also examining access to figurative m...

We evaluate the possibility to learn, in an unsupervised manner, a list of idiomatic word combinations of the type preposition + noun phrase + preposition (P NP P), namely, such groups with three or more simple forms that behave as a whole lexical unit and have semantic and syntactic properties not deducible from the corresponding properties of each simple form, e.g., by means of, in order to, ...

Most of the research on the extraction of idiomatic multiword expressions (MWEs) focused on the acquisition of MWE types. In the present work we investigate whether a text instance of a potentially idiomatic MWE is actually used idiomatically in a given context or not. Inspired by the dataset provided by (Cook et al., 2008), we manually analysed 9,700 instances of potentially idiomatic preposit...

Several studies of L2 learners’ interlanguage have addressed the complexity of the English adpositional system due to several reasons like L1 transfer, lack of knowledge in L2 and the strong collocational relations of prepositions with other elements of the English language. The major purpose of the present study is to evaluate the performance of Iranian students in dealing with three broad cat...

We investigate the lexical and syntactic flexibility of a class of idiomatic expressions. We develop measures that draw on such linguistic properties, and demonstrate that these statistical, corpus-based measures can be successfully used for distinguishing idiomatic combinations from non-idiomatic ones. We also propose a means for automatically determining which syntactic forms a particular idi...