The sentences “but” are used frequently in natural languages. However, the semantics of “but” has not yet been well studied in logic and reasoning. Contrastive reasoning is the reasoning with contrasts which are expressed as contrary conjunctions like the word ”but” in natural language. Contrastive answers are more informative for reasoning with inconsistent ontologies, as compared with the usu...

Abstract The formulation of requests has been widely studied in pragmatics, both within a (variety of) language and from contrastive perspective. In this study, we will show the specific role alerters (elements that precede request head act serve to get attention hearer on request) formulation, comparing L1 speakers Spanish L2 with French Discourse Completion Tests Naturalised Interactions. doi...

Speakers may use pitch accents as pointers to new information, or as signals of a contrast relation between the accented item and a limited set of alternatives. There is no consensus in the literature whether a separately identi able contrastive accent exists. Some studies report that contrastive accents are more emphatic than newness accents and have a di erent melodic shape. In other studies,...

this research was conducted to reveal the differences between the intonation systems of persian and japanese languages and to be applied to the contrastive linguistics and language teaching fields. first,a description of the intonation system in the autosegmental-metrical phonology framework was chosen as reference for each language. based on these two descriptions, the intonations of the two l...

0. Introduction Features that pattern as inert with respect to phonological processes are often unnecessary in distinguishing segments in an inventory. A natural way of accounting for the phonological inertness of noncontrastive features is via underspecification. If noncontrastive features are absent from underlying representations and barred from the phonology, it follows that they will not b...

Semantic theories on focus and information structure assume that there are different accent types for thematic (backwardlooking, known) and rhematic (forward-looking, new) information in languages as English and German. According to Steedman [1], thematic material may only be intonationally marked (= bear a pitch accent), if it “contrasts with a different established or accommodatable” theme [p...

In two speeded acceptability experiments we tested which combination of prenuclear accent, nuclear accent and f0interpolation between them is best suited to signal a double contrast in German (i.e., a contrastive topic followed by a contrastive focus). The experimental utterances differed in the prenuclear accent (medialvs. late-peak, i.e., L+H* vs. L*+H), the nuclear accent (earlyvs. medial-pe...

The Japanese 'adverbial particle' wa is usually argued to have topic and contrastive functions. The previous analyses on contrastive function of wa have two problems. First, they fail to account for 'association with contrast' in complex NP. Second, the notion of contrast has not been made explicit enough to account for an asymmetry between contrasts involving and not involving wa. This paper a...

The study of glottalization is usually based on methods whose limited reliability in the analysis of non sustained phonation is widely acknowledged. In this study we propose a method to measure the degree of glottalization which is robust to variation of fundamental frequency and which, applied to the electroglottographic signal, does not depend on changes in vocal tract resonances. The method,...