As one kind of the legislative language, the language of bilingual legislation possesses its specific characteristics: the two versions share the same authenticity and effect. Therefore, the contrastive analysis of this kind of language from the perspective of pragmatics is more persuasive and authoritative. In this paper, the author chooses Crime Ordinance of Hong Kong and its subsidiary regul...

Speyer (2008) finds an overall decline in the rate of topicalization in historical English, which we refer to pretheoretically as direct object fronting. He attributes it to two separate phenomena: 1) the early loss of unaccented pronominal and demonstrative fronting, and 2) a gradient decline in the use of accented, contrastive fronting due to prosodic well-formedness conditions imposed by the...

Combining information from adjectives with the nouns they modify is essential for comprehension. Previous research suggests that preschoolers do not always integrate and nouns, may instead over-rely on noun when processing referring expressions (Fernald, Thorpe, & Marchman, 2010; Baumgartner, Fernald, 2006). This disjointed has implications pragmatics, apparently preventing under-fives making c...

The present work aims at a formal description of the interface between prosody and pragmatics in the framework of Constraint-based Unified Grammar CUG. It focuses on two main aspects of this interface: (1) intonation patterns vs. speech acts and (2) stress vs. topicfocus articulation. First, four terminal contours are proposed: fall, mid, rise, and high rise. They are then mapped into the speec...

This chapter presents the semantics and pragmatics of prosodic focus in alternative semantics. Half a dozen examples are given of empirical phenomena that are to be covered by the theory. Then a syntax marking the locus, scope, and antecedent for focus is introduced. The syntax is interpreted semantically and pragmatically by a presupposition involving alternatives. The alternative sets that ar...

In this paper I discuss some general problems one is confronted with when trying to analyze the utterance of words within concrete conceptual and contextual settings and to go beyond the aspects of meaning typically investigated by a contrastive analysis of lexemes within the Katz-Fodor tradition of semantics. After emphasizing some important consequences of the traditional view, several phenom...

Successful language comprehension often requires comprehenders to infer contrastive focus alternatives, but the mechanisms used to establish contrastive alternatives are still poorly understood. We propose that comprehenders establish contrastive alternatives by using selection mechanisms that distinguish contrastive from non-contrastive candidates. To examine this proposal, we investigated the...

Contrastive  analysis  of  hypothesis  is  the  comparison  of  the linguistic system of two or more languages and it is based on the main difficulties in  learning  a  new  language  that  caused  by  interference  from  the  first  language. The present study intended to investigate the effect of contrastive analysis on Iranian intermediate EFL learners’ knowledge of L2 adjectives. The questi...