It has long been natural for linguists to invoke metaphors taken from the life sciences, in particular evolutionary biology. In recent decades it has been argued that such analogies represent not mere rhetoric or metalinguistic convenience, but actual processes in language development; after all, why should not a biologically-conditioned cultural phenomenon such as language, the collective prod...

abstractsince heubner's (1985) pioneering study, there have been many studies on (mis) use/ non-use of articles by l2 learners from article-less and article languages the present study investigated how persian l2 learners of english produce and interpret english definite descriptions and demonstrative descriptions it was assumed that definite and demonstrative descriptions share the same centra...

there are several suffixes in creating diminutive words with endearing meanings in the russian language. structures and their meaning variations, make it difficult for iranian pupils to comprehend its concepts which leads to a multitude of errors in translating and instructing this important issue. many foreign and russian researchers and linguists have studied and gone through diminutive words...

Word learners are able to use the syntactic context of a word as one source of information to narrow down the space of possible meanings. We examine this bootstrapping process in the domain of adjectives, focusing on the acquisition of subcategories of Gradable Adjectives (GAs). We first show that robust patterns of adverbial modification in natural language sort GAs according to scalar structu...

Familiar fragrances usually induce positive mood states and elicit favorable evaluation. Relaxation is also widely thought to improve mood state. Yet experimental evidence on the effect of two different stimuli, fragrance smelling and breathing relaxation, on mood state, and fragrance evaluation is lacking. This study aimed to test (1) the effect of two familiar fragrances, lavender and myrtle,...

In this paper, an automatic method for Persian WordNet construction based on Prenceton WordNet 2.1 (PWN) is introduced. The proposed approach uses Persian and English corpora as well as a bilingual dictionary in order to make a mapping between PWN synsets and Persian words. Our method calculates a score for each candidate synset of a given Persian word and for each of its translation, it select...

We propose a new semantic relation of intensity for gradable adjectives in WordNet and show its specific benefits for NLP. Intensity enriches the present, vague, similar relation with information on the degree with which different adjectives express a shared attribute. Using lexical-semantic patterns, we mine the Web for evidence of the relative strength of adjectives like “large”, “huge” and “...