This study presents a contrastive analysis of gerundial and infinitival complementation produced by Spanish and German ESL learners and English native speakers. An analysis of more than 1,100 attestations of the target constructions obtained from the International Corpus of Learner English reveals that (i) advanced learners’ construction choices are not necessarily ungrammatical, yet often non-...

Sentences with contrastive intonation are assumed to presuppose contextual alternatives to the accented elements. Two cross-modal priming experiments tested in Dutch whether such contextual alternatives are automatically available to listeners. Contrastive associates – but not noncontrastive associates were facilitated only when primes were produced in sentences with contrastive intonation, ind...

This contrastive study focuses on the functions of first person subject pronouns in economics article introductions in French and English. It combines a qualitative analysis of the way the pronouns are used within a typical CARS (Create a Research Space) -type introduction (Swales 1990, 2004) with a more quantitative concordance-based analysis of the varying authorial roles played by the pronou...

In a previous production study [1] we explored the prosodic marking of thematic material in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts in German. While both conditions resulted in a prenuclear rise, we found that themes in contrastive context exhibited a significantly longer stressed vowel, together with a higher and later peak. Interestingly, speakers varied as to whether they used peak alignmen...

Pseudo-likelihood and contrastive divergence are two well-known examples of contrastive methods. These algorithms trade off the probability of the correct label with the probabilities of other “nearby” instantiations. In this paper we explore more general types of contrastive objectives, which trade off the probability of the correct label against an arbitrary set of other instantiations. We pr...

This paper discusses an experiment concerning the assignment of contrastive accents, i.e., accents used to indicate the presence of contrastive information. The experiment tested which of two existing approaches to the determination of contrastive information gives the most natural results. According to one approach the presence of ‘alternative items’ is the only condition for the assignment of...

The main idea of contrastive analysis, as propounded by Robert Lado in his book Linguistics Across Cultures (1957), was that it is possible to identify the areas of difficulty a particular foreign language will present for native speakers of another language by systematically comparing the two languages and cultures. Where the two languages and cultures are similar, learning difficulties will n...

In linguistics the structuring role of conjunctions is emphasized, whereas its pragmatic and contrastive study often foregrounded. Conjunction may be prerequisite for study.
 The present research mainly aimed at establishing semantic – functional characteristics conjunction “and”, as well identifying equivalents in Armenian translation. other words only one translation direction investigat...

MOTIVATION Contrasts are useful conceptual vehicles for learning processes and exploratory research of the unknown. For example, contrastive information between proteins can reveal what similarities, divergences and relations there are of the two proteins, leading to invaluable insights for better understanding about the proteins. Such contrastive information are found to be reported in the bio...

This article explores the contrastive function of demonstratives in two languages, Tiriyó (Cariban, northern Brazil) and Lavukaleve (Papuan isolate, Solomon Islands). The contrastive function has to a large extent been neglected in the theoretical literature on demonstrative functions, although preliminary investigations suggest that there are significant di¤erences in demonstrative use in cont...