This study, based on a variety of data sources, investigates the linguistic and cultural characteristics associated with the black and white expressions among Taiwanese Mandarin, Taiwanese Hakka, and Taiwanese Southern Min. The meaning distributions of the data profile four types: prototypical meanings, metonymic extensions, metaphorical extensions and idiosyncratic examples; and the associated...

ion Compensatory affirmation is not the only way in which we can fluidly compensate for a meaning violation—sometimes we will find meaning when unrelated understandings are threatened. If we are looking to our environment to identify something—anything—that can be rendered familiar, the kinds of expected associations that we will draw or abstract may push the limits of fluid compensation even f...

This study investigated the relative effects of deductive and inductive form-focused instruction (FFI) on the acquisition of 4 non-generic definite article uses(cultural, situational, structural, and textual) as assessed by explicit and implicit outcome measures. The tests utilized to assess EFL learners' acquisition of definite article uses were timed and untimed grammaticality judgment tests....

This paper presents a methodology to infer implicit semantic relations from verbargument structures. An annotation effort shows implicit relations boost the amount of meaning explicitly encoded for verbs. Experimental results with automatically obtained parse trees and verb-argument structures demonstrate that inferring implicit relations is a doable task.

Interpretation of a pronoun in one clause can be systematically affected by the verb in the previous clause. Compare Archibald angered Bartholomew because he… (he=Archibald) with Archibald criticized Bartholomew because he… (he=Bartholomew). While it is clear that meaning plays a critical role, it is unclear whether that meaning is directly encoded in the verb or, alternatively, inferred from w...

It is not just a manner of speaking: "Mind reading," or working out what others are thinking and feeling, is markedly similar to print reading. Both of these distinctly human skills recover meaning from signs, depend on dedicated cortical areas, are subject to genetically heritable disorders, show cultural variation around a universal core, and regulate how people behave. But when it comes to d...