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...

Several authors within psychology, neuroscience and philosophy take for granted that standard empirical research techniques are applicable when studying consciousness. In this article, it is discussed whether one of the key methods in cognitive neuroscience – the contrastive analysis – suffers from any serious confounding when applied to the field of consciousness studies; that is to say, if th...

Rhetorical structure theory (RST) provides a model of textual function based upon rhetoric. Initially developed as a model of text coherence, RST has been used extensively in text generation research, and has more recently been proposed as a basis for multimedia presentation generation. This paper investigates the use of RST for generating video presentations having a rhetorical form, using mod...

This paper presents a study of use the rhetorical figure antithesis and other contrastive relations in several modern-day environmental science policy journal articles on issues food security, climate change, water resource management. The present conflicting perspectives environmentalists engineers, i.e., view that nature should be preserved protected versus it engineered to solve human proble...

This paper argues for treating the Mandarin sentence-final particle ne as ambiguous between marking contrastive topic, in the sense of Büring 2003, and marking durative aspect. This account is novel is two ways. First, it rejects the widespread view that ne never marks aspect, representing a revival of Chan’s (1980) classic aspectual analysis. Second, while topic-marking ne is known to mark con...

A read speech corpus was collected in order to study the tonal targets alignment of two Pisa Italian peak accents. The production of the two accents was forced by inducing a broad and a contrastive interpretation of the target words inserted in small paragraphs. Results of latency and F0 measurements reveal that the contrastive accent has a low target at a 'fixed' distance after the peak wherea...

While lecturers' teaching practices continue to be a focal point of English-medium Instruction (EMI) research, contrastive studies between EMI and L1 lectures remain extremely scarce. The present study addresses this research gap by analyzing five sets matching given in different disciplines at three Italian universities. Each set is the same lecturer, about topic. Thus, study, closely examines...