The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

Abstract This paper examines the use of modal auxiliaries can and could in speech acts produced by university students English. Its aim is to explore syntactic patterns, semantic features pragmatic functions utterances containing / Corpus Czech Students’ Spoken English . Taking account factors, including broader linguistic extralinguistic context, analysis attempts identify illocutionary forces...

We studied a special case for the translation of English verbs in verb-object pairs. Researchers have studied the effects of the linguistic information about the verbs being translated, and many have reported how considering the objects of the verbs will facilitate the quality of translations. In this study, we took an extreme venue – assuming the availability of the Chinese translations of the...

This paper suggests a method for detecting cross-lingual semantic similarity using parallel PropBanks. We begin by improving word alignments for verb predicates generated by GIZA++ by using information available in parallel PropBanks. We applied the Kuhn-Munkres method to measure predicateargument matching and improved verb predicate alignments by an F-score of 12.6%. Using the enhanced word al...

This paper shows that there are some syntactic and semantic discrepancies among three seemingly semantically equivalent verbs denoting one of the most basic actions in any language, i.e. the verbs meaning ‘kill’ in English, Chinese and Thai. Specifically, it examines the possibility of these verbs to appear in two syntactic patterns in which English is used as the metalanguage: (A) X kill Y dea...

Based on Fairclough's three-dimensional critical discourse analysis model, this study investigates China's image in the English translation of country leader's New Year Greetings from 2014 to 2021. The method corpus linguistics is applied, and modal system systemic functional perspective employed. reveals that country's hardworking, enjoying good governance social harmony, pursuing peace develo...

The fact that object shift only affects weak pronouns in mainland Scandinavian is seen as an instance of a more general observation that can be made in all Germanic languages: weak function words tend to avoid the edges of larger prosodic domains. This generalisation has been formulated within Optimality Theory in terms of alignment constraints on prosodic structure by Selkirk (1996) in explain...

We describe our experience in adapting an existing highquality, interlingual, unidirectional machine translation system to a new domain and bidirectional translation for a new language pair (English and Italian). We focus on the interlingua design changes which were necessary to achieve high quality output in view of the language mismatches between English and Italian. The representation we pro...

In view of the problem that sentence evaluation mechanism correctionnet focuses on grammar and vocabulary modification, this paper, based Halliday's interpersonal metafunction theory framework, sets up a peer assessment scale from three aspects: modal verbs, adjuncts evidentiality. Taking English majors in provincial universities as test subjects, paper makes comparative analysis their function...

We describe our experience in adapting an existing high-quality, interlingual, unidirectional machine translation system to a new domain and bidirectional translation for a new language pair (English and Italian). We focus on the interlingua design changes which were necessary to achieve high quality output in view of the language mismatches between English and Italian. The representation we pr...