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...

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...

connor et al. (2008) mention “specifying textual requirements of genres” (p.12) as one of the reasons which have motivated researchers in the analysis of writing. members of each genre should be able to produce and retrieve these textual requirements appropriately to be considered communicatively proficient. one of the textual requirements of genres is regularities of specific forms and content...

We study the effect of focus shift on prosodic features for Marathi, a major Indian language. In our analysis, we consider different focus locations and different focus widths. We report observations of fundamental frequency, intensity, and syllabic durations of constituent words of the utterance. F0 is studied via the accent commands of the Fujisaki model. We contrast statements containing nar...