The notions of part and whole play an important role for ontology. They also play an important role in many areas of the semantics of natural language such as the mass-count distinction, certain semantic selectional requirements, and expressions whose lexical meaning is sensitive to the part structure of an object such as whole, together, and individual. In recent analyses both in philosophy an...

Exploiting data from a parallel treebank recently developed for Italian, English and French, the paper discusses issues related to the development of a dependency-based alignment system. We focus on the alignment of linguistic expressions and constructions which are structurally different in the languages that have to be aligned, and on how to deal with them using dependency rather than constit...

Manually maintaining comprehensive databases of multi-word expressions, for example Verb-Particle Constructions (VPCs), is infeasible. We describe a new type level classifier for potential VPCs, which uses information in the Google Web1T corpus to perform a simple linguistic constituency test. Specifically, we consider the fronting test, comparing the frequencies of the two possible orderings o...

The present study was aimed at exploring the use of pronominal reference for identity representation in terms of power and solidarity in English political discourse. The investigation was based on a corpus of four political interviews and debates amounting 26,500 words. The analysis was both qualitative and quantitative. In the qualitative analysis, a discourse-analytic approach was used to fin...

How do we read stories? How do they engage our minds and create meaning? Are they a mental construct, a linguistic one, or a cultural one? What is the difference between real stories and fictional ones? This book addresses such questions by describing the conceptual and linguistic underpinnings of narrative interpretation. Barbara Dancygier discusses literary texts as linguistic artifacts, desc...

Modern text linguistics pays serious attention to the significant structural elements of the text, which carry special knowledge. Such structural elements include the title. In this article, the title is considered as a linguistic and cognitive characteristic and a spatially fixed structural element of the text – «frame», which is located around/before/behind the text, focusing on the importanc...

Abstract One way to resolve the actuation problem of metaphorical language change is provide a statistical profile constructions and generative rules with antecedent conditions. Based on arguments from view as complex systems dynamic metaphor, this paper argues that qualifies Self-Organized Criticality state linguistic expressions metaphor can be profiled fractal spatio-temporal correlations. S...