The divergent views expressed in the literature on the linguistic competence of chimpanzees is due in large part to the lack of a common framework in which, to compare human and chimpanzee signing. Working for the most part within a Saussurian semiological framework, several distinct 'tactic' sign types, including: ataxis, lexical parataxis and syntax, are introduced for the purpose of comparis...

The lexicon is the store of words in long-term memory. Any attempt at modelling lexical competence must take issues of string storage seriously. In the present contribution, we discuss a few desiderata that any biologically-inspired computational model of the mental lexicon has to meet, and detail a multi-task evaluation protocol for their assessment. The proposed protocol is applied to a novel...

This paper discusses findings of a frame-based contrastive text analysis, using the large-scale and precise descriptions of semantic frames provided by the FrameNet project (Baker, 2006; Fillmore, 2006). It points out that even though the existing FrameNet methodology allows us to compare languages at a more detailed level than previous studies (e.g. Talmy, 2003; Slobin, 2004), in order to inve...

This paper discusses an experiment concerning the assignment of contrastive accents, i.e., accents used to indicate the presence of contrastive information. The experiment tested which of two existing approaches to the determination of contrastive information gives the most natural results. According to one approach the presence of ‘alternative items’ is the only condition for the assignment of...

Philosophical arguments and neuropsychological research on deficits of lexical processing converge in indicating that our competence on word meaning may have two components: inferential competence, that takes care of word-word relations and is relevant to tasks such as recovery of a word from its definition, pairing of synonyms, semantic inference (“Milan is north of Rome” ! “Rome is south of M...

En proposant une méthodologie basée sur les postulats de la grammaire cognitive, l’article présente analyse contrastive français-polonais des extensions métaphoriques, et plus précisément, relations catégorisation lesquelles elles sont fondées. L’étude porte noms parties du corps humain désignant instruments musique. Elle vise à dévoiler similitudes divergences entre ces catégorisations aux dif...

Previous research has shown that native speakers of French, as opposed to those of Spanish, exhibit stress 'deafness', i.e. have difficulties distinguishing stress contrasts. In French, stress is non-contrastive, while in Spanish, stress is used to make lexical distinctions. We examine three other languages with non-contrastive stress, Finnish, Hungarian and Polish. In two experiments with a sh...

As the channel spreads Chinese voice and promotes culture, status of political document translation is self-evident with deepening global communication. Taking English reports 20th 19th CPC National Congress as examples, this paper makes a contrastive study their lexical features in corpus-based way. With assistance corpus analysis software such AntConc, TagAnt WordSmith4.0, author investigates...