We present a reinterpretation of lexical information embedded in the English WordNet in an alternate type of structure called lexical system. First, we characterize lexical systems as graphs of lexical units (word senses) connected mainly by Meaning-Text lexical function relations, then introduce a hand-built lexical system: the French Lexical Network or frLN, a lexical resource that implements...

This study investigates the process of generalizing a learned sub-lexical contrast across speakers of different non-native accents of English. We examine the generalization of a novel cue (voicing-cued release) that is non-contrastive in English, but contrastive in the manipulated speech of our L2 speakers of English, to a speaker with the same or different L1 as our training speakers (Exp. 1)....

This study compares and contrasts lexical cohesion in English and Persian abstracts of Iranian medical students’ theses to appreciate textualization processes in the two languages. For this purpose, one hundred English and Persian abstracts were selected randomly and analyzed based on Seddigh and Yarmohamadi’s (1996) lexical cohesion framework, a version of Halliday and Hasan’s (1976) and Halli...

This paper argues that antonymy is a syntagmatic as well as a paradigmatic relation, and that antonym pairs constitute a particular type of construction. This position relies on three observations about antonymy in discourse: (1) antonyms tend to co-occur in sentences, (2) they tend to co-occur in particular contrastive constructions, and (3) unlike other paradigmatic relations, antonymy is lex...

Higher-level graphical and lexical punctuation (paragraphing, indentation, font changes, ...) must be taken into consideration in comprehension processes and text generation. In this paper, we analyse a class of text punctuation marks which includes lexical units (chapter, introduction). We give a method for the analysis of the semantics of these units, in terms of metalanguage. In addition, th...

This paper advocates a complementary measure of translation performance that focuses on the constrastive ability of two or more systems or system versions to adequately translate source words. This is motivated by three main reasons : 1) existing automatic metrics sometimes do not show significant differences that can be revealed by fine-grained focussed human evaluation, 2) these metrics are b...

The paper discusses the use of corpora for experimental studies in contrastive lexical semantics, in particular, for comparing how a state of affairs is expressed in different languages and by different translators. Three topics are addressed: (1) a lexicographic database, which is aimed at storing and maintaining contrastive descriptions of a class of lexical items in several languages; (2) an...

This paper presents a pilot study on the prosodic marking of a contrastive topic in Southern Swedish. A test sentence was elicited in three experimental conditions: initial focus; final focus; contrastive topic (initial word) plus focus (final word). F0 patterns were analysed in recordings of 10 speakers. A majority of the speakers distinguished clearly between the conditions, but speakers empl...