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...

"Paganism not only holds a solution to our environmental crisis ... it can bring about a revolution in the way our culture makes sense of reality. For Paganism puts us back in touch with the body; by reconnecting our wordy analytical culture with the physical self, Paganism brings us back to the Earth" (Harris, 1995: 149). Stirring stuff, certainly, but does the rhetoric hold? Though I first sp...

Algeria’s economic crisis parallels and is an intrinsic part of its political crisis over the past decade. It consists, furthermore, of an interrelated crisis over control of the economic rent and the activities of an informal parallel economy originally based on smuggling and now sustained through violence which is legitimised by Islamist rhetoric. Economic reform, therefore, cannot be meaning...

MOTIVATION Contrasts are useful conceptual vehicles for learning processes and exploratory research of the unknown. For example, contrastive information between proteins can reveal what similarities, divergences and relations there are of the two proteins, leading to invaluable insights for better understanding about the proteins. Such contrastive information are found to be reported in the bio...

This article explores the contrastive function of demonstratives in two languages, Tiriyó (Cariban, northern Brazil) and Lavukaleve (Papuan isolate, Solomon Islands). The contrastive function has to a large extent been neglected in the theoretical literature on demonstrative functions, although preliminary investigations suggest that there are significant di¤erences in demonstrative use in cont...

One source of asymmetry in phonology derives from the contrastive function of features. I assume that feature specifications are driven by considerations of contrast. In order to distinguish between contrastive and redundant specifications, it is necessary to specify the relative scope, or ordering, of each feature. This ordering determines a contrastive hierarchy. Different contrastive hierarc...

Contrastive summarization is the problem of jointly generating summaries for two entities in order to highlight their differences. In this paper we present an investigation into contrastive summarization through an implementation and evaluation of a contrastive opinion summarizer in the consumer reviews domain.

Previous eye tracking studies [1] demonstrated that a prominent L+H* accent in English instructions evoked a contrastive relationship between discourse referents, immediately guiding listeners’ eye movements to contrastive candidates in the visual scene. However, the visual layout in the previous study conflated looks to contrastive candidates with those to previously fixated object groups, thu...