Idiomatic expressions can be interpreted literally or figuratively. These two meanings are often processed in parallel or very rapidly, as evidenced by online measures of idiomatic processing. Because in many cases the figurative meaning cannot be derived from the component lexical elements and because of the speed with which this meaning is accessed, it is assumed such meanings are stored in s...

In this paper, we present a hybrid approach to align single words, compound words and idiomatic expressions from bilingual parallel corpora. The objective is to develop, improve and maintain automatically translation lexicons. This approach combines linguistic and statistical information in order to improve word alignment results. The linguistic improvements taken into account refer to the use ...

The main purpose of this paper is to throw some light on applied strategies at an idiomatic expressional level in a contrastive analysis framework by investigating the cultural-bound Brida novel Paulo Coelho from English translation into Persian. It worthy point out that theoretical present based Baker’s (2011) model rendering expressions. Further, within text, there are certain comparisons whi...

What does it tell us about the conceptual structures underlying language use that a language can use ”prick the law” but not ”sing the law” to mean ”break the law”? Some theorists have speculated about the existence of conceptual primitives, which permeate the meaning of all words in any language (Schank, 1975, Mandler, 2004). If this premise is correct, then these concepts could also be used t...

Multiword expressions (MWEs) are pervasive in natural languages and often have both idiomatic and compositional readings, which leads to high syntactic ambiguity. We show that for some MWE types idiomatic readings are usually the correct ones. We propose a heuristic for an A? parser for Tree Adjoining Grammars which benefits from this knowledge by promoting MWEoriented analyses. This strategy l...

Multiword expressions can have both idiomatic and literal occurrences. Distinguishing these two cases is considered one of the major challenges in MWE processing. We suggest that literal readings should be considered in both semantic and syntactic terms, which motivates their study in a treebank. We propose heuristics to automatically pre-identify candidate sentences that might contain literal ...

Previous studies have suggested that formulaic and literal expressions are stored and processed according to differing characteristics, and that certain auditory–acoustic cues serve to distinguish formulaic from literal meanings. This study took these observations a step further by investigating listeners’ ability to discriminate between literal or idiomatic exemplars of ambiguous utterances an...