It is proposed that literary translation is intrinsically an act of literary criticism. This theory is illustrated by discussion of specific problems in translating Sartre's "La Nausee" and Leonard Forest's "Le pays de la Sagouine," especially the use of verb tense. (MSE)

Examines negative polarity items in English and Korean and argues that a consistent explanation emerges if certain assumptions are entertained about indefiniteness and concession by arbitrary choice. The article maintains that the logical consequences of monotone decreasingness is transparent with strong negatives but less so with weaker ones. (18…

The grammars of natural languages may be learned by using genetic algorithm systems such as LUST (Linguistics Using Sexual Techniques) that reproduce and mutate grammatical rules and parts-of-speech tags. In document retrieval or filtering systems, applying tags to the list of terms representing a document provides additional information about…

Presents a comparative semantic analysis of English, French, and Dutch transitive constructions that takes into account the entity that sets the event in motion, the object it affects, and the process that links both. (18 references) (Author/CK)

Investigates the differences in form and meaning between the Dutch and English passives, attributing the differences to the passive auxiliaries that signal a process and a state for Dutch and English. The article is aided by the framework of Langacker's (1991) cognitive grammar. (30 references) (Author/CK)

States the differences between the classes of structures that admit a progressive interpretation in English and Japanese and discusses progressive aspect in these two languages on the basis of proposed universally valid definitions. It is concluded that the contrastive behavior of the English "be-ing" construction and the Japanese…

Presents a corpus-based analysis of two lexical items: Modern English "hand" and "fist" and their Middle Cornish equivalents, resulting in discovering semantic and collocational differences between the corresponding lexemes in these two languages. The article argues that grammatical meaning may form part of the lexical meaning…

The Setswana language possesses a verbal prefix that, according to some grammarians of the language such as D. T. Cole, is categorized as the reflexive prefix, closely allied to objectival concords. If the morphology suggests that this morpheme be characterized as a reflexive object prefix, it does not always give expected results in its semantic…

Tests the understanding of French pronominal-verbal constructions on native and English speakers of French and assesses their sensitivity to the possible multiple readings such as: reflexive, reciprocal, intrinsic, and passive. The article attributes the superior performance of English speakers to the corresponding morphosyntactic and lexical…

Discusses the relative merits of feature versus model based semantics for the interpretation of verb phrases in English, French, and German. The article concludes that the simplicity afforded by features is offset by the depth of analysis achieved with event models that are additionally able to support a sophisticated approach to machine…