Focuses on the usefulness of corpus-based analysis to discover linguistic patterns selected and favored by a specific genre. Results show that the frameworks "the . . . of,""A . . . of," and "be . . .to," when used in medical papers, enclose restricted sets of lexical items and that the selection of specific…

Argues that corpus-based text analysis should be going beyond the analysis of lexicogrammatical features to investigate the specific genre features of text. A study of politeness strategies used by Finns, Americans, and Belgians in a learner corpus of letters of application found that Americans tended to be much more patterned--even formulaic--in…

Although researchers studying human speech recognition (HSR) and automatic speech recognition (ASR) share a common interest in how information processing systems (human or machine) recognize spoken language, there is little communication between the two disciplines. We suggest that this lack of communication follows largely from the fact that…

On the basis of a corpus of British and German press coverage of European Union (EU) politics over the 1990s, the paper analyses uses of the geopolitical HEART metaphor. Over the course of the 1990s, successive British governments promised to work "at" the "heart of Europe". However, no one ever claimed that Britain was…

A prevalent assumption in text comprehension research is that many aspects of text processing are automatic, with automaticity typically defined in terms of properties (e.g., speed and effort). The present research advocates conceptualization of automaticity in terms of underlying mechanisms and evaluates two such accounts, a…

The 4th international conference "Nation and Language: Modern Aspects of Socio-Linguistic Development" continues an eight-year old tradition. The conference is organized by Kaunas University of Technology Panevezys Institute and aims to bring scientists and researchers together for a general scientific discussion on new trends in…

To what extent does the wording and syntactic form of people's writing reflect their personalities? Using a bottom-up stratified corpus comparison, rather than the top-down content analysis techniques that have been used before, we examine a corpus of e-mail messages elicited from individuals of known personality, as measured by the Eysenck…

In this study we use a computational model of language learning called model of syntax acquisition in children (MOSAIC) to investigate the extent to which the optional infinitive (OI) phenomenon in Dutch and English can be explained in terms of a resource-limited distributional analysis of Dutch and English child-directed speech. The results show…

This study investigates the role of phonological and morphological information in children's developing orthographies in two languages with different linguistic typologies: Hebrew, a Semitic language with a highly synthetic morphology, and Dutch, a Germanic language with a sparse morphology. 192 Israeli and 192 Belgian monolingual schoolchildren…

Analogies are drawn between the social aspects of programming and similar aspects of mathematics and natural languages. By analogy with the history of auxiliary languages it is suggested that Fortran and Cobol will remain dominant. (Available from the Association of Computing Machinery, 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10036.) (Author/TL)

An examination and comparison of the computer languages which behavioral scientists are most likely to use: SCAT, INTERACT, SKED, OS/8 Fortran IV, RT11/Fortran, RSX-11M, Data General's Real-Time; Disk Operating System and its Fortran, and interpretative Languages. (EH)

The process of developing a computer program that can turn French text into speech is described. The program is designed to change a conventionally-spelled text into a phonemic transcription with an accuracy level of over 99.9%, divide the text into breath-groups that are syntactically correct and not over 14 syllables long, treat the unstable…

Developing and integrating two lines of research, one focusing on discourse and the other on intention recognition in discourse, this paper presents the basic elements of a computational theory of discourse. The paper argues that by specifying the basic units a discourse comprises and the ways in which they can relate, an account of discourse…

The advantages of a knowledge-based computer program that creates exercises for language instruction rather than presenting pre-stored materials are discussed, and one such system, ILIAD, is described. Designed to address a broad range of language learning needs, this system can be used by people learning English as a second language and by…

This paper analyzes fictive motion expressions in English and Spanish with the twofold aim of (a) finding out whether the differences that have been reported in the expression of motion in English and Spanish also apply to fictive motion, and (b) checking whether the similarities and differences reported by Matsumoto for English and Japanese also…