Euphemism is a communicative strategy used to frame a polite or less offensive language and to save people’s public face in communication. This study investigated the euphemistic strategies used by Persian speakers in situations associated with death and lying. Warren’s model of euphemism was drawn on as the analytic model guiding the study. To conduct the study, 60 male and female university s...

actions are decomposed until primitive communicative actions (executable as speech acts) are reached. In performing this task, the text planner relies on the set of explanation strategies that specify possible decompositions for each communicative action and the constraints dictating when they may be applied. These constraints are checked against the solution graph and when they are satisfied t...

adopting a humanistic, communicative-based approach to semiotics, this paper aims at investigating the status of linguistic signs and their interaction with other communicative signs. the status of linguistic sign is first studied in semiotic theories spanning ancient, middle ages and modern era. based on the commonalities envisaged in four contemporary semiotic theories done in the spirit of t...

In this work we present a typology of eye closing behaviours based on a semantic taxonomy of communicative signals. The types of eye closing we investigate are blinks, eye-closures and winks performed during political debates. While other studies in the literature attempt to classify blinks and eye-closures according to their duration or (in)completeness of the closure, our study aims to distin...

We outline some components of a mentalist theory of human communicative competence. Communication in our species is an intentional and overt type of social interaction, based on each agent's capability of entertaining shared mental states and of acting so as to make certain mental states shared with the other. Communicative meaning is a matter of ascription: it is not an intrinsic property of a...

Information graphics, such as bar charts and line graphs, generally have a communicative message that they are intended to convey when they appear in popular media. The communicative signals present or absent in the graphic help convey these underlying intended messages. We have designed a Bayesian system that automatically extracts communicative signals from a grouped bar chart information gra...

The article features a brief overview of theoretical and empirical studies in communication psychology and sociability of men and women, boys and girls. Russian and foreign studies are summarized to point out that girls and women place greater emphasis on communication and interpersonal relations than do boys and men. Moreover, female communication is more emotional. The article presents the re...

It is believed that the communicative language teaching approach (abbreviated as CLTA) is one of the most effective methods to keep away from the weaknesses of the traditional English teaching method in developing students’ communicative ability. Using games, which is communicative in essence, are often considered effective in developing students’ communicative ability. In order to help English...