this study examines the efficiency of pedagogical intervention in raising l2 pragmatic awareness of the iranian efl learners. more specifically, it seeks to investigate the difference between explicit and implicit instructions in improving pragmatic appropriateness of the english refusals by adult persian native speakers in an efl classroom context. fifty-four participants, with approximately t...

This book takes a diachronic approach to a variety of forms commonly subsumed under the notion of COMMENT CLAUSE (CC). It explicitly excludes some of the most frequent, well-known and widely studied CCs, for example I think and I guess, which have been discussed elsewhere by the same author (Brinton 1996). At the same time, it includes some less widely studied examples, such as CCs with see, sa...

In this paper, the semantic and pragmatic modules of a spoken dialogue system development platform are presented and evaluated. The main goal of this research is to create spoken dialogue system modules that are portable across applications domains and interaction modalities. We propose a hierarchical semantic representation that encodes all information supplied by the user over multiple dialog...

There’s an ongoing debate on the advantage of bilingualism on the development of pragmatic abilities and executive functions in children (Bialystok & Poarch, 2014; Paap & Greenberg, 2013). Many studies by Bialystok and colleagues (cf. Bialystok, Craik and Luk for a recent overview) show that bilingual children outperform their monolingual peers on different tasks, in particular those involving ...

We study collaborative modeling by analyzing conversations and loud thinking during modeling sessions and the resulting models themselves. We identify the basic activities of the modeling teams on the social, pragmatic, semantic and syntactic levels and derive a schema for the pragmatic level. Our main conclusion is that team-based modeling is largely a negotiation process. Drawing on these res...

In this paper we present a proposal to integrate pragmatic information, both from the preceding discourse and the extra-linguistic context, in the grammar. We provide an analysis of elliptical fragments according to how they are anchored to the context and the kind of resolution they require. We also present an alternative view about the syntax of fragments.

In this article, we highlight the need to create a more Pragmatic Web which would act as an extension of the Semantic Web, where information is not only given a well-defined meaning, but the meaning is understood within the context it is used. Using foundations such as Tolk’s Dynamic Web model, we propose a Trust Model, dealing with the Social Web that we believe, would ‘complete’ the Pragmatic...

BACKGROUND For the early detection of children who are at risk of communication problems, we need appropriate assessment instruments. Two Dutch-language standardised screening instruments are available: the Dutch version of the Non Speech Test (NNST) and the Dutch version of the MacArthur Communicative Development Inventories (N-CDIs). These instruments gauge the precursors of language developm...