This  paper  focuses  on  some  pragmatic  expressions  that  are  characteristic  of  informal  spoken English, their possible equivalents in some other languages, and their use by EFL learners from different  backgrounds.  These  expressions,  called  general  extenders  (e.g.  and  stuff,  or something), are shown to be different from discourse markers and to exhibit variation in form, funct...

Hedging academic claims has been recognized as one of integral pragmatic features of academic writing in which most EFL academic writers seem to face substantial problems. Explicit instruction has been proposed by some scholars as an effective approach to make EFL writers aware of the importance, different forms, and pragmatic functions of hedging devices some of which are polysemous and polypr...

Abstract Despite billions of dollars invested in recent decades by international aid agencies Africa, the state continent’s environment and its biodiversity continues to decay. Turning failure success is possible. This book presents pragmatic approaches learned from a wide diversity long-term projects both rich poor countries, distilled into twelve fundamental drivers success. The have been led...

We study the logical properties that characterize pragmatic inferences and we show that classical understanding of notions such as entailment and defeasibility is not enough if one wants to explain infelicities that occur when a pragmatic inference is cancelled. We show that infelicities can be detected if a special kind of inference is considered , namely infelicitously defeasible inference. W...

This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generallyavailable scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositi...

Many individuals with Parkinson's disease (PD) are known to have difficulties in understanding pragmatic aspects of language. In the present study, a group of eleven non-demented PD patients and eleven healthy control (HC) participants were tested on their ability to interpret communicative intentions underlying verbal irony and lies, as well as on their ability to infer first- and second-order...

the present study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of different types of pragmatic instruction including two collaborative translation tasks and two structured input tasks with and without explicit pragmatic instruction on the production of apologetic utterances by low-intermediate efl learners. one hundred and fifty university students in four experimental groups and one control ...

this study aims to delve into the unobservable dimensions of deciding and acting in a pragmatically significant speech event. utilizing a discourse completion test questionnaire, it seeks to find out the structure and pragmatic functions that lie behind efl learners’ choice of specific wording while engaged in performing a recurrent speech act in iran i.e. compliments. to this aim, 30 efl learn...