Intonation languages signal pragmatic functions (e.g. information structure) by means of different pitch accent types. Acoustically, pitch accent types differ in the alignment of pitch peaks (and valleys) in regard to stressed syllables, which makes the position of pitch peaks an unreliable cue to lexical stress (even though pitch peaks and lexical stress often coincide in intonation languages)...

When Jacob revised his introduction to pragmatics (Mey [1990] 2001), he included an extra section on the role of body moves in communication. Here he argues that body movements and posture can fulfil complex pragmatic functions and may constitute an integral part of the action in the total context of the pragmatic act (2001: 223 227). Thus, “[p]ragmatic acts engage the whole individual in commu...

The aim of the present study was to examine the relationship between cognitive functions such as attention, working memory, long-term memory, planning, i.e. executive functions, theory of mind, and pragmatic deficits resulting as a consequence of traumatic brain injury (TBI). Communicative disorders represent a typical outcome in TBI patients, even if their linguistic abilities remain virtually...

The roles of prosody vary from language to language. In European languages prosody is largely involved in pragmatics, but this may be less true for other languages, especially tone languages. As a case study this paper examines Mandarin. Using telephone dialog data and a semi-automatic bottom-up analysis method based on Principal Components Analysis, we identify a dozen prosodic patterns in Man...

The box calculus is a formalism for reasoning about the properties of multi-process systems which enables account to be taken of pragmatic as well as computational concerns. It was developed for the programming language Hume which explicitly distinguishes between coordination, based on concurrent boxes linked by wires, and expressions, based on polymorphic recursive functions. This chapter intr...

This paper discusses the discourse behavior of Chinese causal connectives yinwei "becauseand suoyi "so" from the perspective of grammaticalization, and claims that the underlying motivation for such is coherence, which involves pragmatic and cognitive interpretation. We claim that the majority of yinwei and suoyi are used pragmatically, and they are grammaticalized. This grammaticalization of d...

A multi-stakeholder symposium at the third annual Canadian Therapeutics Congress (May 2006) discussed the nature of pragmatic studies, and helped to further define their role in the drug regulatory system, formulary access decisions and in clinical practice. The symposium panel appeared to have agreed that pragmatic studies were beneficial, but revealed differences in how, when and where they s...

Pragmatic assessment and consistency in rating are among the subject matters which are still in need of more profound investigations. The importance of the issue is highlighted when remembering that inconsistency in ratings would surely damage the test fairness issue in assessment and lead to much diversity in ratings. Our principal concern in this study was observing the criteria that American...

This study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan. The goal was to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. Second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two deli...