1. Preliminaries In general, for languages which allow a flexible order of major constituents, the grammatical variations of simple sentences are truth-conditionally equivalent regardless of the constituent sequences and of the intonational patterns. In Spanish, for instance, the six logically possible variations of sentences containing three constituents, namely, subject, verb, and object are ...

In Chinese language processing, the recognition and analysis for serial verb constructions (SVCs) is a fascinating research topic. Chinese language researchers each may have a different definition and interpretation of SVC since the structure of SVC makes Chinese unique to other languages and contains complex semantic and pragmatic information. This paper proposes a formal definition of SVC and...

We examine a popular practitioner methodology used in the construction of linear factor models whereby particular factors are increased or decreased in relative importance within the model. This allows model builders to customise models and, as such, reflect those factors that the client and modeller may think important. We call this process Pragmatic Bayesianism (or prag-Bayes for short) and w...

In natural communication, humans enrich their utterances with pragmatic information indicating, e.g., what is important to them or what they are not certain about. We investigate whether and how virtual humans (VH) can employ this kind of meta-communication. In an empirical study we have identified three modifying functions that humans produce and perceive in multimodal utterance, one being to ...

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...

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...