In this paper I revisit a previously-published analysis of paradigm shifts within research on instructional technology (IT). Following Kuhn, I will use the term ‘paradigm’ to denote an actual scientific achievement. Used in this way, a particular experiment or research study must meet two criteria to qualify as a paradigm: it must be novel, that is it must be demonstratively different from thos...

ion transactions Abstraction instructional transactions enable the learner to acquire class, subclass, and instance relationships between knowledge objects. Abstraction transactions promote the ability to transfer or use a skill acquired for one set of instances or subclasses with a new8 set of instances or subclasses. Abstraction transactions enable the learner to generalize knowledge by acqui...

Pragmatics is the study of utterance meaning, and it is well known that prosody or, more informally, ' tone of voice' can contribute crucially to that meaning. Pragmatic effects in speech are thus the product of both what is said and how it is said, and the two are inextricably linked. However, while many working in pragmatics are well aware of the important contribution of prosody, exactly how...

following a thorough survey of the available literature and concentrating on the wax and wane of testing pragmatic competence so far, the present study firstly is an attempt to develop a comprehensive test of inter-language pragmatics mainly focusing on academic situations in the iranian context. secondly, the study aims to investigate the criteria required for the selection of speech acts of a...

Recent discussions of animal communication and the evolution language have advocated adopting a ‘pragmatics-first’ approach, according to which “a more productive framework” for primate research should be “pragmatics, field linguistics that examines role context in shaping meaning linguistic utterances” (Wheeler Fischer, Evol Anthropol 21:195–205, 2012: 203). After distinguishing two different ...

Semantics and Pragmatics of Spatial Reference

The term pragmatics was proposed by Morris in 1938 as a tribute to C. S. Peirce's philosophy of pragmatism, to designate the study of signs and their relationship to interpreters. In 1946 Morris changed this slightly to make pragmatics the study of the origin, use and effect of signs. One of the main differences between the two versions is that in the second version the term use also includes t...

Negation is a fundamental element of language and logical systems, but processing negative sentences can be challenging. Early investigations suggested that this difficulty was due to the representational challenge of adding an additional logical element to a proposition, but in more recent work, supportive contexts mitigate the processing costs of negation, suggesting a pragmatic explanation. ...