This paper is concerned with the analysis of the spoken language of teenagers, taken from a newly developed specialised corpus the British and Taiwanese Teenage Intercultural Communication Corpus (BATTICC). More specifically, the study employs a discourse analytical approach to examine vague language in an intercultural context among a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, paying particul...

This paper provides a first analysis of the Slovak word [no] that is extremely ambiguous in terms of pragmatic and discourse functions and can correspond to ‘okay’, ‘yes’, ‘well’, ‘mhm’, ‘so’, and others. We report that the function of backchannel/continuer is the most easily disambiguated by the pitch contour, duration, and other features. Other functions, while also frequent in our corpus, re...

Negation is a universal phenomenon in human communication. All natural languages have negation, yet it seems to be absent in animal communication systems (S Altmann, 1967). We use negation frequently for a wide range of purposes, including rejection, denial and talking about non-existence. According to the Oxford English Corpus, “not” is the 13 most frequently used word in the English language....

Entrainment is the tendency for participants in conversations to develop behaviour similar to one another in multiple dimensions. The degree of such entrainment is linked to the emotional state and empathy of the speakers and people who entrain to their conversational partners are seen as more socially attractive, likeable, competent, more intimate, and the interactions with such partners as mo...

This study examined how motivation for learning English, the amount of contact with English, and  length  of  residence  in  the  target language area affects Korean graduate students’ English pragmatic skills. The study attempted to account for differential pragmatic development among 50  graduate-level  Korean  students  in  relation  to  individual  factors  mentioned  above.  The  data were...

The article analyzes the speeches delivered by British Prince Harry at opening and closing ceremonies of Invictus Games proves their inspirational nature. Inspirational are defined as a public speech aimed, rule, group people in order to convey strong sense enthusiasm, inspire motivate them, encourage them take desired actions. As result lexicographic analysis, framework concept was formed, sem...

This paper 1 describes work in progress concerning the semantic and pragmatic interpretation of utterances in human-computer natural language information dialogues, as developed in the ELTA project at Tilburg University. This project aims at developing and applying an integrated approach to semantic and pragmatic interpretation of dialogue utterances, where the application is sought in the form...

Investigating transfer of one’s pragmatic knowledge of first language to his second or foreign language has been one of the areas of interest for researchers. However, there are contradictory results even within the scarce studies which have addressed transferability. This study was an attempt to investigate perceived pragmatic transferability of L1 refusal strategies by Persian EFL learners. S...