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...

in this paper, we examine the treatment of persian relative clauses in role and reference grammar. rrg is a structural-functional theory which has studied the syntax-semantics-pragmatics interface in human language systems. the main objectives of this article, on the one hand, are to elucidate syntactic, semantic and pragmatic properties of farsi relative clauses, and on the other hand, to asse...

In the introduction to her classic paper on topic, Reinhart (1982) writes: “Although the subject matter of pragmatic theory is ostensibly linguistic communication, much of it deals, in fact, with the more general problem of human interaction, which is independent of linguistic considerations and of which linguistic communication is just a particular manifestation. Thus, as Grice points out, his...

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 ...

While INGOs are known for having to balance competing demands in their quest legitimacy, this article discusses a similar balancing act local organisations working directly with communities the field. Building on social constructivist view that legitimacy is actor and context dependent, we examine how various parties perceive of three land rights advocacy Kenya. regulatory cognitive have societ...

Since Austin introduced the term infelicity, the linguistic literature has been ooded with its use. Today, not only performatives that fail are considered infelicitous but also utterances that are syntactically, semantically, or pragmatically ill-formed. However, no formal or computational explanation has been given for infelicity. This thesis provides one for those infelicities that occur when...