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...

This paper explores participative Social Information Behavior in the educational domain. The goal is to capture a picture of current information practices in the Social Web. The focus is on the “places” and the scale of the Social Web in the domain, the communication dynamics and structure of communities and the specificities, quality, pragmatics and success of communication processes. The pape...

Many developmental psycholinguists assume that young children have adult syntactic competence, this assumption being operationalized in the use of adult-like grammars to describe young children's language. This ``continuity assumption'' has never had strong empirical support, but recently a number of new ®ndings have emerged both from systematic analyses of children's spontaneous speech and fro...

Current dialogue systems generally operate in a pipelined, modular fashion on one complete utterance at a time. Converging evidence shows that human understanding operates incrementally and makes use of multiple sources of information during the parsing process, including traditionally “later” aspects such as pragmatics. We describe a spoken dialogue system that understands language incremental...

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. ...

Current dialogue systems generally operate in a pipelined, modular fashion on one complete utterance at a time. Evidence from human language understanding shows that human understanding operates incrementally and makes use of multiple sources of information during the parsing process, including traditionally “later” components such as pragmatics. In this paper we describe a spoken dialogue syst...

Among the readings available for NL sentences, those where two or more sets of entities are independent of one another are particularly challenging from both a theoretical and an empirical point of view. Those readings are termed here as ‘Independent Set (IS) readings’. Standard examples of such readings are the well-known Collective and Cumulative Readings. (Robaldo, 2011) proposes a logical f...