The present research is aimed at investigating how the politeness of the speakers of Urdu is influenced by their relative social status in society. The researcher took politeness theory of Brown and Levinson (1978, 1987) as a model. To observe politeness of Urdu speakers, speech act of apology with different strategies was selected. A Discourse Completion Task (DCT) was used as an instrument to...

Despite their ambiguous historical record, conservation/development interventions the world over have remained a popular environmental governance tool. One of the latest global ‘trends’ are interventions to establish so-called ‘Transfrontier Conservation Areas’ (TFCAs): large contiguous spaces that are principally aimed at conserving biological diversity across national boundaries. In line with...

BACKGROUND Adequate use of different learning strategies is one of the most important prerequisites of academic success. The actual use of learning strategies is the result of an interaction between individual and situational variables. Against this background we conducted a longitudinal study with first year medical students to investigate whether individuals show different patterns in their u...

Recent research has revealed that learning behavior is associated with academic achievement at the college level, but the impact of specific learning strategies on academic success as well as gender differences therein are still not clear. Therefore, the aim of this study was to investigate gender differences in the incremental contribution of learning strategies over general cognitive ability ...

In this study, maternal semantic input was analyzed during a task, in which German mothers instructed their two-year-old children to put two objects together in a particular way. In the setting, the spatial relation (ON and UNDER) and the canonicality of these relations (canonical such as ‘an iron on an ironing board’ and noncanonical like ‘a cup under a table’) were varied and related to child...

In an effort to develop measures of discourse level management strategies, this study examines a measure of the degree to which decisionmaking interactions consist of sequences of utterance functions that are linked in a decisionmaking routine. The measure is applied to 100 dyadic interactions elicited in both face-to-face and computer-mediated environments with systematic variation of task com...

Since a while the ethics of persuasive technology (PT) have been discussed. One interesting approach is the assessment of PTs in the light of discourse ethics and the speech-act theory as proposed recently. While some see such an approach as promising, the author will illustrate that the application of discourse ethics is only appropriate for a few limited persuasive strategies. It is argued th...