The main purpose of this article is to present the development and evolution two fundamental components communicative competence in teaching foreign languages: pragmatics interculturality. We will analyze different visions pragmatic intercultural competence, which are sometimes treated as synonymous concepts. focus our attention on problems observed class a consequence great diversity cultural ...

Pragmatic formulas have been recognized as linguistic building blocks necessary for successful speech act performance. Current approaches to teaching overlook pragmatic formulas, promoting an incomplete view of pragmatics instruction. This paper reports on the results a classroom-based study in which formula-enhanced treatment focusing both pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic components ability...

This thesis explores the relationship between phonetic reduction and the pragmatic organisation of conversation, and the treatment of this relationship in phonological representation. It reports on an empirical investigation of pragmatic constraints on reduction patterns in a corpus of spontaneous Dutch conversation, combining phonetic analysis and Conversation Analysis. The starting point of t...

An interesting issue for any mentalist approach to pragmatics is whether the utterance comprehension system is an autonomous processor within the overall cognitive system or consists of processes carried out by an unencapsulated central inferencing system. Two approaches to pragmatics which claim to involve modular subsystems in utterance understanding are discussed (Barton's contextual submodu...

It has often been observed that children go through a stage in their language development where they omit subjects. This occurs in children learning both pro-drop and non-pro-drop languages and poses questions for a traditional parameter-based theory of language acquisition. In this paper I give an overview of some of the existing accounts of this phenomenon, considering the patterns that emerg...

The paper describes the role of Independent Safety Auditor (ISA) as carried out at the present in the defence and other sectors in the UK. It outlines the way the ISA role has developed over the past 15–20 years with the changing regulatory environment. The extent to which the role comprises audit, assessment or advice is a source of confusion, and the paper clarifies this by means of some defi...

Twenty trial court judges were surveyed to determine what information they considered pertinent in psychiatric examinations for competence. These judges showed a clear understanding of what they were asking for in ordering the examinations but also showed a significant tendency to use the competency exam to advise them about other issues in addition (e.g., dangerousness or the need for treatmen...

Narrative ability is one of the most promising ways to assess communicative competence in children: Coordination of lexical, morphosyntactic, phonological, and pragmatic elements is needed to produce narrations. Narratives might even serve as a diagnostic tool for Specific Language Impairment, since children with Specific Language Impairment are reported to have difficulties producing (oral) na...

Autism is characterized by a chronic, severe impairment in social relations. Recent studies of language in autism also show pervasive deficits in pragmatics. We assume, uncontroversially, that these two deficits are linked, since pragmatics is part of social competence. This paper reviews the literature describing these deficits, and then considers two different psychological theories of these ...