Previous natural language help systems have not taken into account the user’s knowledge when formulating answers. Such pragmatic information is needed to formulate more concise and helpful answers. By not repeating things that the user already knows, a system can provide more succinct answers that, because they focus on pertinent new facts, are easier to understand. A users’s prior knowledge al...

research related to colonialism and post colonialism shows how the identities of indigenous people were constructed and how these identities are reconstructed in our contemporary world. the thrust of this paper is that colonialism brought a shift in the linguistic structure of ghana with the introduction of the use of english among ghanaians. the coexistence of both ghanaian languages and engli...

introduction: in this paper we report on clinical linguistic applications of several versions of the bilingual aphasia test (bat) and the persian aphasia battery (pab) developed to assess patterns of recovery and language impairments in monolingual and bilingual aphasics with different clinical histories living in iran. methods: the participants are adult monolingual native speakers of persian ...

The present research focuses on the relation between tone and gesture across varieties of the same language, European Portuguese (EP). Three questions are addressed: (i) whether EP varieties use different visual cues while producing different sentence types/pragmatic meanings, (ii) if there is a relation between intonational variation and variability (if any) of visual cues, and (iii) if each l...

The elaboration of the theoretical notion of communicative competence reflects a growing awareness of the importance of pragmatic knowledge in achieving mastery of a second language. Such awareness includes the recognition that teaching language effectively includes teaching culture in the most fundamental sense. Using the framework of interactional sociolinguistics to link theoretical work on ...