A century ago, Peirce developed a pragmatic theory of meaning. The theory appeals to the Pragmatic Maxim. It says that the meaning of a concept is the sum total of its implications for possible observations and actions. The Relevance Theory of Sperber & Wilson is classified according to that criteria to the category of pragmatic theories of meaning. It is argued that relevance is an instance of...

This paper investigates semantic and pragmatic presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) and enhances the pragmatic perspective of presupposition in DRT. In doing so, it draws attention to the need to account for agent presupposition (i.e. both speaker and hearer presupposition) when dealing with pragmatic presupposition. Furthermore, this paper links this pragmatic conception of ...

Testing pragmatic competence has always posed daunting challenges to researchers and practitioners. As a step to address the gap in pragmatic testing, this paper delineates the procedural stages of developing and validating a context-sensitive Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT). Following a unitary view of validity, tenable argument and empirical evidence was accumulated to suppor...

Alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. These approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996). The present study tries to ex...

The present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. Most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native English speaking students’ (NNESs) pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native English speaking students (NESs) and compared learners ...

With the aim of more emphasis on pragmatics and its inclusion in EFL classrooms, this study attempted to investigate the effectiveness of obtrusive and unobtrusive focus on form instructions on learners’ pragmatic performance of criticizing in English. 54 Iranian learners, all at intermediate level, participated in this study, and they were divided into three groups: 19 participants receiving o...