among topics in the field of pragmatics, some seem to be in a more rigorous need of investigation. pragmatic assessment and specifically the issue of pragmatic rating are among issues which deserve more thorough consideration. the purpose of this study was to examine rater criteria and its consistency and variability in the assessment of iranian efl learners’ production of compliments based on ...

Finding large numbers of target items for phonetic and phonological experiments can be a time-consuming and error-prone task. Using freely available tools and data, we have generated a bilingual corpus with the specific aim of investigating the processing and perception of stress in second-language (L2) words. Normalized Levenshtein distances between orthographic and phonemic transcriptions of ...

This paper applies techniques to obtain an aggregate measure of syntactic distance between two varieties of English spoken by firstand second-generation Finnish Australians and examines the degree of what we call syntactic ‘contamination’ in the two. Our general goal is to detect the linguistic sources of the variation between the two groups and interpret the findings from (at least) two perspe...

The traditional view of phonological representation assumes that lexical representation is economical and free of redundancy and that a phoneme is represented as a combination of contrastive phonetic features. The traditional view, however, is challenged by the recent developments in phonological theories. In Optimality Theory, the distinction between contrastive vs. non-contrastive aspects of ...

Although studies on pragmatics in general and politeness in particular abound in the literature, impoliteness has been largely ignored. In the present study, participants filled out either the Persian or English version of a discourse completion test (DCT). The researchers analyzed collected answers to discover the relationship between impoliteness and power. Furthermore, the researchers compar...