the present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of english unaccusative verbs. through employing the questionnaire originally used by ju, (2000), 206 iranian intermediate and advanced english majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

This study examines the factors that influence Mandarin and Korean speakers’ understanding of English pitch accent placement. The results show that both groups have difficulty determining whether a native English speaker is using the correct prosody for a particular discourse context. Participants’ ability to do this task improved with greater English proficiency, as measured by the Versant Eng...

Ownership of land in the Western sense involves the establishment of boundaries that simultaneously contain, restrict and grant rights within a given space. Discourse on Indigenous concepts of ownership often point to the state of ‘belonging’, a deep connection with a given territory rather than a distinctly marked space that one occupies. In coastal Indigenous cultures territory will often ext...

Tropical montane habitats, grasslands, in particular, merit urgent conservation attention owing to the disproportionate levels of endemic biodiversity they harbour, the ecosystem services they provide, and the fact that they are among the most threatened habitats globally. The Shola Sky Islands in the Western Ghats host a matrix of native forest-grassland matrix that has been planted over the l...

In their travel writings about Europe in the 19th century, Moroccan visitors compare and contrast what they see of the European artistic designs and aesthetic values with experiences from their own native cultures. In this paper, I analyze the discourse and rhetoric about the enjoyment of nature, landscape design and leisure aesthetics as explored in the travel writing of the Moroccan traveler ...

This research comes within the framework of the linguistic theory of iconicity and cognitive grammar for French Sign Language (FSL). In this paper we briefly recall some crucial elements used to analyse any Sign Language (SL), especially transfers operations which appear to be the core of spatial grammar. Then we present examples from our video database with deaf native speakers engaged in narr...

Research of discourse analysis and pragmatics suggests that English language assumes a three-part feature in communication: locution, illocution, and perlocution. Therefore, the teaching of communicative English language should follow the same pattern. But for years, the classroom teaching as well as the teaching materials in China focuses mainly on locution, but ignores the other two aspects, ...

Current education standards in the U.S. require school students to read and understand complex texts from different subject areas (e.g., social studies). However, such texts usually contain figurative language, complex phrases and sentences, as well as unfamiliar discourse relations. This may present an obstacle to students whose native language is not English — a growing sub-population in the ...

This paper describes a pilot study in which we collected a small learner corpus of Arabic, developed a tagset for errorannotation of Arabic learner data, tagged the data for error, and performed simple Computer-aided Error Analysis (CEA). Language Learner Corpora and Applications Learner corpora research uses the methods and tools of Second Language Acquisition (SLA) studies and corpus linguist...