this study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level english as foreign language (efl) learners in taiwan. the goal was to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on efl learners’ pragmatic competence. second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two deli...

pragmatic assessment and consistency in rating are among the subject matters which are still in need of more profound investigations. the importance of the issue is highlighted when remembering that inconsistency in ratings would surely damage the test fairness issue in assessment and lead to much diversity in ratings. our principal concern in this study was observing the criteria that american...

BACKGROUND To impact on the obesity epidemic, interventions that prevent weight gain across populations are urgently needed. However, even the most efficacious interventions will have little impact on obesity prevention unless they are successfully implemented in diverse populations and settings. Implementation research takes isolated efficacy studies into practice and policy and is particularl...

This paper presents an open-domain textual Question-Answering system that uses several feedback loops to enhance its performance. These feedback loops combine in a new way statistical results with syntactic, semantic or pragmatic information derived from texts and lexical databases. The paper presents the contribution of each feedback loop to the overall performance of 76% human-assessed precis...

Although a growing body of clinical research has begun to evaluate the efficacy and safety of t'ai chi as a therapeutic tool for a variety of health conditions, little attention has been devoted to evaluating "how" t'ai chi is scientifically studied, and the advantages or limitations of different methodological approaches. In a companion to this paper (Part I), we argued that t'ai chi is a comp...

Psychokinesis research is encountering difficulties in replicating its findings. While experimental and analysis methods became more and more professional in the last decades, researchers complain about a loss of effect size and evidence. Walter von Lucadou explained this erosion of evidence with his “Model of Pragmatic Information” (MPI). He proposed a new experimental paradigm for future rese...

In this paper we present the problem of representing the morphosyntactic relations in wordnets, especially the problems that arise when wordnets for languages that differ significantly from English are being developed on the basis of the Princeton wordnet, which is the case for Bulgarian and Serbian. We present the derivational characteristics of these two languages, how these characteristics a...

Game theoretical analyses of communication (e.g. Lewis, Crawford & Sobel) demand cooperation between conversational partners for reliable information exchange to take place. Similarly, in pragmatics, the theory of language use, it is standard to assume that communication is a cooperative affair. Recently, this standard view has come under attack by Durcot and Merin, and it has been proposed tha...

Clinical trials are sometimes classified as being explanatory or pragmatic, although they are rarely reported in that way. Explanatory trials may seek to investigate the efficacy of new treatments by imposing strict limitations on many aspects of trial design, including, for example, recruiting only those patients who are most likely to respond. In contrast, the objective of pragmatic trials is...

New forms of collaboration between organizations based on open source principles are rapidly emerging. The collaboration is typically done in a spirit of co-opetition whereby companies, often SMEs, share cost and risk by developing software jointly and openly. The paper elaborates how this emerging phenomenon of open source ecosystems can be understood from the perspective of actability and the...