Owing to the growing interest in communicative, cultural and pragmatic aspects of second language learning in recent years, the present study tried to investigate representations of pragmatic aspects of English as a foreign language in Iranian high school textbooks. Using Halliday’s (1978), and Searle’s (1976) models, different language functions and speech acts were specifically determined and...

We examine prosodic and contextual factors characterizing the backchannel function of single affirmative words. Data is drawn from collaborative task-oriented dialogues between speakers of Standard American English. Despite high lexical variability, backchannels are prosodically well defined: they have higher pitch and intensity and greater pitch slope than affirmative words expressing other pr...

interlanguage pragmatics (ilp) has witnessed a growing body of research in the past two decades. one of the under-explored domains of l2 pragmatics is the role of learning strategies specifically tailored for the development of ilp knowledge. therefore, this investigation aimed to determine the significant interlanguage pragmatic learning strategies (ipls) used by high vs. low l2 pragmatic achi...

introduction: children with pragmatic language impairment have problems with appropriate use of language according to age and context. assessment and intervention plans designed to be used with a pragmatically impaired child were discussed in this study. materials and methods: the primary method of data collection adopted in this study was observation method. accordingly, communicative partner ...

In this paper, we translate sentence generation from TAG grammars with semantic and pragmatic information into a planning problem by encoding the contribution of each word declaratively and explicitly. This allows us to tap into the recent performance improvements in off-the-shelf planners. It also opens up new perspectives on referring expression generation and the relationship between languag...

In order to serve a lot of different customers in a SaaS environment, software vendors have to comply to a range of different varying requirements in their software product. Because of these varying requirements and the large number of customers, a variable multi-tenant solution is needed to achieve this goal. This paper gives a pragmatic approach to the concepts of multi-tenancy and variabilit...

The present investigation sought to comparatively explore the effect of length of residence (LOR) as well as EFL instruction on the pragmatic competence of Iranian learners. The participants were 45 EFL learners in Iran and 45 learners in Canada selected based on snowball sampling and each group was divided into three sub-groups based on the years of learning English in an EFL or a natural sett...

Graph-based notations form a significant subclass of visual languages. Studies of the use of such notations in practice have shown that users often employ pragmatic aspects, such as layout, to capture important domain information. Moreover this pragmatic information can support and guide reasoning over such representations. However, typical formalisations of graph-based notations often pay scan...

A multi-stakeholder symposium at the third annual Canadian Therapeutics Congress (May 2006) discussed the nature of pragmatic studies, and helped to further define their role in the drug regulatory system, formulary access decisions and in clinical practice. The symposium panel appeared to have agreed that pragmatic studies were beneficial, but revealed differences in how, when and where they s...

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...