The article has three main concerns: (i) it gives a concise introduction into optimality-theoretic pragmatics; (ii) it discusses the relation to alternative accounts (relevance theory and Levinson's theory of presumptive meanings); (iii) it reviews recent findings concerning the psychological reality of optimality-theoretic pragmatics and its central part concept – bidirectional optimization. A...

the present investigation was designed to study the production and comprehension of specific means for information highlighted by advanced iranian learners of english as a foreign language. the study focused on the discourse-pragmatically motivated variations of the basic word order such as inversion, pre-posing, it- and wh-clefts. after taking the nelson test, a homogeneous group was settled. ...

pragmatic aspect of second language (l2) as a component of communicative competence has recently received more attention. many research studies have investigated the gap between native and nonnative speakers’ command of l2 pragmatics. however, development of l2 pragmatics has been the focus of few studies. in this study, how coursebooks can help both nonnative teachers and learners develop l2 p...

l2 research has shown that instruction in l2 pragmatics is necessary. the current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on efl learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. it also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the l2 classroom. iranian undergraduate students maj...

This paper provides an outline of the changes in linguistics that gave rise to historical pragmatics in the 1990s and that have shaped its development over the twenty years of its existence. These changes have affected virtually all aspects of linguistic analyses: the nature of the data, the research questions, the methods and tools that are being used for the analysis, as well as the nature of...

L2 research has shown that instruction in L2 pragmatics is necessary. The current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on EFL learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. It also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the L2 classroom. Iranian undergraduate students maj...

Part I Pioneering Approaches 2 Changing Ideas about Reference 25 Herbert H. Clark and Adrian Bangerter 3 Psycholinguistic Experiments and Linguistic-Pragmatics 50 Raymond W. Gibbs, Jr. 4 On the Automaticity of Pragmatic Processes: a Modular Proposal 72 Sam Glucksberg 5 Reasoning, Judgement and Pragmatics 94 Guy Politzer 6 Exploring Quantifiers: Pragmatics Meets the Psychology of Comprehension 1...

Pragmatics is everywhere in life, and now pragmatics has formed a trend of combining with other disciplines. As newly developed discipline, brings new perspective to the development English language literature. This thesis mainly studies definition, branches future trends pragmatics, which can provide some reference for interdisciplinary research.

Formal Pragmatics discusses various topics that are at the borderline of the semantics and pragmatics of natural language, in particular the treatment of indefinites and anaphora, presuppositions, and the analysis of focus. Enormous progress has been made in the last two decades in the analysis of these phenomena. It is time for this body of work to be summarized and described in a relatively e...