This chapter draws from research in the Pilbara (Western Australia), and to a lesser extent in the Gulf of Carpentaria (Queensland), on the Indigenous engagement with the mining industry. Post-Native Title Act land use agreements have been made between industry and Native Title claimant groups, in these two regions as others, known generally as ‘community benefit packages’. These agreements and...

Metadiscourse is a widely used term in current discourse analysis and language education, referring to an interesting, and relatively new approach to conceptualizing interaction between text producers and their texts and between text producers and users. Despite the growing importance of the term, however, it is often understood in different ways and used to refer to different aspects of langua...

this paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the persian native speakers. 200 persian respondents took a 24-item discourse completion task (dct) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenting exchanges they either observed or participated i...

We discuss perception studies of two low level indicators of discourse phenomena by Swedish, Japanese, and Chinese native speakers. Subjects were asked to identify upcoming prosodic boundaries and disfluencies in Swedish spontaneous speech. We hypothesize that speakers of prosodically unrelated languages should be less able to predict upcoming phrase boundaries but potentially better able to id...

This experimental study brings evidence from second language acquisition (L2A) to bear on a theoretical issue that has been called into question by native speaker judgments: the semantic effect Russian perfective prefixes have on object interpretation. In perfective sentences, article-less bare plural and mass objects are interpreted as denoting a specific quantity. Russian native speakers do n...

The purpose of this study was to compare apology strategies used by Iranian EFL learner students and native English speaking students (NSS) in formal and informal situations. The aim was further to investigate gender differentiation among participants. For this purpose, data were elicited from 40 Iranian (16 males and 24 females) and 40 native English speaking students (20 males and 20 females)...

The study of compliment speech act has been under investigation on many occasions in recent years. In this study, an attempt is made to explore appraisals performed by native English speakers and Iranian EFL learners to find out how these two groups diverge or converge from each other with regard to complimenting patterns and norms. The participants of the study were 60 advanced Iranian EFL lea...

This paper reports on the findings of a study designed to investigate the cultural and social complexities governing the compliment responses among the Persian native speakers. 200 Persian respondents took a 24-item Discourse Completion Task (DCT) while 15 native field workers were also set responsible for collecting the examples of complimenting exchanges they either observed or participated i...

This paper has three aims: (1) to generalize a computational account of the discourse process called CENTERING, (2) to apply this account to discourse processing in Japanese so that it can be used in computational systems for machine translation or language understanding, and (3) to provide some insights on the effect of syntactic factors in Japanese on discourse interpretation. We argue that w...