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...

We contrast two views of how contextual influence on sentence meaning composition can be explained. The Semantic Similarity View maintains that discourse context affects sentence meaning mainly because of the semantic similarity between the words in the discourse context and the words in the sentence (as measured by Latent Semantic Analysis). The Free Pragmatic View, in contrast, defends the cl...

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...

A fact often not made explicit by syntacticians is that these labels need to be interpreted in semantics. The semantics of tenses has been formulated as a theory of temporal reference since the seminal work of Reichenbach (1947). Subsequently this theory has been integrated into a theory of context change, which widens the domain of tense semantics from the sentence to discourse (Kamp. 1979, Ka...

Reasoning with conditionals is central to everyday life, yet there is long-standing disagreement about the meaning of the conditional. One example is the puzzle of so-called missing-link conditionals such as "if raccoons have no wings, they cannot breathe under water." Their oddity may be taken to show that conditionals require a connection between antecedent ("raccoons have no wings") and cons...

This paper develops an account of the meaning and use of various types of legal claims, and uses this account to inform debates about the nature and normativity of law. The account draws on a more general framework for implementing a contextualist semantics and pragmatics, called Discourse Contextualism (Silk 2014b). The aim of Discourse Contextualism is to derive the apparent normativity of cl...

This article deals with discourses of littering prohibition signs found in various places Indonesia, focusing on three main issues, i.e., discourse structures, pragmatic strategies, and sociocultural factors which might influence that structure strategy. Using data collected from websites those Yogyakarta Special Regency, a socio-pragmatics approach, the research finds are constructed by kinds ...