Clinical trials have been the main tool used by the health sciences community to test and evaluate interventions, Trials can fall into two broad categories: pragmatic and explanatory. Pragmatic trials are designed to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions in real-life routine practice conditions, whereas explanatory trials aim to test whether an intervention works under optimal situations....

This paper describes a framework for recognizing contradictions between multiple text sources by relying on three forms of linguistic information: (a) negation; (b) antonymy; and (c) semantic and pragmatic information associated with the discourse relations. Two views of contradictions are considered, in which a novel method of recognizing contrast and of finding antonymies are described. Contr...

Interlanguage pragmatics, as an inseparable part of communicative competence, has been emphasized as an ultimate objective in language learning. This study explored the perceptions of Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) students regarding interlanguage pragmatics and the impact of textbooks tasks on shaping their pragmatic competence. To accomplish this objective, 137 senior EFL student...

this study examines the efficiency of pedagogical intervention in raising l2 pragmatic awareness of the iranian efl learners. more specifically, it seeks to investigate the difference between explicit and implicit instructions in improving pragmatic appropriateness of the english refusals by adult persian native speakers in an efl classroom context. fifty-four participants, with approximately t...

In this paper we present a proposal to integrate pragmatic information, both from the preceding discourse and the extra-linguistic context, in the grammar. We provide an analysis of elliptical fragments according to how they are anchored to the context and the kind of resolution they require. We also present an alternative view about the syntax of fragments.

In this article, we highlight the need to create a more Pragmatic Web which would act as an extension of the Semantic Web, where information is not only given a well-defined meaning, but the meaning is understood within the context it is used. Using foundations such as Tolk’s Dynamic Web model, we propose a Trust Model, dealing with the Social Web that we believe, would ‘complete’ the Pragmatic...

this study examined the effect of explicit instruction of hedging on english forspecific academic purposes (esap) reading comprehension performance ofenglish language learning (ell) university students. a reading comprehensiontest was developed and validated as the pretest and the posttest. the test, includingitems for assessing the comprehension of the students in their area of specialization,...

We present a series of three experiments on the comprehension of metonymy that sought to tease apart the role of contextual information and conventionality during the processing of expressions that require a transfer of meaning for proper interpretation. Event-related brain potentials (ERPs) were recorded while participants read or listened to sentences including metonymic expressions and liter...

This paper discusses the semantic and pragmatic properties of Japanese benefactives with the main focus on the yaru-construction. The benefactive sentence is judged to be acceptable if the transitive verb complement falls into a certain semantic class in which the meaning of transfer of possession is expressed. Hence, the distribution of the recipient role rather than the beneficiary role is cr...

Interlanguage Pragmatics has gained more attention among Pragmatics researchers. This paper reviews the recent researches on Interlanguage pragmatics in Second Language Acquisition, and selects the research which focuses on learning process. It presents them into four groups: cross-sectional studies, longitudinal studies, research about pragmatic transfer, and instructed learning of L2 pragmati...