In this article, a new webdictionary for pragmatic markers in Icelandic is presented.

Meta-discourse markers are an inevitable part of oral proficiency which improve both the quality and comprehension of learners’ speech. While studies of oral meta-discourse have been conducted since the 1980s in a European or US context, they have remained relatively untouched in Iran. Therefore, this study aimed to seek the impact of both explicit and implicit teaching of formal meta-discourse...

The present study compares two measures most frequently used to assess pragmatic competence: Written Discourse Completion Tasks (WDCT) and Oral Discourse Completion Tasks (ODCT). The study focuses on these two speech act data collection methods and explores the validity of using different forms of Discourse Completion Tasks (DCTs) in non-Western contexts. Twenty four Iranian university students...

The unacceptability of wh-question disjunctions can be given a semantic explanation if we take the partition theory of questions as a basis (Groenendijk and Stokhof 1982, 1984). According to this theory, a question defines a partition of the logical space. A disjunction of two questions is then a union of two partitions, which is not again a partition: there are overlapping cells. Thus the disj...

among topics in the field of pragmatics, some seem to be in a more rigorous need of investigation. pragmatic assessment and specifically the issue of pragmatic rating are among issues which deserve more thorough consideration. the purpose of this study was to examine rater criteria and its consistency and variability in the assessment of iranian efl learners’ production of compliments based on ...

Drawing upon sociocultural theory of Vygotsky, the current study aims to investigate the effect of dyadic interaction in mixed and matched level proficiency pairings on comprehension and production of request and apology speech acts. The participants were 125 EFL learners who were randomly assigned to control and experimental (interaction) groups. Based on their scores in the pretest including ...

This paper addresses the construction of a spontaneous speech corpus in European Portuguese (hereafter EP), the corpus is presented and a prosodic labeling scheme that is here proposed is explained. The objective of this work is to provide a tool for linguistic analysis suitable to several research topics, which have speech and dialogue as objects. The main features considered in the database w...

This paper presents some initial experiment with transformation-based and memory-based learning for detecting errors on the word level in speech recognition results. Features that were tested include word confidence scores along with lexical, contextual and pragmatic information. The results show that the best classifier performs 11.9% better than baseline for all words, and 17.9% for content w...

We present an approach to dialogue management and interpretation that evaluates and selects amongst candidate dialogue moves based on features at multiple levels. Multiple interpretation methods can be combined, multiple speech recognition and parsing hypotheses tested, and multiple candidate dialogue moves considered to choose the highest scoring hypothesis overall. We integrate hypotheses gen...

In recent years, increasing emphasis has been put on pragmatic competence as part of foreign language curricula. This article analyzes the devices used by learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) in order to perform the speech act of disagreement in their L2. Data from 27 ESL learners were gathered by means of Discourse Completion Tests and compared to baseline data from 27 native speaker...