Context and historical (socio-)pragmatics twenty years on

Twenty years of historical pragmatics Origins, developments and changing thought styles

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...

English syntax in its linguistic and socio - historical context

At the end of the twentieth century , the Late Modern period still had to be described as ‘the Cinderella of English historical linguistic study’ (Jones 1989 : 279). Fortunately, this scenario has changed over the last fi fteen years or so. Among other things, the change of emphasis within historical linguistics to socio-historical and corpus-based approaches led to a surge of interest in Late ...

Twenty years on.

Twenty years on.

One of the problems of moving to the USA to practise medicine is taking "finals" again. I don't mean the exam for an Educational Council for Foreign Medical Graduates (ECFMG) certificate, which is a one-day affair taken in the familiar surroundings of London or Edinburgh. Without the ECFMG, of course, one's chances of getting a visa to live in the USA are next to nil. But actually to practise a...

Teaching English Pragmatics in an EFL Context: Effects of Obtrusive and Unobtrusive Focus on Form Instructions

With the aim of more emphasis on pragmatics and its inclusion in EFL classrooms, this study attempted to investigate the effectiveness of obtrusive and unobtrusive focus on form instructions on learners’ pragmatic performance of criticizing in English. 54 Iranian learners, all at intermediate level, participated in this study, and they were divided into three groups: 19 participants receiving o...