Corpus Pragmatics and Multimodality: Compiling an ad-hoc Multimodal Corpus for EFL Pragmatics Teaching

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...

Corpus-based Lexicographic Pragmatics: On 'transforming' dirty corpora

Just over one decade ago, corpus-based pragmatics labelling made its way into a major dictionary for the first time. In the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (COBUILD 2, Sinclair 1995), the compilers started to insert the novel 'PRAGMATICS' sign into the Extra Column, whenever the 'statement of meaning' for certain senses of words had to be supplemented by an 'added meaning'. In the latest edi...

The Pragmatics of Quantifier Scope: A Corpus Study

One of the most well-studied phenomena in natural language semantics has long been the question of what readings are possible in various types of sentences with multiple quantifiers. Semanticists have generally been concerned with developing theories to capture the range of possible readings for such sentences. This is what Higgins & Sadock (2003) have dubbed the problem of scope generation. To...

Strategic Interaction 2.0: Instructed Intercultural Pragmatics in an EFL Context

The potential of web-based 2.0 technology for teaching and assessing intercultural pragmatics has become an area of focus for language educators (Cohen, 2008; Belz, 2005, 2006). Research has highlighted that second and foreign language learners show significant differences from native speakers in language use, in particular, with the execution and comprehension of certain speech acts (Bardovi-H...

Compiling a Task-Based Corpus