This  paper  focuses  on  some  pragmatic  expressions  that  are  characteristic  of  informal  spoken English, their possible equivalents in some other languages, and their use by EFL learners from different  backgrounds.  These  expressions,  called  general  extenders  (e.g.  and  stuff,  or something), are shown to be different from discourse markers and to exhibit variation in form, funct...

This study investigates the relationship between prosody and information/discourse structure in spontaneous spoken folk tales in the tonal Mon-Khmer language Northern Kammu, a language that behaves as a typical phrase language where available boundary tones are enhanced to mark information structuring. Topic is always placed before Comment by syntactic movement if necessary. There is a prosodic...

earlier linguistic studies of political discourse revealed that, not many works exist on pragmatic analysis of impoliteness in this genre. apart from mullany (2002), who employs relational and face works to analyses impoliteness in political discourse, taiwo (2007), adetunji (2009), and ademilokun (2015), who employ discourse analytical tools in analyzing the political speeches, there exist ver...

levels and internal representations and often enough they get lost in their own symbolic maze and have to invent more and more artificial tricks to climb out of their constructions and still meet the surface of the utterance. Of course, it is hopeless "to seek meaning in the physical properties of utterances and formal properties of language. However, the simple :[act is, that speech is merely ...

second language  learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence (kasper & roever, 2005) and the exact nature of the relationship between the two competences is still indistinct and in need of inquiries ( bardovi-harlig, 1999; khatib & ahmadisafa, 2011). this study is a partial attempt to address the lacuna and aims to see if any relation...

We present a two-layer OWL ontology-based Knowledge Base (KB) that allows for flexible content selection and discourse structuring in Natural Language text Generation (NLG) and discuss its use for these two tasks. The first layer of the ontology contains an applicationindependent base ontology. It models the domain and was not designed with NLG in mind. The second layer, which is added on top o...

Following Macaulay’s (2002, 2005) repeated calls for a fuller integration of discourse-pragmatic features into the variationist research agenda, the last decade or so has seen an unprecedented upsurge in quantitative research investigating patterns of variation and change in the use of conventionalised, polyfunctional linguistic items and constructions such as innit, you know, as I say, and stu...

the present study aims to investigate the relative effectiveness of different types of pragmatic instruction including two collaborative translation tasks and two structured input tasks with and without explicit pragmatic instruction on the production of apologetic utterances by low-intermediate efl learners. one hundred and fifty university students in four experimental groups and one control ...

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...

This tutorial consists of four parts. Part I starts with a brief introduction to different bases for discourse structuring, properties of discourse structure that are relevant to LT, and accessible evidence for discourse structure. For discourse structure to be useful for language technologies, one must be able to automatically recognize or generate with it. Hence, Part II surveys computational...