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 obvious starting point for investigating meaning is the analysis of natural languages and their usage. Even from ancient times, examination of reasoning expressed in natural language revealed that patterns of valid inference often follow certain patterns. Moreover, these can be expressed as formal rules that are idealisations of actual natural language arguments (e.g. Aristotle’s syllogisms...

Since the 50’s there have been many attempts to design computer programs which are able to translate texts from one natural language into another. Despite 40 years of intensive research the systems developed so far are still far from being able to translate texts correctly. In this thesis we present a different approach to the machine generation of texts into several languages, namely their gen...