In this paper, we describe the hypotheses and the design of an empirical study to investigate the impact of adopting a 3D and a 4D foundational ontology on the pragmatic quality of a conceptual model. More specifically, we intend to measure the impact of the metaphysical characteristics of an ontology on the comprehension and understandability of the ontology-driven models by its users. Our res...

It is traditionally assumed in the linguistic-pragmatic literature that Scalar Implicatures (A or B >> either A or B but not both; some of the Fs>> at least one but not all of the Fs) are explicitly defeasible, structure-dependent and defeasible in context. We present three off-line studies that demonstrate the psycholinguistic reality of these properties of Scalar Implicatures (henceforth SIs)...

Right-brain-damaged individuals may present discursive, pragmatic, lexical-semantic and/or prosodic disorders. Objective To verify the effect of right hemisphere damage on communication processing evaluated by the Brazilian version of the Protocole Montréal d'Évaluation de la Communication (Montreal Communication Evaluation Battery) - Bateria Montreal de Avaliação da Comunicação, Bateria MAC,...

Testing pragmatic competence has always posed daunting challenges to researchers and practitioners. As a step to address the gap in pragmatic testing, this paper delineates the procedural stages of developing and validating a context-sensitive Multiple Choice Discourse Completion Test (MDCT). Following a unitary view of validity, tenable argument and empirical evidence was accumulated to suppor...

We investigate the interaction of structural and contextual constraints on the on-line generation of three types of Scalar Implicature, (a) the disjunction: “A or B” >> “either A or B but not both”, (b) the partitive NP: “some of the Fs”>> “at least one but not all of the Fs” and (c) ad hoc context dependent scales. In theoretical linguistics, according to the structural approach (Chierchia, 20...

l2 research has shown that instruction in l2 pragmatics is necessary. the current study evaluated the impact of explicit instruction on efl learner's awareness and production of three speech acts of request, apology, and complaint. it also probed whether learners’ language proficiency plays any role in incorporating pragmatic instruction into the l2 classroom. iranian undergraduate student...

A common problem for linguists, philosophers and psychologists is that linguistically specified (‘literal’) word meanings are often modified in use. The literal meaning may be narrowed (e.g. drink used to mean ‘alcoholic drink’), approximated (e.g. square used to mean ‘squarish’) or undergo metaphorical extension (e.g. rose or diamond applied to a person). Typically, narrowing, approximation an...

This paper discusses a case study of Sarah (aged 9;8-10;3) who is reported to have pragmatic difficulties. The focus is on her comprehension of questions, which are asked on the basis of pictures and heard stories. Particular focus is on the pragmatic (or inferential) demands of the input questions and their relationship to the (in)appropriacy of the answer. Data from 16 normally functioning 6-...

This thesis deals with the nature of metarepresentation in language. It proposes linguistic-semantic and pragmatic analyses of a variety of metarepresentational expressions in English, using the framework of relevance theory (Sperber and Wilson 1986/1995). The main aim is to deepen the relevance-theoretic analysis of metarepresentation, to apply it to a range of data which have not been previou...

Patients suffering from schizophrenia have been found to be impaired in their pragmatic abilities in the comprehension of figurative language (e.g., metaphors, ironies, proverbs). Impairments in theory of mind (ToM; that is, the ability to attribute/infer mental states) have been proposed to be underlying high level language understanding. Even though ToM has been shown to be defective in schiz...