evidence occupies a paramount position in any logical endeavor and research article is consensually considered a predominant site of such an endeavor. one interesting area of rhetoric which addresses the source and reliability of evidence is quality metadiscourse. in this qualitative study, quality metadiscourse strategies (i.e., evidentials, hedges, boosters and disclaimers) are examined to in...

VieCtoS is a system producing spoken utterances in German from information stored in a database. An important aspect of the system is the use of information relevant for intonation at all stages of the generation process. Prosodic features are derived from pragmatic information available in the strategic generator, and transformed by the tactical generator into features that can be interpreted ...

This study critically examines the widely held belief that the Chinese language provides no consistent linguistic forms for expressing counterfactual ideas (Bloom, 1981). In Study 1, native speakers of Chinese identified counterfactual sentences from a large corpus of Chinese texts. A number of syntactic and/or lexical forms are found to be highly predictive of counterfactuality. Aspect modific...

In recent years, so-called "effectiveness studies," also called "real-world studies" or "pragmatic trials," have gained increasing importance in the context of evidence-based medicine. These studies follow less restrictive methodological standards than phase III studies in terms of patient selection, comedication, and other design issues, and their results should therefore be better generalizab...

The purpose of the present article is to examine the implications of the pragmatic web for the research and development of educational technology. It is argued that, beyond knowledge acquisition and social participation, technology-mediated learning environments based on a semantic and pragmatic web have the potential for facilitating creation and advancement of knowledge. In order to capitaliz...

Clinical trials have been the main tool used by the health sciences community to test and evaluate interventions, Trials can fall into two broad categories: pragmatic and explanatory. Pragmatic trials are designed to evaluate the effectiveness of interventions in real-life routine practice conditions, whereas explanatory trials aim to test whether an intervention works under optimal situations....

This paper describes a framework for recognizing contradictions between multiple text sources by relying on three forms of linguistic information: (a) negation; (b) antonymy; and (c) semantic and pragmatic information associated with the discourse relations. Two views of contradictions are considered, in which a novel method of recognizing contrast and of finding antonymies are described. Contr...

Statin therapy may prevent an excessive inflammatory response after cardiopulmonary bypass for cardiac surgery. In a recent issue of Critical Care, Morgan and colleagues present data from a well-conducted systematic review and meta-analysis of randomised controlled trials using inflammatory markers as primary outcome measure. They find that pre-operative statin therapy, compared with placebo, m...

This paper examines an understudied area of pragmatic research, namely, the sequencing of Discourse Markers (DMs). Looking only at the sequencing of Contrastive Discourse Markers (CDMs), thereby excluding both Elaborative and Inferential Discourse Markers, it is shown that only “but” may occur as the first with all of the other CDMs, e.g., “But, on the other hand...,” with “yet” occurring first...

Interlanguage pragmatics, as an inseparable part of communicative competence, has been emphasized as an ultimate objective in language learning. This study explored the perceptions of Iranian English as a foreign language (EFL) students regarding interlanguage pragmatics and the impact of textbooks tasks on shaping their pragmatic competence. To accomplish this objective, 137 senior EFL student...