alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. these approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (bachman, 1990; bachman & palmer, 1996). the present study tries t...

Information systems actability theory builds on a communicative action perspective on IS. Information systems are seen as instruments for technology mediated work communication. Human actors are communicating (i.e. sending and/or receiving messages) through an information system. Information systems actability emphasises pragmatic dimensions of information systems. The paper presents 19 actabil...

This paper propo~s a reversible architecture to handle not orily syntactic and semantic information but also pragmatic information. • I Existing architectures cannot represent pragmatic informatioil explicitly, and lack reasoning capability;given insufficient information. I argue that the techniques of plan representation and approximate reasoning are, in the enhanced argumentation system propo...

Clinical trials are sometimes classified as being explanatory or pragmatic, although they are rarely reported in that way. Explanatory trials may seek to investigate the efficacy of new treatments by imposing strict limitations on many aspects of trial design, including, for example, recruiting only those patients who are most likely to respond. In contrast, the objective of pragmatic trials is...

BACKGROUND The CONSORT statement is intended to improve reporting of randomised controlled trials and focuses on minimising the risk of bias (internal validity). The applicability of a trial's results (generalisability or external validity) is also important, particularly for pragmatic trials. A pragmatic trial (a term first used in 1967 by Schwartz and Lellouch) can be broadly defined as a ran...

Intersentential elliptical utterances occur frequently during information-seeking dialogs in task domains. This paper presents a pragmatics-based framework for interpreting such utterances. Discourse expectations and focusing heuristics are used to facilitate recognition of an information-seeker's intent in uttering an elliptical fragment. The ellipsis is comprehended by identifying both the as...