Hedging academic claims has been recognized as one of integral pragmatic features of academic writing in which most EFL academic writers seem to face substantial problems. Explicit instruction has been proposed by some scholars as an effective approach to make EFL writers aware of the importance, different forms, and pragmatic functions of hedging devices some of which are polysemous and polypr...

Time-limited psychodynamic psychotherapy is garnering empirical support as an intervention for clinical depression. However, research is needed to examine the efficacy of psychodynamic approaches among patients presenting with diverse psychiatric and medical problems. This case study examined the efficacy of eight sessions of pragmatic psychodynamic psychotherapy (PPP) in treating a woman with ...

We study the logical properties that characterize pragmatic inferences and we show that classical understanding of notions such as entailment and defeasibility is not enough if one wants to explain infelicities that occur when a pragmatic inference is cancelled. We show that infelicities can be detected if a special kind of inference is considered , namely infelicitously defeasible inference. W...

This paper offers an analysis of metalinguistic comparatives such as more dumb than crazy in which they differ from ordinary comparatives in the scale on which they compare: ordinary comparatives use scales lexically determined by particular adjectives, but metalinguistic ones use a generallyavailable scale of imprecision or ‘pragmatic slack’. To implement this idea, I propose a novel compositi...

Introduction Pragmatic surgical RCTs are needed but it is unclear how to design studies with evolving innovative interventions. The aim of this paper was to describe how a pilot RCT comparing two standard techniques incorporated an additional randomised group with a nested IDEAL (Idea, Development, Evaluation, Assessment and Long-term evaluation of innovative surgery) Phase 2b evaluation of an ...

Abstract The current regulatory approach to address aquatic mixture toxicity for pesticides in the EU (EFSA J 11:3290, 2013) is rather complex: typical cases it requires conducting entire risk assessment scheme every exposure scenario separately (e.g. 6–8 ecotoxicological endpoints, each of nine scenarios European Central Zone with 24 common mitigation measure combinations result over 1700 sub-...

How are decisions about care orders of children in cases violence justified? What important accounts considered? In an in-depth analysis 94 written order from the Norwegian County Boards, we examine decision-makers arguments and hereunder if there differences migrant non-migrant families. The shows that justifications largely rooted a pragmatic discourse focusing on risk-levels, drawing empiric...

BACKGROUND A wealth of information on the functional roles of docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) and arachidonic acid (ARA) from cellular, animal, and human studies is available. Yet, there remains a lack of cohesion in policymaking for recommended dietary intakes of DHA and ARA in early life. This is predominantly driven by inconsistent findings from a relatively small number of randomised clinical tr...