phatic communion is a cultural concept which differs across cultures. according to hofstede (2001), the u.s. tends to have individualistic culture; however, asian countries tend to have collectivistic cultures. these cultures view phatic communion differently. in individualistic cultures like u.s., phatic communion reflects speakers’ socio-cultural relationships in conversations. to see whether...

although there are studies on pragmatic assessment, to date, literature has been almost silent about native and non-native english raters’ criteria for the assessment of efl learners’ pragmatic performance. focusing on this topic, this study pursued four purposes. the first one was to find criteria for rating the speech acts of apology and refusal in l2 by native and non-native english teachers...

objective: the objective of this study was to investigate the invitro fluoride release of four new self-adhesive resin cements; set (sdi, australia), breeze (pentron, usa), embrace wetbond (pulpdent, usa), g-cem (gc, japan) and to assess the bonding performance of these self-adhesive resin cements for bonding of orthodontic brackets. materials and methods: for fluoride release experiment, six ...

abstract: in this thesis, we focus to class of convex optimization problem whose objective function is given as a linear function and a convex function of a linear transformation of the decision variables and whose feasible region is a polytope. we show that there exists an optimal solution to this class of problems on a face of the constraint polytope of feasible region. based on this, we dev...

this is an original study on the effect of a polyisobutylene – polydimethylsiloxane (pibpdms) block copolymer modifier used as an interfacial active agent on the dynamics behaviour of single newtonian drops suspended in a polyisobutylene (pib) newtonian matrix. the results were divided in two sections. the first part included the experiments carried out on the non-modified and 2% block cop...

we show that when both sources ( lepton flavor violation sources and cp-violating phases) are present, the electric dipole moment of the electron, $d_e$, receives a contribution from the phase of the trilinear $a$-term of staus, $phi_{a_ au}$. for $phi_{a_ au}=pi/2$, the value of $d_e$, depending on the ratios of the lfv mass elements, can range between zero and three orders of magnitude a...

abstract type-ii fuzzy logic has shown its superiority over traditional fuzzy logic when dealing with uncertainty. type-ii fuzzy logic controllers are however newer and more promising approaches that have been recently applied to various fields due to their significant contribution especially when the noise (as an important instance of uncertainty) emerges. during the design of type- i fuz...

the application of e-learning systems - as one of the solutions to the issue of anywhere and anytime learning – is increasingly spreading in the area of education. content management - one of the most important parts of any e-learning system- is in the concern of tutors and teachers through which they can obtain means and paths to achieve the goals of the course and learning objectives. e-learn...