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...

The present paper argues that multilingual generation must be considered as a kind of multilingual communication requiring similar resources as translation. One of the central resources necessary is that of contrastive knowledge, both linguistic and nonlinguistic. We will show what this contrastive knowledge comprises and make a proposal of how to construct it employing the approach used in the...

It is acknowledged that contrast plays an important role in understanding discourse and information structure. While it is commonly assumed that contrast can be marked by intonation only, our understanding of the intonational realization of contrast is limited. For German there is mainly introspective evidence that the rising theme accent (or topic accent) is realized differently when signaling...

The purpose of this study is to find a practical solution for improving writing skill among Iranian high school learners of EFL. The main question was whether pragmatics had any priority over traditional methods in improving writing or not.  Forty high school students were selected on the basis of their performance in PET (2009). In addition the following instruments were also used in this quas...

This study investigates the phonetics of German nuclear rise-fall contours in relation to contexts that trigger either a contrastive or a non-contrastive interpretation in the answer. A rise-fall contour can be conceived of a tonal sequence of L-H-L. A production study elicited target sentences in contrastive and non-contrastive contexts. The majority of cases realized showed a nuclear rise-fal...

When writing about pragmatics, theoreticians of cartography usually refer to the classic "Foundations of the theory of signs" by Morris (1938). Let me remind that Morris has divided semiotics into three basic branches: semantics, syntactics and pragmatics. Originally semantics was defined as the study of the sign meanings (or of relationships between linguistic forms and entities in the world),...

Lexical Pragmatics is a research field that tries to give a systematic and explanatory account of pragmatic phenomena that are connected with the semantic underspecification of lexical items. Cases in point are the pragmatics of adjectives, systematic polysemy, the distribution of lexical and productive causatives, blocking phenomena, the interpretation of compounds, and many phenomena presentl...

Deixis owns a significant place in the study of pragmatics. Present study discusses deixis comparatively with reference to Levinson (1983) and Yule (1996) in terms of its clarification of concepts, appropriate exemplification and coherent argumentation as propounded in their respective works on pragmatics. However, it is revealed through this discussion that the approach of Yule is quite precis...

The effects of pitch accenting on memory were investigated in three experiments. Participants listened to short recorded discourses that contained contrast sets with two items (e.g. British scientists and French scientists); a continuation specified one item from the set. Pitch accenting on the critical word in the continuation was manipulated between non-contrastive (H* in the ToBI system) and...