The purpose of this study was to look at headline writers’ intentions from Tanzanian Nipashe newspapers and classify them in accordance with illocutionary speech acts Taxonomy by Searle (1979). employed a qualitative research approach descriptive design. involved the population 1095 front-page newspaper headlines. A sample 130 headlines chosen each classified according taxonomy Speech Act. Out ...

The Dialog State Tracking Challenge 4 (DSTC 4) proposes several pilot tasks. In this paper, we focus on the spoken language understanding pilot task, which consists of tagging a given utterance with speech acts and semantic slots. We compare different classifiers: the best system obtains 0.52 and 0.67 F1-scores on the test set for speech act recognition for the tourist and the guide respectivel...

When making a mistake, individuals can apologize to secure further cooperation, even if the apology is costly. Similarly, individuals arrange commitments to guarantee that an action such as a cooperative one is in the others’ best interest, and thus will be carried out to avoid eventual penalties for commitment failure. Hence, both apology and commitment should go side by side in behavioral evo...

One of the theories accounting for pragmatic development of L2 learners is Vygotsky’s (1978) sociocultural  theory.  This  study  investigated  the  development  of  EFL  learners'  pragmatic competence through the lens of an important concept of Vygotsky’s theory, i.e.  the  zone  of proximal  development.  The  study  was  conducted  to  answer  two  questions.  The  first  question was wheth...