Public sector information systems (IS) may produce unintended negative consequences that are very challenging to predict in advance. In this paper we seek to answer the following critical research questions: How does a democratic society identify and deal with ethically and morally problematic effects of public sector IS? What does it mean for public sector IS to be ethically and morally justif...

The Annotation Ontology (AO) has proven to be a valuable resource for structuring annotations in scientific documents. We are representing elements of discourse with the AO; by using our proposed extension it is possible to mark up specific rhetorical structures and build a network of interconnected documents. The extension presented in this paper also makes it possible to represent more expres...

The present study investigated the pragmatic awareness and production of Iranian Turkish and Persian EFL learners in the speech act of apology. Sixty-eight learners of English studying at several universities in Iran were selected based on simple random sampling as the monolingual and bilingual participants. Data were elicited by means of a written discourse self-assessment/completion test (WDS...

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...

German modal or discourse particles make a contribution to the illocutionary force of an utterance. In this paper we integrate a model of belief sets held as part of the Common Ground into the Abstract Knowledge Representation (AKR) component of the German ParGram grammar. We follow recent accounts that divide the Common Ground into individual belief state sets for each of the discourse partici...

From a multimodal point of view, the functions which have generally been attributed to linguistic elements of discourse (known, as a rule, as discourse markers or connectors within the several discourse analytic theories) can also be fulfilled by prosody and nonverbal units. These types of discourse functions, here called interactive conversational signals, a subgroup of the conversational sign...

We consider the functions that formulae perform in two types of written texts which maintain close links to oral forms: Old English epic poetry and blogs. Five oralityrelated functions of formulae are identified in both datasets: discourse-structuring, filler, epithetic, gnomic, and tonic. A sixth type of formulaic function, theacronymic, necessarily tied to the written medium, is also found in...

A genuine comprehension of the process of human communication within organisations requires a detailed understanding of pragmatics. Accordingly, our aim here is to work towards a richer means of analysing and describing multimodal documents at the pragmatic level than is currently available within the framework of Organisational Semiotics. Our basic strategy is to take six of the most widely kn...