abstract pragmatics is the study of communicative action in its sociocultural context. communicative action includes not only using speech acts (such as apologizing, complaining, complimenting, and requesting), but also engaging in different types of discourse and participating in speech events of varying length and complexity. the present study aimed to investigate the assessment of pragm...

insurers have in the past few decades faced longevity risks - the risk that annuitants survive more than expected - and therefore need a new approach to manage this new risk. in this dissertation we survey methods that hedge longevity risks. these methods use securitization to manage risk, so using modern financial and insurance pricing models, especially wang transform and actuarial concepts, ...

investigation the archetype of mother can help the reader to understand poes works, especially his fiction, better, if not fully. motivated by internal and external drives to get into the universe in its manifold form poe was impelled to art and, from various modes of art, to symbolism. how much was poe successful to produce works of art has been a matter of dispute among critics. however, ther...

plagiarism in esl/efl learning contexts has been established as a dynamic and multi-layered phenomenon and has become a topic engaging many researchers in a heated debate in recent years. comparisons of student-generated texts with their source texts have shown that students rely on source texts in their writings and copying is a major strategy used by both l1 and l2 writers. in our country a...

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...

the importance of writing as a complex skill in applied linguistics has drawn the attention of many researchers to evaluate textbooks in order to help learners gain self-sufficiency and autonomy in the field of language use and communication. investigations have shown that developments in textbooks evaluation can promote the quality of pedagogies and consequently the learning. this study attemp...

many mobile and off-grid devices include electronics and other electrical consumers like servo drives, which need a quite low supply power. since the price for photovoltaic modules drops continuously, photovoltaic power supply is interesting in more and more applications. in solar powered systems, a battery is needed to store energy for the night and cloudy periods. the power electronics of suc...

introduction acetic acid bacteria are large group of obligate aerobic gram negative bacteria with the ability to oxidize ethanol to acetic acid (1). they are widely distributed in natural habitats and classified in family acetobacteraceae. members of this family are useful in industrial production of vinegar(2). acetic acid bacteria (aab) can use substrates as glucose, ethanol, lactate or glyc...

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...

there is less published research about how teachers in efl contexts respond to students who are relatively less mature and less competent l2 writers. while writing researchers have examined various issues concerning peer and teacher response in writing-oriented classes, little research has centered on the effect of collaborative tasks particularly dictogloss on writing skills. output collaborat...