Attempts to alleviate land degradation and water scarcity in arid/semi-arid regions of India have historically been carried out within the ambit of government schemes implemented disparately by concerned departments. These sectoral methods are being increasingly replaced by a watershed-based approach in which local communities are encouraged to assume ownership of development programs, albeit w...

Communicative language use largely entails regular patterns consisting of pre-constructed phrases or sequences. These sequences have been examined by many researchers to find the situation-based formulas which may help L2 learners follow a possibly more target-like speaking system. This study, therefore, explored two categories of formulaic expressions including speech formulas and situation-bo...

Article history: Received 14 April 2015 Received in revised form 26 May 2016 Accepted 22 July 2016 Available online 11 August 2016 Based on Habermas' Theory of Communicative Action, this paper critiques the transparency and legitimacy of participatory scenario planning, considering a case study of scenario development for the livestock industry within Scotland. The paper considers the extent to...

This article discusses the training of communicative skills by fostering the reflection of speech-receptive action and the opportunities for using software for this purpose. Most frameworks for the training of communicative behavior focus on fostering the observable speech-productive action (i.e. speaking); the individual cognitive processes underlying speech-receptive action (hearing and under...

We describe the generation of communicative actions in an implemented embodied conversational agent. Our agent plans each utterance so that multiple communicative goals may be realized opportunistically by a composite action including not only speech but also coverbal gesture that fits the context and the ongoing speech in ways representative of natural human conversation. We accomplish this by...