This study reports the results of an investigation of subject properties in the spontaneous speech of 14 4-year old English speaking children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and two control groups (age and MLUm). It is shown that while the children with SLI perform much below their age-level with respect to grammatical properties of subjects (subject-verb agreement, subject case), they ...

Recent research in the area of Second Language Acquisition has proposed that bilinguals and L2 learners show syntactic indeterminacy when syntactic properties interface with other cognitive domains. Most of the research in this area has focused on the pragmatic use of syntactic properties while the investigation of compliance with a grammatical rule at syntax-related interfaces has not received...

the present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native english speaking students’ (nness) pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native english speaking students (ness) and compared learners ...

Although studies on pragmatics in general and politeness in particular abound in the literature, impoliteness has been largely ignored. In the present study, participants filled out either the Persian or English version of a discourse completion test (DCT). The researchers analyzed collected answers to discover the relationship between impoliteness and power. Furthermore, the researchers compar...

Just over one decade ago, corpus-based pragmatics labelling made its way into a major dictionary for the first time. In the Collins COBUILD English Dictionary (COBUILD 2, Sinclair 1995), the compilers started to insert the novel 'PRAGMATICS' sign into the Extra Column, whenever the 'statement of meaning' for certain senses of words had to be supplemented by an 'added meaning'. In the latest edi...

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...

The present study investigated learners’ interlanguage pragmatic development through analysis of 99 requestive emails addressed to a faculty member over a period of up to two years. Most previous studies mainly investigated how non-native English speaking students’ (NNESs) pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic competence differed from native English speaking students (NESs) and compared learners ...