based on how formal a conversation is, how much familiar the speaker and the listeners are with each other and how distant is the speaker's social status from the listener's one, the speaker uses certain forms of language known as styles of language. linguistic styles are different from language varieties. selection of the styles depends on definite social situations and the kind of r...

Following a thorough survey of the available literature and concentrating on the wax and wane of testing pragmatic competence so far, the present study firstly is an attempt to develop a comprehensive test of inter-language pragmatics mainly focusing on academic situations in the Iranian context. Secondly, the study aims to investigate the criteria required for the selection of speech acts of a...

Many people have argued that the evolution of the human language faculty cannot be explained by Darwinian natural selection. Chomsky and Gould have suggested that language may have evolved as the by-product of selection for other abilities or as a consequence of as-yet unknown laws of growth and form. Others have argued that a biological specialization for grammar is incompatible with every ten...

following a thorough survey of the available literature and concentrating on the wax and wane of testing pragmatic competence so far, the present study firstly is an attempt to develop a comprehensive test of inter-language pragmatics mainly focusing on academic situations in the iranian context. secondly, the study aims to investigate the criteria required for the selection of speech acts of a...

We present a method for automatic determiner selection, based on an existing language model. We train on the Penn Treebank and also use additional data from the North American News Text Corpus. Our results are a significant improvement over previous best.

Human beings are talkative. What advantage did their ancestors find in communicating so much? Numerous authors consider this advantage to be “obvious” and “enormous”. If so, the problem of the evolutionary emergence of language amounts to explaining why none of the other primate species evolved anything even remotely similar to language. What I propose here is to reverse the picture. On closer ...

Charles Darwin himself helped to start the debate on language change as a selection process. Here I examine two aspects of Darwin’s contribution to this debate. Throughout I emphasize how much Darwin’s own views differed from the views of present-day Darwinians. First, I consider the parallels Darwin identified between selection in language change and selection in species change. I argue that D...