This paper discusses the discourse behavior of Chinese causal connectives yinwei "becauseand suoyi "so" from the perspective of grammaticalization, and claims that the underlying motivation for such is coherence, which involves pragmatic and cognitive interpretation. We claim that the majority of yinwei and suoyi are used pragmatically, and they are grammaticalized. This grammaticalization of d...

The analysis of discourse is the study of language in communication. Such a study involves contextual considerations and so it necessarily belongs to that area of linguistics called pragmatics. Pragmatics is concerned with the threetermed relation which unites linguistic forms and the communicative functions; these forms are capable of serving with the contexts or settings in which given lingui...

 Second language  learners often develop grammatical competence in the absence of concomitant pragmatic competence (Kasper & Roever, 2005) and the exact nature of the relationship between the two competences is still indistinct and in need of inquiries ( Bardovi-Harlig, 1999; Khatib & Ahmadisafa, 2011). This study is a partial attempt to address the lacuna and aims to see if any relationship ca...

The explicit consideration of an addressee’s inferences during discourse planning affects the content and coherence of the generated discourse. The content of the discourse is affected because the consideration of an addressee’s inferences may require the addition of information that addresses erroneous inferences or suggest the omission of easily inferred information. The coherence of the disc...

Veryfew attempts have been made in the past to develop instruments to measure pragmatic knowledge of second language (L2) learners. The absence of such instruments in the literature of English language teaching (ELT) underscores the need for the researchers to develop new tests that are specifically designed to assess this crucial but less explored aspect of language learners’ (LLs) knowledge. ...

This contribution explores the subgroup of text structuring expressions with the form preposition + demonstrative pronoun, thus it is devoted to an aspect of the interaction of coreference relations and relations signaled by discourse connectives (DCs) in a text. The demonstrative pronoun typically signals a referential link to an antecedent, whereas the whole expression can, but does not have ...

Voice constructions are usually associated with changes in the pragmatic status of the arguments of a clause, and so bear a strong resemblance to topic constructions in terms of their information structuring effects and entailments. Importantly, however, a defining criterion of voice alternations is that they morphologically monitor the changing status of the arguments of the verb, in terms of ...

Verbal periphrases (VP) constitute a typological feature of Romance languages and they are especially frequent in the Iberoromanic languages. In context this paper, aspectual verbal construction stare + infinito modal VP volere will be “grasped concrete speech action” (Katelhön 2013: 237; my translation) order to show how these two VPs used as discourse-structuring elements contemporary Italian...

This paper investigates semantic and pragmatic presupposition in Discourse Representation Theory (DRT) and enhances the pragmatic perspective of presupposition in DRT. In doing so, it draws attention to the need to account for agent presupposition (i.e. both speaker and hearer presupposition) when dealing with pragmatic presupposition. Furthermore, this paper links this pragmatic conception of ...