An MEG experiment was carried out in order to compare the processing of lexical-tonal and intonational contrasts, based on the tonal dialect of Roermond (the Netherlands). A set of words with identical phoneme sequences but distinct pitch contours, which represented different lexical meanings or discourse meanings (statement vs. question), were presented to native speakers as well as to a contr...

It is considered that a number of factors, such as the external social structure, language proficiency, and relative knowledge of the content domain, affect interaction. Therefore, one of the participants is thought to play a more important role in interaction and to dominate the conversation. However, some studies have illustrated that both participants in a conversation actively contribute to...

Corresponding author: Yves Bestgen, PSP/PSOR Place du Cardinal Mercier, 10 B-1348 Louvain-la-Neuve Belgique Tel: (+32) 10 473005 Fax: (+32) 10 473774 [email protected] ABSTRACT Signaling the structure of a discourse using linguistic devices is at least as important in second language production as in one’s mother tongue. Still, very little is known about the difficulties second languag...

Existing ideational approaches to nativism tend conflate the concept with nationalism, xenophobia and populism, as well overlooking role of racism racialisation in process constructing non-native ‘out-group’, against native ‘in-group’. Inspired by Discourse Theoretical approach this article offers a significant conceptual contribution studies on far right interpreting racist xenophobic discours...

Pragmatic competence is one essential component of communicative competence; however, it has been quite neglected until recent years. Among all, the knowledge and ability to use discourse markers (DMs) cannot be overemphasized because they often facilitate cross-cultural communications. Due to the culture-bound nature, DMs (e.g., “well”, “y’know”) are often used quite differently across culture...

We examine the status of French major continuative prosodic contours, which are mainly realised as final rises at the boundary of sentences. We show how to substantiate the common intuition that these contours convey ‘continuation’. We report empirical evidence that indicates that native speakers cannot distinguish major continuatives and questions in isolated discourse segments. We then show h...

In this paper, we examine the status of French major continuative prosodic contours, which are mainly realised as final rises at the boundary of sentences. We show how to substantiate the common intuition that these contours convey ‘continuation’. We report empirical evidence that indicates that native speakers cannot distinguish major continuatives and questions in isolated discourse segments....

This study investigated metadiscourse and its subcategories in English research articles (RAs) written by nonnative (Iranian) and native English writers from the two disciplines of applied linguistics and civil engineering. The study aimed at seeing whether language and discipline influenced the frequency of occurrence of metadiscourse elements in research articles. To this end, a sample of 120...