investigating transfer of one’s pragmatic knowledge of first language to his second or foreign language has been one of the areas of interest for researchers. however, there are contradictory results even within the scarce studies which have addressed transferability. this study was an attempt to investigate perceived pragmatic transferability of l1 refusal strategies by persian efl learners. s...

World knowledge enters into pragmatic utterance interpretation in complex ways, and may be defeasible in light of speakers’ utterances. Yet there is to date a surprising lack of systematic investigation into the role of world knowledge in pragmatic inference. In this paper, we show that a state-of-the-art model of pragmatic interpretation greatly overestimates the influence of world knowledge o...

Alternative assessment approaches received considerable attention soon after a discontent with traditional, one-shot testing. These approaches, however, have been used only to improve learners’ linguistic ability despite communicative models of language which pointed that knowledge of language also involves pragmatic ability (Bachman, 1990; Bachman & Palmer, 1996). The present study tries to ex...

With the aim of more emphasis on pragmatics and its inclusion in EFL classrooms, this study attempted to investigate the effectiveness of obtrusive and unobtrusive focus on form instructions on learners’ pragmatic performance of criticizing in English. 54 Iranian learners, all at intermediate level, participated in this study, and they were divided into three groups: 19 participants receiving o...

the purpose of this study was to examine cook’s (2003) ‘multiple competence’ by investigating backward pragmatic transfer (from l2 [english] to l1 [persian]) in refusals to invitations. it explored participants’ frequency and content of refusal strategies in l1 regarding the status (i.e., power and distance) of interlocutors and the proficiency level of efl learners. the participants were persi...

Since the automatic semantic and pragmatic analysis of arbitrary texts is far from being reality, general purpose TTS systems can rely on simpler knowledge only, in particular on syntactic and morphological language knowledge. Although, from a linguistic point of view, this way of proceeding is very rough, it delivers very often quite acceptable results, mainly because there is a strong relatio...

: Individual learner differences play an integral role in second language acquisition and interested researchers and practitioners cannot get a full appreciation of second language learning if they ignore these significant variables. This study investigated how willingness to communicate (WTC), learner subjectivity, and anxiety in learning the L2 correlate with Iranian students’ English pragmat...

This paper outlines the first phase of the PRAGMATEXT project. The aim of PRAGMATEXT is to introduce pragmatic knowledge into the transcriptions of CORAL-ROM, a spontaneous spoken corpus of Spanish. The paper is divided in four sections. The first section presents the most relevant features of the C-ORAL-ROM corpus. The second describes the pragmatic-discursive annotation model. The phenomena t...

Introduction of Cultural Linguistics in the modern ages of communication can address the issue of cultural schema transfer in online communication. Despite a good number of studies on a compliment, this pragmatic behavior has not been examined in the context of online communications such as social networking sites where compliments are commonly paid and received. The present study aimed to exam...