Over the past four decades, the syntactic and prosodic properties reflecting the information packaging of a particular sentence have attracted considerable attention in the field. Most linguists working in the generative framework will agree that there are language-specific phenomena concerning information structuring, such as focus, topic and intonation, and that they can only be adequately de...

Novel metaphorical expressions have been understudied in traditional approaches to terminology because they normally behave as sporadic units incapable of structuring whole discourse events. To show that this is not always the case, this paper presents a case study of novel BIOECONOMICS metaphors in an academic marine biology research article (Landa 1998). They were analysed following two parad...

In any well-written mathematical discourse a certain amount of mathematical and meta-mathematical knowledge is presupposed and implied. We give an account on presuppositions and implicatures in mathematical discourse and describe an architecture that allows to effectively interpret them. Our approach heavily relies on proof methods that capture common patterns of argumentation in mathematical d...

This study investigated the effectiveness of explicit pragmatic instruction on the acquisition of requests by college-level English as Foreign Language (EFL) learners in Taiwan. The goal was to determine first whether the use of explicit pragmatic instruction had a positive effect on EFL learners’ pragmatic competence. Second, the relative effectiveness of presenting pragmatics through two deli...

The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

pairing theory with methodology, this study demonstrates how efl teachers’ limited wait-time practice structures in and affects the structuring of the unfolding classroom discourse with reference to learners’ participation opportunities. informed by the tenets of conversation analysis, we have observed, videotaped, and transcribed line-by-line 10 efl teachers’ naturally-occurring classroom inte...

pragmatics is defined as appropriate use of language either to comprehend ideas or to interact in social situations effectively. pragmatic competence, which is processed in the right hemisphere, comprises a number of interrelated skills that manifest in a range of adaptive behaviors. due to the widespread influence of language in communication, studying pragmatic profiles, by developing appropr...

this study aimed to examine cross-cultural differences in performing refusal of requests between persian native speakers (pnss) and english native speakers (enss) in terms of the frequency of the semantic formulas. also examined in this study was whether persian efl learners would transfer their l1 refusal patterns into the l2, and if there would be a relation between their proficiency level an...

Pairing theory with methodology, this study demonstrates how EFL teachers’ limited wait-time practice structures in and affects the structuring of the unfolding classroom discourse with reference to learners’ participation opportunities. Informed by the tenets of conversation analysis, we have observed, videotaped, and transcribed line-by-line 10 EFL teachers’ naturally-occurring classroom inte...