Children encounter many opportunities for word learning where a novel word (e.g., "chinchilla") coincides in time with the presence of its referent (e.g., a parent pointing at a fuzzy rodent). These two ingredients are not always paired simultaneously, but they sometimes still occur in succession within a discourse. We investigated children's ability to apply their knowledge of discourse struct...

The present study investigated the pragmatic awareness and production of Iranian Turkish and Persian EFL learners in the speech act of apology. Sixty-eight learners of English studying at several universities in Iran were selected based on simple random sampling as the monolingual and bilingual participants. Data were elicited by means of a written discourse self-assessment/completion test (WDS...

The purpose of the present study is to compare the impoliteness strategies employed by Iranian and English students in English and Persian Languages. The participants consisted of 6o Iranian EFL learners at intermediate level of language proficiency, 60 Iranian non-English major students, and 212 native English-speaking students. The data were collected through an open-ended questionnaire in th...

The generation of synthetic speech with a certain degree of expressiveness has been successful for some particular applications or speaking styles (e.g. emotions). In this context, there is a particular speaking style with subtle speech nuances that may be of great interest for delivering expressive speech: the storytelling style. The purpose of this paper is to define a first step towards deve...

The typological literature generally assumes that semantic maps and the underlying conceptual spaces have mental reality, that is, they correspond to a universal arrangement of the relevant conceptual situations in a speaker's mind, based on perceived relations of similarity between these conceptual situations (Croft 2001 and 2003, Haspelmath 2003, among others). Croft (2003) goes far as arguin...

It is claimed that a variety of facts concerning ellipsis, event reference, and interclausal coherence can be explained by two features of the linguistic form in question: (1) whether the form leaves behind an empty constituent in the syntax, and (2) whether the form is anaphoric in the semantics. It is proposed that these features interact with one of two types of discourse inference, namely C...

This article is devoted to the study of role pragmatic potential phraseological units in realization cognitive models situations. The timeliness this work consists absence at moment information about components situations that can be most effectively used by authors articles realize their intentions through units. purpose determine are actualized and brought fore pragmatics texts English-langua...

We set forth general techniques for managing discourse in an intelligent tutor. These techniques are being implemented in a structure that dynamically reasons about the discourse, a student's response, and the tutor's move. The structure is flexible, domain-independent, and designed to be rebuilt-decision points and machine actions are modifiable through a visual editor. We discuss this formal ...

In this paper we present our research on identifying and model-ing the strategies that human tutors use for integrating previous explanations into current explanations. We have used this work to develop a computational model that has been partially implemented in an explanation facility for an existing tutoring system known as SHERLOCK. We are implementing a system that uses case-based reasonin...