this study was an attempt to investigate iranian and spanish intermediate nonnative english learners’ request strategies to their faculty. to this aim, 74 (50 iranian and 24 spanish) nonnative english intermediate learners participated in this study. a discourse completion test (dct) was used to elicit the request strategies used by the participants. the findings suggested the participants empl...

Recently, warped discrete cosine transform(WDCT) has been proposed [1, 2], which is the cascade of allpass filters and DCT. The role of the allpass filters is to warp the input frequency contents to be suitable for compression by DCT. The compression algorithm based on the WDCT outperforms the JPEG [5] that is based on the conventional DCT, especially for the images with high frequency contents...

This study sought to promote EFL learners' speaking ability drawing on Bakhtin’s notion of dialogic discourse pattern (DDP) and to explore their perceptions towards implementing dialogic teaching (DT) in a speaking classroom. To this end, from the population of students in different language institutes, 47 students were selected based on a purposive sampling method. The data were collected at t...

Discourse segmentation is the division of a text into minimal discourse segments, which form the leaves in the trees that are used to represent discourse structures. A definition of elementary discourse segments in German is provided by adapting widely used segmentation principles for English minimal units, while considering punctuation, morphology, sytax, and aspects of the logical document st...

This paper presents a system for automatically generating discourse structures from written text. The system is divided into two levels: sentence-level and text-level. The sentence-level discourse parser uses syntactic information and cue phrases to segment sentences into elementary discourse units and to generate discourse structures of sentences. At the text-level, constraints about textual a...

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...

We contrast two views of how contextual influence on sentence meaning composition can be explained. The Semantic Similarity View maintains that discourse context affects sentence meaning mainly because of the semantic similarity between the words in the discourse context and the words in the sentence (as measured by Latent Semantic Analysis). The Free Pragmatic View, in contrast, defends the cl...

as a member of larger familyof formulaic sequences , lexical bundles play different discourse functions in written research articles. this study investigated the use of four-word lexical bundles in published research articles in medicine via natural language processing by computational linguistics. a corpus of 2,420,914 words was extracted from 790 research articles in 33 medical disciplines. f...