In this study, storytelling was surveyed with regard to the impact that it might haveon student-teacher interactional patterns. For this aim, the researchers utilized anintact class with ten young students in a language institute in a north eastern part ofthe country. Four sessions of the class were transcribed after a full observationalprotocol. Two groups of Interactional patterns on student-...

BACKGROUND Confrontation with a life-threatening disease like cancer can evoke existential distress, which can trigger a search for meaning in people after having survived this disease. METHODS In an effort to gain more insight in the meaning making process, we conducted four focus groups with 23 cancer survivors on this topic. Participants responded to questions about experienced meaning mak...

Despite much research, disagreements abound regarding the detailed characteristics of question intonation in different languages or even in the same language. The present study investigates question intonation in Mandarin by also considering the role of focus that is frequently ignored in previous research. In experiment 1, native speakers of Mandarin produced statements, yes/no questions, part...

Negation is present in all human languages and it is used to reverse the polarity of parts of a statement. It is a complex phenomenon that interacts with many other aspects of language. Besides the direct meaning, negated statements often carry a latent positive meaning. Negation can be interpreted in terms of its scope and focus. This paper explores the importance of both scope and focus to ca...

The purpose of this study was to investigate the effect of two strategies of explicit teaching of economic terms on learners' vocabulary learning and retention. In the first explicit strategy, known as 'etymological elaboration', the focus was on presenting conceptual metaphors through 'identify-the-source' tasks, that is, providing the learners with the source domains underlying the metaphors,...

We describe in this article an annotation scheme for deep dependency syntax, built from the surface annotation scheme of the Sequoia corpus, abstracting away from it and expressing the grammatical relations between content words. When these grammatical relations take part into verbal diatheses, we consider the diatheses as resulting from redistributions from the canonical diathesis, which we re...

Negated statements often carry positive implicit meaning. Regardless of the semantic representation one adopts, pinpointing the positive concepts within a negated statement is needed in order to encode the statement’s meaning. In this paper, novel ideas to reveal positive implicit meaning using focus of negation are presented. The concept of granularity of focus is introduced and justified. New...