Pronoun interpretation in English has been demonstrated to be sensitive to an interaction between grammatical and pragmatically-driven factors. This study investigated the interpretation of pronouns in Japanese, which has both null and overt forms. Thirty-two native speakers of Japanese per experiment participated in passage completion studies with transfer-of-possession contexts (Experiment 1)...

Graph-based notations form a significant subclass of visual languages. Studies of the use of such notations in practice have shown that users often employ pragmatic aspects, such as layout, to capture important domain information. Moreover this pragmatic information can support and guide reasoning over such representations. However, typical formalisations of graph-based notations often pay scan...

A multi-stakeholder symposium at the third annual Canadian Therapeutics Congress (May 2006) discussed the nature of pragmatic studies, and helped to further define their role in the drug regulatory system, formulary access decisions and in clinical practice. The symposium panel appeared to have agreed that pragmatic studies were beneficial, but revealed differences in how, when and where they s...

Pragmatic assessment and consistency in rating are among the subject matters which are still in need of more profound investigations. The importance of the issue is highlighted when remembering that inconsistency in ratings would surely damage the test fairness issue in assessment and lead to much diversity in ratings. Our principal concern in this study was observing the criteria that American...

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 purpose of this survey is to study the change-oriented, pragmatic, and neutered leadership styles of the heads of physical education departments in the province of Ardebil. 180 heads of sports commissions answered a multi-factor leadership questionnaire (MLQ). The multi-factor leadership questionnaire includes 41 questions covering three leadership styles of change-oriented, pragmatic, an...

VieCtoS is a system producing spoken utterances in German from information stored in a database. An important aspect of the system is the use of information relevant for intonation at all stages of the generation process. Prosodic features are derived from pragmatic information available in the strategic generator, and transformed by the tactical generator into features that can be interpreted ...

In recent years, so-called "effectiveness studies," also called "real-world studies" or "pragmatic trials," have gained increasing importance in the context of evidence-based medicine. These studies follow less restrictive methodological standards than phase III studies in terms of patient selection, comedication, and other design issues, and their results should therefore be better generalizab...

The purpose of the present article is to examine the implications of the pragmatic web for the research and development of educational technology. It is argued that, beyond knowledge acquisition and social participation, technology-mediated learning environments based on a semantic and pragmatic web have the potential for facilitating creation and advancement of knowledge. In order to capitaliz...