AN ACTIVITY BASED APPROACH TO PRAGMATICS 1. Purpose The purpose of this paper is to outline an approach to communication and pragmatics which under the names of "Activity based Communication Analysis" or "Communicative Activity Analysis" has been under development since the mid 70´s (cf. Allwood, 1976). To do this I start by giving a critical review of some of the main theoretical contributions...

This paper argues that in addition to the familiar approach using formal contexts, there is now a need in artificial intelligence to study contexts as social constructs. As a successful example of the latter approach, I draw attention to ' interpretation' (in the sense of literary theory), viz. the reconstruction of the intended meaning of a literary text that takes into account the context in ...

English language teaching (ELT) publishing as we know it today has a long and lucrative history, dating, according to Rix (2008), from the Longman publication of Michael West's New Method Readers in 1926, present day, where annual turnover runs around US$194 billion (Jordan & Gray, 2019). Some sector's best-sellers, such Oxford University Press's Headway series (Soars Soars), have sold over...

distinguished between the appetitive system involving A promotion focus is concerned with advancement, approach and the defensive or aversive system involvgrowth, and accomplishment, whereas a prevention ing avoidance (e.g., Gray, 1982; Konorski, 1967; Lang, focus is concerned with security, safety, and responsi1995). Models in personality and social psychology have bility. We hypothesized that...

“What is bacterial vaginosis, anyway? Why can’t we treat it very well? What does a biofilm have to do with it? I thought those were involved in prosthetic device infections! Isn’t there an animal model for this condition that can help us answer these questions, whose importance I personally doubt, as there is for any respectable disease?” In this issue of the Journal, Hymes and colleagues prese...

The author conducted a four-year ethnography of American fundamentalists including fieldwork as a participant-observer in more than 250 worship services at some 200 churches in 17 states. While the private speech of laity is readily analyzable through an ethnography of communication (EOC), the approach could interpret only half the story. For a community of practice bound not by geography but b...

Regulatory Focus Theory’s two fundamental processing orientations, Prevention Focus and Promotion Focus, have been shown to capture important differences in problem-solving motivation, goal pursuit, and individual-task ‘fit’, although some ambiguity remains regarding the nature of these differences; they have been construed as chronic but have also been related to specific situational factors. ...

A correct structural analysis of a discourse is a prerequisite for understanding it. This paper sketches the outline of a discourse grammar which acknowledges several different levels of structure. This gram~nar, the "Dynamic Discourse Model", uses an Augmented Transition Network parsing mechanism to build a representation of the semantics of a discourse in a stepwise fashion, from left to righ...

S INTERNATIONAL 52 (1992). 27. Robert W. Hymes et al., Acquaintance Rape: The Effect of Race of Defendant and Race of Victim on White Juror Decisions, 133 J. SOC. PSYCHOL. 627 (1993). 28. Laura T. Sweeney & Craig Haney, The Influence of Race on Sentencing: A MetaAnalytic Review of Experimental Studies, 10 BEHAV. SCI. & L. 179 (1992). 29. Andrea DeSantis & Wesley A. Kayson, Defendants' Character...

The author of this paper1 will speak in favor of the idea that studying old runic texts is of vital importance not only for the development of runology, but also for the development of knowledge regarding the socio-linguistic beginnings of pre-urban societies in the Viking Age. The above is presented on the basis of a working typology of existing runic inscriptions found in North-Central Jutlan...