The current research is an interlanguage pragmatic study on the use of compliment responses by Lebanese learners of Spanish. Previous to this analysis, a comparative research on compliment responses in peninsular Spanish and Lebanese Colloquial Arabic was conducted. The topics o…
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This dissertation investigates the semantic and pragmatic characterization of the evidential morphology in Turkish. That evidentials are parasitic to tense/aspect morphology is well noted (Izvroski 1997, Matthewson et al. 2007 a.o.), and the traditional literature describes the …
A contrastive study of Kiswahili and Spanish, two different languages both genetically and morphologically, and at the same time identical since they are both human languages. The study develops gradually, touching on themes related to language and communication, general linguis…
The potential of community building through computer-mediated communication (CMC) in virtual learning environments has received increasing attention in recent years, yet little empirical research has been conducted in this field in Middle Eastern countries particularly based on …
This thesis focusses on variability in audience interpretation of a television programme, and aims to problematise and investigate the reception of broadcast communication by applying the pragmatic theory of relevance (Sperber and Wilson 1966) to an empirical study of audience r…
This thesis studies a period of historical transition (1945-1950) and proposes to use scandal as a critical tool to account for the ambiguity of the immediate post-war period in literature. As set out in pragmatic sociology, scandal is understood to involve a test to the stabili…
In this thesis, I aim to motivate a particular philosophy of mathematics characterised by the following three claims. First, mathematical sentences are generally speaking false because mathematical objects do not exist. Second, people typically use mathematical sentences to comm…
This thesis consists of four essays and an introduction dedicated to two main topics: indexicality and presupposition. The first essay is concerned with an alleged problem for the standard treatment of indexicals on which their linguistic meanings are functions from context to c…
This thesis is concerned with pragmatic factors of deontic reasoning, namely scale of violation, aggravating and mitigating circumstances and power of source. Nine experiments are reported investigating deontic reasoning and judgement revision. Experiment 1 established scale of …
The overarching topic of this dissertation is the semantics and pragmatics of definite descriptions. It focuses on the question whether sentences such as ‘the king of France is bald’ literally assert the existence of a unique king (and therefore are false) or simply presuppose t…
The aim of the logic for pragmatics considered in this work is to provide a logical framework that formalises reasoning about the pragmatic forces with which a sentence may be uttered. The concept of pragmatic or illocutionary force comes from speech act theory and plays a cruci…
Demonstratives have traditionally been analyzed as 'pointing words' whose primary function is to indicate relative spatial or temporal distance of a referent from speech participants. Recent research argues that the meaning of demonstratives is not limited to spatial distance an…
This study investigated how the speech act of refusal is realized in Egyptian Arabic by intermediate and advanced American learners of Arabic as a foreign language. It also compared the performance of the learners to that of native speakers of Egyptian Arabic and native speakers…
This dissertation pursues a thorough study of paragraph delimitation in biblical Hebrew narrative. This study introduces three different approaches to unit division and identifies the textual boundaries of 1 Samuel 1–7 through these methods. Comparing and synthesizing all the re…
This study contributes to the existing literature on teaching English as a Foreign Language (EFL) by investigating advanced Jordanian EFL learners' request speech act realization compared to that of native American English speakers, as well as the influence of Arabic, the learne…
The study aims to identify and compare apology strategies used in Turkish, American English, and advanced non-native speakers of English in Turkey. In order to identify and compare the norms of apologizing in Turkish, English, and non-native English speakers in Turkey, apologies…
This study looks at the pedagogical implications of pragmatic video clips in an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) setting with native L1 Arabic speakers. Previous research on the use of video clips in pedagogy with this population of learners is limited. This study consists of…
The current study investigated whether the pragmatic component of the language of individuals with aphasia is intact as manifested by a systematic encoding of information status in terms of 'oldness'/'newness' of information. An experimental study was conducted to find out how i…
The following study is a description and analysis of six discourse markers in Tunisian Arabic. In it I will attempt to determine the syntactic and pragmatic roles of each marker, describing its function in discourse. The final analysis will be based on the pragmatic model of rel…