We live in the age of globalization where diverse cultures and nations mix and mingle. A lot of us live in a multicultural society in which macro- and microethnoses coexist. Cultures enrich each other, collaborate…and sometimes clash. Misunderstandings happen when people speak the same language, but do not share the same cultural codes. Edward…

Theoretically speaking, semantic minimalism and semantic maximalism are two current dominant assumptions on the nature of meaning in the linguistic communication. The former lays more emphasis on the syntactic basis of sentence meaning, while the latter stresses much over the pragmatic properties of utterance meaning. This paper, grounded on the…

Ever since Aristotle and Plato ("The Categories"; "Cratylus"), linguists have considered language to be the pairing of form (sounds or gestures or written strings) and meaning. This is true for all meaningful linguistic units from morphemes, through words, phrases and sentences, to discourse. Generally speaking, semantics is…

We should seek every possible method for educating immigrants and refugees and facilitating ­communication for them--especially during the current difficult times due to the spread of a killer-­ pandemic (i.e., Covid-19). To this end, I discuss the role which "metalanguage" could play in this regard, with reference to Natural Semantic…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

How is the future of the Web, as one of the most influential inventions of the twentieth century? Today, there are great conceptual gaps between the Web 2.0 (Social Web), Web 3.0 (Semantic Web), and Web 4.0 (Pragmatic Web) generations. Every generation of Web is merely an independent conceptual branch of Web and the future Web needs to benefit…

Acquiring a second language (L2) has been increasingly recognized to be an ongoing developmental process, one that progresses in a fluid and non-linear fashion (Larsen-Freeman, 2015). Instead of operating like a mechanical black box that parses incoming linguistic information and outputs oral/written language indiscriminately, the learner's…

Language is the main resource for meaningful action, including the very formation of selves and psychosocial identities, shaped by practical norms, beliefs, and values. Thus, language education constitutes one of the most powerful means for both social reproduction and social production and ideological maintenance and utopian innovation. In this…

This interview was conducted with Professor Keith Allan with the aim of providing a brief but informative summary of the state of the art of pragmatics. In providing answers to the interview questions, Professor Allan begins with a definition of pragmatics as it is practiced today, i.e., the study of the meanings of utterances with attention to…

This is a report of the main points I made in an informal "conversation" with Paul Fletcher and the audience at the 14th ICPLA conference in Cork. The observations arose randomly, as part of an unstructured 1-h Q&A, so they do not provide a systematic account of the subject, but simply reflect the issues which were raised by the conference…

John Brekke challenges the field and profession of social work to define and develop the "science of social work". This response to Brekke's paper identifies the premises undergirding a discussion of the science of social work related to (1) a definition of "science";; (2 ) an organizing principle for social work; (3) a…

Although the Greek roots of the word pedagogy refer to teaching children, until the second half of the 20th century it was applied to any teaching-learning transaction regardless of the age of the learner. Some educators still use pedagogy in this generic way. A neologism is a newly coined word or phrase that is just emerging into mainstream use,…

The paper attempts to discuss the place of intervention in the developmental and communication disorders of children with intellectual disability for the purpose of providing effective inclusion programme. The definition of early intervention was stated, areas affected by children communication disorder such as language comprehension, fluency,…

How to help babies and young children right from birth to become competent in talking as well as emergent literacy is illustrated by research findings as well as with specific clinical stories. Both kinds of knowledge can serve to galvanize parents and teachers to increase awareness of infant and preschool language development and the crucial role…

In order to interpret a sentence, hearers must often access information that is not explicitly stated, drawing on pragmatic knowledge and/or the discourse context. A problem with previous work on the acquisition of English focus particles such as "only," "also," "even," etc. is that it has often ignored such factors. Using a context-based…