This article reports the findings of sociolinguistic research investigating the use of second-person singular pronouns in Costa Rica. The study was carried out onsite and involved 132 interviewees from all seven provinces of the country. These subjects reacted to scenarios in which they had to choose their preferred pronoun of use…

This dissertation aims to extend our knowledge of prosody--in particular, what kinds of information may be conveyed through prosody, which prosodic dimensions may be used to convey them, and how individual speakers differ from one another in how they use prosody. Four production studies were conducted to examine how various factors interact with…

We show how emergence offers new explanations for the behaviour of metaphorically-used expressions. Analysis of metaphors in two types of natural language data are combined: detailed analysis of continuous discourse, which offers wealth of context and the possibility of monitoring emergent forms as the discourse unfolds, and computer-assisted…

Provides examples illustrating that the study of technologically-mediated communication, if approached from an ethnographic perspective, draws attention to old questions of interactional patterning in what may be radically new contexts of communication. Notes a central issue to be explored, that of the implications of formulating the notion of…

This study examines the speech act sequence of introductions among native speakers of American English from a wide variety of occupations, educational backgrounds, and role relationships. Specifically, the focus of the study is on the sequencing of other-introductions; namely, in an introduction that involves at least three participants, who gets…

The aim of the present study was to investigate idiom comprehension in school-age Italian children with different reading comprehension skills. According to our hypothesis, the level of a child's text comprehension skills should predict his/her ability to understand idiomatic meanings. Idiom comprehension in fact requires children to go beyond a…