In sentences such as "Some dogs are mammals," the literal semantic meaning ("Some 'and possibly all' dogs are mammals") conflicts with the pragmatic meaning ("'Not all' dogs are mammals," known as a "scalar implicature"). Prior work has shown that adults vary widely in the extent to which they adopt the…

While acquiring a second language, learners may encounter challenges and difficulties in effectively carrying out verbal communication in the second language. Mastering the apology speech act is a challenge for L2 learners. The objective of this study is to identify the apology strategies utilized by individuals learning the Japanese language, as…

This paper argues against the assumption that Spanish--and more generally Romance--imperfective past (IMP) is an intrinsically anaphoric tense. It is a widely accepted view that IMP requires a temporal discourse antecedent to be licensed. My aim is to show that such requirement is not actually in force when IMP combines with a stative/atelic…

This study aims to investigate the differences in the realization of request speech act between the IEL (Indonesian English Learners) and the AES (Australian English-Native Speakers), as well as explain the factors influencing these distinctions. The descriptive-qualitative method and discourse completion task (DCT) were used to obtain data in…

A locus of the difference in meaning between distributive and collective sentences can be the quantifiers that modify their subjects. A current theoretical account of distributive and collective sentences claims that sentences with quantifiers such as "the" in English, or "los" in Spanish, in subject position and an indefinite…

This study investigated 5-year-old Mandarin-speaking children's comprehension of "wh"-questions, universal statements and free choice inferences. Previous research has found that Mandarin-speaking children assign a universal interpretation to sentences with a wh-word (e.g., "shei" 'who') followed by the adverbial quantifier…

To comprehend a text, one needs to understand the relationship of various elements in it. The skill that helps connect the non-textual components to the textual ones is making inferences. This research aims to reveal different types of inferences made by the students with German-language proficiency of level B1. A qualitative research approach was…

Purpose: With Aim 1, we compared the comprehension of and sensitivity to canonical and noncanonical word order structures in school-age children with specific language impairment (SLI) and same-age typically developing (TD) children. Aim 2 centered on the developmental improvement of sentence comprehension in the groups. With Aim 3, we compared…

The current research argues that definiteness in Arabic can be used for formal purposes. The definite article and the nunnation suffix "-n" (NnnS) manage the information flow in the sentence through maintaining accepted informativity balance. Additionally, the study assumes that NnnS, "-n," is not an indefinite article. Its…

This dissertation is concerned with the specific relationship between copular sentences and existential sentences, and what about that relationship is responsible for the well-known restrictions on definiteness and predicates that are observed in the existential cases. Instead of starting with the well-known paradigms which illustrate restrictions…

Children (aged five-to-six and nine-to-ten years) and adults rated the acceptability of well-formed sentences and argument-structure overgeneralization errors involving the prepositional-object and double-object dative constructions (e.g. "Marge pulled the box to Homer/*Marge pulled Homer the box"). In support of the entrenchment hypothesis, a…

The main objective of this study was to investigate the refusal speech act among Omani EFL college students. It examined how they refused in various situations and whether their responses were appropriate in terms of culture and accurate in terms of language. Forty-one English as foreign language (EFL) learners completed a Discourse Completion…

This volume contains a selection of papers presented at the 2014 International Conference of Pragmatics and Language Learning at Indiana University. It includes fourteen papers on a variety of topics, with a diversity of first and second languages, and a wide range of methods used to collect pragmatic data in L2 and FL settings. This volume is…

Analyzes the distribution of information in so-called "synonymous" sentences in the context of a semantic perspective. (AM)

Polar interrogative sentences differ from declarative sentences in terms of illocutionary forces and the linguistic analysis of their meaning. It is possible to isolate small numbers of syntactic and semantic categories and an unlimited number of illocutionary forces resulting from their interaction with the total situation. (CK)