This study tries to identify high school students' knowledge about the concept of proof, based on classroom discussion. The processes of discourses, both natural and prompted, are studied as they occur between students and teachers. The study employs discourse analysis as the qualitative research framework. Participants are 13 Science High School…

The present article compares and contrasts linguistic findings from longitudinal studies of low-income Americans derived from evidence of recorded family speech interactions. Hart and Risley (1995) employed research assistants who spent 1 hour per month observing language usage among families from different socioeconomic backgrounds in their homes…

This dissertation explores, analyzes, and compares the usage of German and Chinese demonstratives. Discourse and textual uses of the forms will be considered as well as their locative and temporal uses. I observe that in both languages the demonstratives can be used to refer to referents. However, they depart from the common assumption that…

To help EFL learners realize the use of nominals and clauses in practicing productive skills of academic writing in English writing tests, experiments have been exploited using the tasks similar to those of internet-based test of English as a foreign language to determine the nominal and clause level information during sentence and paragraph…

This study, entitled, "Texture and textuality in Political Discourse: A Study of Cohesive Devices in President Goodluck Jonathan's Inaugural Address-May, 2011" was an analysis of the lexical cohesive devices employed by Nigeria's President Goodluck Jonathan in crafting his May, 2011's Presidential Inaugural Address (PIA). Guided by the…

Universities' aims for educating global citizens are rarely supported by a theoretical underpinning or evidence of outcomes. This study explored how international higher education experts conceptualize the global citizen or related terms representing the "ideal global graduate." A global notion of citizenship was accepted by the majority…

Many philosophers believe that if "S" is an unambiguous, context-sensitive, declarative sentence and "p" is a proposition asserted (without conversational implicatures) by a literal utterance of "S" in a context "c," then "p" is fully determined by the linguistic meaning of "S" in…

Purpose: Prior studies of discourse comprehension have concluded that the deficits of persons with aphasia (PWA) in syntactically based comprehension of sentences in isolation are not predictive of deficits in comprehension of sentences in discourse (Brookshire & Nicholas, 1984; Caplan & Evans, 1990). However, these studies used semantically…

The very complicated nature of interpretation, in general, and ambiguities involved in Derrida's writings, in particular, makes it very difficult to hold what Derrida means by deconstruction. As Biesta and Miedema (2011, 105) state: "One of the main challenges here is to get the interpretation of Derrida's writings 'right.'" Surely, by putting…

Discourse is essential in communicating thoughts and ideas. People around the world communicate their ideas through stretches of language. In order to understand any discourse, it must achieve cohesion. The purpose of this paper is to define and describe the cohesive devices based on the work of Halliday and Hasan (1976). It also aims to emphasize…

The present study attempted to describe the giving advice strategies utilized by Malaysian postgraduate students in confronting different situations. In addition, it examined the effects of the situational factors of social distance, power, and imposition on the students' choice of giving advice strategies. Another objective was to categorize the…

Irony comprehension in seven- and eight-year-old children with typically developing language skills was explored under the framework of the graded salience hypothesis. Target ironic remarks, either conventional or novel/situation-specific, were presented following brief story contexts. Children's responses to comprehension questions were used to…

This study concerns the mechanisms involving temporal update in discourse comprehension, comparing traditional approaches based on "Aktionsart" and Iconicity against an approach based on narrative expectations. Our experiments suggest that readers pay more attention to fine-grained discourse properties (such as salient temporal…

In both signed and spoken languages, pointing serves to direct an addressee's attention to a particular entity. This entity may be either present or absent in the physical context of the conversation. In this article we focus on pointing directed to nonspeaker/nonaddressee referents in Sign Language of the Netherlands (Nederlandse Gebarentaal,…

Based on the theoretical understandings from Legitimation Code Theory (Maton, 2013) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (Martin, 2013) underpinning the research discussed in this special issue, this paper focuses on classroom pedagogy to illustrate an important strategy for making semantic waves in History teaching, namely "temporal shifting". We…