Fostering EF/SL learners' meta-pragmatic awareness of complaints and their interactive effects

This paper suggests a series of steps for teaching complaint behaviour in English. The production of complaints requires a meta-pragmatic awareness of their interactive value and functions, their different types and realisations, pragmalinguistic formulae frequently employed or the socio-pragmatic factors affecting them, among others, which many didactic materials do not address holistically. Integrating relevant findings about complaint behaviour from pragmatics and various neighbouring disciplines, these pedagogical steps combine distinct teaching approaches and include production tasks and guidelines for assessment. Moreover, these steps also comprise an account of some communicative effects of complaints from the cognitive framework of relevance theory with a view to fostering learners’ meta-psychological awarenes

Requests in Brazilian Portuguese : new theoretical and methodological approaches in interlanguage pragmatics

Abstract unavailable please refer to PD

Hybrid discourse modeling and summarization for a speech-to-speech translation system

The thesis discusses two parts of the speech-to-speech translation system VerbMobil: the dialogue model and one of its applications, multilingual summary generation. In connection with the dialogue model, two topics are of special interest: (a) the use of a default unification operation called overlay as the fundamental operation for dialogue management; and (b) an intentional model that is able to describe intentions in dialogue on five levels in a language-independent way. Besides the actual generation algorithm developed, we present a comprehensive evaluation of the summarization functionality. In addition to precision and recall, a new characterization - confabulation - is defined that provides a more precise understanding of the performance of complex natural language processing systems.Die vorliegende Arbeit behandelt hauptsächlich zwei Themen, die für das VerbMobil-System, ein Übersetzungssystem gesprochener Spontansprache, entwickelt wurden: das Dialogmodell und als Applikation die multilinguale Generierung von Ergebnissprotokollen. Für die Dialogmodellierung sind zwei Themen von besonderem Interesse. Das erste behandelt eine in der vorliegenden Arbeit formalisierte Default-Unifikations-Operation namens Overlay, die als fundamentale Operation für Diskursverarbeitung dient. Das zweite besteht aus einem intentionalen Modell, das Intentionen eines Dialogs auf fünf Ebenen in einer sprachunabhängigen Repräsentation darstellt. Neben dem für die Protokollgenerierung entwickelten Generierungsalgorithmus wird eine umfassende Evaluation zur Protokollgenerierungsfunktionalität vorgestellt. Zusätzlich zu "precision" und "recall" wird ein neues Maß - Konfabulation (Engl.: "confabulation") - vorgestellt, das eine präzisere Charakterisierung der Qualität eines komplexen Sprachverarbeitungssystems ermöglicht

Acquisition of request modifiers in Vietnamese as a second language

This study examines the acquisition of request modifiers by learners of L2 Vietnamese, with a view to expanding the range of target languages under inquiry and contributing to the field of L2 pragmatics acquisition. Data were collected from nine Vietnamese native speakers and 18 learners from various language backgrounds, using open role-plays in six scenarios with differing social power and imposition levels. An analysis was made of the learners' use of request modifiers in relation to their proficiency levels in Vietnamese and their lengths of residency in the target language environment. Findings supported claims in the literature that learning pragmatics is particularly challenging for low-proficiency learners, and provided some evidence of pragmatic development in the case of highproficiency learners who had stayed in the target language culture for an extended period

Computational Sociolinguistics: A Survey

Language is a social phenomenon and variation is inherent to its social nature. Recently, there has been a surge of interest within the computational linguistics (CL) community in the social dimension of language. In this article we present a survey of the emerging field of "Computational Sociolinguistics" that reflects this increased interest. We aim to provide a comprehensive overview of CL research on sociolinguistic themes, featuring topics such as the relation between language and social identity, language use in social interaction and multilingual communication. Moreover, we demonstrate the potential for synergy between the research communities involved, by showing how the large-scale data-driven methods that are widely used in CL can complement existing sociolinguistic studies, and how sociolinguistics can inform and challenge the methods and assumptions employed in CL studies. We hope to convey the possible benefits of a closer collaboration between the two communities and conclude with a discussion of open challenges.Comment: To appear in Computational Linguistics. Accepted for publication: 18th February, 201

Consciousness, Learning and Interlanguage Pragmatics

During the past decade, the study of interlanguage pragmatics has produced important empirical findings, primarily through the identification and comparison of speech act realization patterns in various languages based on data from both native and nonnative speakers. In addition to this focus on product, some attention has been paid to the processes of comprehension and production in second language pragmatics (Frerch & Kasper 1984, 1989; Kasper 1984). In contrast to these concerns, there has been little discussion of how pragmatic abilities are acquired in a second language. This paper is concerned with the ways in which consciousness may be involved in learning the principles of discourse and pragmatics in a second language. The role of conscious and nonconscious processes in the acquisition of morphosyntax has been hotly debated within the field of second language acquisition (Krashen 1981, 1983; Munsell & Carr 1981; Rutherford & Sharwood Smith 1985; Seliger 1983; Sharwood Smith 1981), but these debates have ignored pragmatic and discoursal abilities. My discussion will of necessity be speculative, drawing on current theories of the role of consciousness in human learning in general, drawn primarily from cognitive science and experimental psychology, with some suggestions for the extension of general principles to the learning of pragmatics. This is an issue with important pedagogical implications. In second language teaching, as Richards (forthcoming) points out, there are currently two major approaches to the teaching of conversation in second language programs. The first is an indirect approach, in which conversational competence is seen as the product of engaging learners in conversational interaction; the underlying assumption is that the ability to carry on conversation (which includes pragmatic ability and other factors as well) is something that is acquired simply in the course of doing it. In practice, this leads to the use of group work activities or other tasks which require interaction. The second, a more direct approach, focuses explicitly on the strategies involved in conversation and emphasizes consciousness-raising concerning these strategies

Hybrid discourse modeling and summarization for a speech-to-speech translation system

The thesis discusses two parts of the speech-to-speech translation system VerbMobil: the dialogue model and one of its applications, multilingual summary generation. In connection with the dialogue model, two topics are of special interest: (a) the use of a default unification operation called overlay as the fundamental operation for dialogue management; and (b) an intentional model that is able to describe intentions in dialogue on five levels in a language-independent way. Besides the actual generation algorithm developed, we present a comprehensive evaluation of the summarization functionality. In addition to precision and recall, a new characterization - confabulation - is defined that provides a more precise understanding of the performance of complex natural language processing systems.Die vorliegende Arbeit behandelt hauptsächlich zwei Themen, die für das VerbMobil-System, ein Übersetzungssystem gesprochener Spontansprache, entwickelt wurden: das Dialogmodell und als Applikation die multilinguale Generierung von Ergebnissprotokollen. Für die Dialogmodellierung sind zwei Themen von besonderem Interesse. Das erste behandelt eine in der vorliegenden Arbeit formalisierte Default-Unifikations-Operation namens Overlay, die als fundamentale Operation für Diskursverarbeitung dient. Das zweite besteht aus einem intentionalen Modell, das Intentionen eines Dialogs auf fünf Ebenen in einer sprachunabhängigen Repräsentation darstellt. Neben dem für die Protokollgenerierung entwickelten Generierungsalgorithmus wird eine umfassende Evaluation zur Protokollgenerierungsfunktionalität vorgestellt. Zusätzlich zu "precision" und "recall" wird ein neues Maß - Konfabulation (Engl.: "confabulation") - vorgestellt, das eine präzisere Charakterisierung der Qualität eines komplexen Sprachverarbeitungssystems ermöglicht