Sharif Digital Repository

The inferential approach, in contrast with classic model of coding-decoding, regards communication something more than the mere decoding of the received message, and points to the inference as a pivotal element for the discovery of the intentional meaning in a communication. This line of research was beginned with the works of Paul Grice in the literature of the pragmatics. His theory proposes its cooperation principle and conversational maxims for that aim.Relevance theory, while accepting the pivotal role of the inference, replaces cognitive principle of relevance with those Gricean rules. Hence, it proposes a more comprehensive explanation of communication, with more simplicity and... 

Evidently, language knowledge is not limited to linguistic competence rather it is related to sociolinguistics competence as well. Moreover, the cultural norms of a society affect the way people communicate. In other words, language is the medium through which culture, tradition, and values are realized and manifested. Accordingly, speech acts such as congratulations and condolences are shaped by the cultural norms of societies and it is quite common to expect differences in congratulations and condolences strategies across cultures. The aim of this study was to contribute to the intercultural pragmatics by exploring the strategies used by Iranian Persian speakers, Iranian EFL learners, and... 

Various philosophical views on scientific models, in this research, are reviewed and criticized. From a syntactic point of view, a scientific theory is nothing but its models, and this is the theory that illustrates how the model is constructed. Pragmatic view, by adopting a pluralistic view, argue that the interpretive model provides the basis for the concretization of the abstract concepts of the theory, and it is possible that representational model is incompatible with the theory itself. The model works better than theory even in functions such as prediction, explanation and representation in some places. A group of philosophers believe that with the introduction of fiction discussion,... 

Although Robot Assisted Language Learning (RALL) has recently received attention as a tool for language learning, its role in pragmatic development has gone unnoticed. Hence, this study sought to explore the effect of RALL on pragmatic learning of greeting, thanking, and request speech acts by young Persian-speaking EFL learners. To this end, 38 preschool female and male kids (3-6 years old) were assigned to the RALL (19 students) and game-based (19 students) groups. The humanoid robot for the RALL group was used as an assistant to the teacher while for the game-based group the instruction was based on gaming methods such as command, mystery bag and pass the ball games. The instructional...