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What is the relationship between speech and experience? What is the experiential quality of speech? At first glance, these might seem like peculiar questions as speech and experience are inextricably tied together through habitual practices. The apparent inseparability of speech and experience renders such questions problematic for we cannot get beyond or outside of language by means of language alone. This article explores the ideological constitution of language as seen from the perspective of a remote group of Inuit hunters. It urges a more phenomenological approach to speech and experience. It is shown how moments of phenomenological awakening might help us understand better local indigenous ideologies of language and how this could shed light more generally on the relationship between experience and speech.

Assuming that demanding and asking are different types of requestives, the study hypothesized (a) that they differ in their degrees and types of indirectness in request head acts (HAs) and internal/external supportive discourse moves (ISMs/ESMs), (b) that this is informed by people’s ethnic mindsets, psychic delusions, and/or intentional attempts at negotiating social power, and (c) that any miscomputation of one’s true social power may change a ‘requestive’ into a an act of verbal ‘harassment’ that can terminate interlocutors’ relationships and connections. To test these hypotheses, 229 ‘hurting’ requests collected through verbal recalls, written recalls, and online interviews were coded by two expert human coders using Blum-Kulka, Færch and Kasper's (1989) coding scheme for HAs, and House and Kasper’s (1981) and Færch and Kasper’s (1989) coding schemes for ISMs and ESMs. Results indicated that hearers and speakers differ in their computations of requestives based on their ethnic, linguistic, and psychological perceptions.

Legal translators are often confronted with the peculiarities of legal writing, especially if they have undergone little training in legal matters (Bhatia, 1997; Tiersma, 1999; Williams, 2004; 2011). At the same time, both novice and experienced lawyers may find it difficult to understand legal texts in a second language due to linguistic shortcomings. This paper aims at exploring if second language professionals, scholars and students can learn the genre of the law through the medium of online specialized corpora. A trial lesson was given to 8 participants (4 translators, 1 academic student, and 3 lawyers) who attended a 3-hour workshop and were introduced to online legal corpora. This paper shows that the Internet is a rich source of free legal corpora which can be used for linguistic and translation purposes. It is concluded that professionals, scholars, and students can be trained to acquire the technological skills which will help them overcome the linguistic intricacies of the language of law.

A light verb basically constitutes the verbal element of a compound verb. Following Huddleston and Pullum (2002), this paper aims at discovering and analyzing syntactic patterns in which ‘zadan’, as one the most frequent light verbs in Persian, is the main verb. The research data were collected from the Updating Persian Corpus consisting of 48M words. The study adopted a descriptive-analytical method and a corpus-based survey design. The results indicated that zadan is used in five different syntactic patterns. In the first pattern, three phrases comprise the basic elements of the clause, but each of the remaining four patterns needs at least four syntactic elements: nouns, NPs, PPs, and the light verb zadan. In all of the sentences analyzed, 21 different semantic roles were found which were played by different syntactic categories. The findings of the study also showed that 28% and 72% of the occurrences of this light verb were transitive and intransitive respectively. In 43% of the cases, zadan was used as a stative verb whereas in 57% of the cases, the verb showed a dynamic situation. In over 90% of the occurrences of zadan as a light verb, there was not any equivalent in the form of a single-word verb.

This study tries to explore the stakeholders’ perception about the status quo of English for Medical Purposes (EMP) in Iranian context, and their ideas for the improvement of the current situation. For so doing, both quantitative and qualitative methods of data collection were used. In the first phase of the study, a structured questionnaire was developed and distributed among 282 Medical Students, 12 instructors, and 15 practitioners studying and working at Birjand University of Medical Sciences to probe into their perception of the extent to which the current EMP curriculum can satisfy medical students’ language needs. In the second phase of the study, 25 medical students, 8 instructors, 12 practitioners, and 3 EFL instructors were interviewed. The results of the first phase of the study (quantitative part) showed that the participants believed that the current EMP curriculum cannot satisfy medical students’ English language needs in the four major language skills and their subcomponents. Furthermore, they were not satisfied with the current class size, teaching and evaluation methods, textbooks, and the time allocated for teaching EMP. The findings of the second phase of the study (qualitative part) further confirmed the participants’ dissatisfaction with the components of the EMP curriculum. In addition, they believed that changes in the status quo of EMP should begin with the EMP educational policies. The findings are discussed and the implications for policy and practice are mentioned.

The current study explores the language of non-commercial advertising, both quantitatively and qualitatively, within the framework of pragmatics. The main incentive is (1) to investigate how creators of such advertising aim to seek attention, inform and persuade, and (2) to examine whether non-commercial and commercial advertising differ linguistically. Orbiting around key notions of Relevance Theory and Tanaka’s pragmatic approach to advertising, the study pays attention to how collected advertisements use internal and external contexts in their explicit and implicit language, and whether their language complies with the hierarchy present in commercial advertising in which information is subordinated to persuasion. The findings show that language functions in non-commercial advertising are frequently incorporated into complex arrangements in which they sometimes overlap and/or collaborate. Such arrangements appear to cause the audience to be inventive and to use extra processing efforts in solving explicit and implicit problems of the stimulus. Moreover, it is suggested that non-commercial and commercial advertising do not differ from one another in a linguistic sense. There are, indeed, times when non-commercial advertisers leave out clear persuasion and instead aim their main focus at improving the audience’s knowledge. In a purely linguistic sense, however, it is shown that persuasive language is always embedded, which indicates that the genre is not necessarily less persuasive than its commercial counterpart.

Due to the less successful results of traditional methods of vocabulary learning, such as memorization and translation, new ways of learning and retaining vocabulary items have recently been investigated by researchers and tried by instructors. Using word games has been suggested as a promising way to teach vocabulary items and to transform vocabulary knowledge from passive to active. The present study aimed to find the effects of word games on Iranian elementary EFL learners’ vocabulary achievement. 60 (N=60) Iranian elementary students were randomly divided into a control and an experimental groups; they took a vocabulary pre-test and re-took it as the post-test. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to analyze the scores obtained from the two groups. To find any probable differences in the achievements of the two groups, a mixed between-within design ANOVA was conducted. Results are reported, and implications for the teaching of vocabulary items are discussed.

Foreign language writing has been taught through the traditional focus-on-product (or product-based) approach, but the recent demands for training IELTS candidates for better test performance has highlighted the pressing need for crash coaching courses that empower IELTS test takers to gain the ability to perform much more efficiently on the test. To see if the process-based approach to FL writing has any merit over the traditional product-based approach, 76 (N=76) upper-intermediate IELTS-trainee candidates took part in the current study. They were matched into the control (or product-based) and experimental (or process-based) groups (38 each) to make sure both groups were homogeneous at the onset of the study. The appropriate teaching approach was adopted for the teaching of IELTS writing tasks to each group. The pretest and post-test data were analyzed using a mixed between-within design ANOVA. It was found that the process-based approach to the teaching of writing in IELTS training courses results in much greater achievement.