This book investigates the notion of Speech Act from a cross-cultural perspective. The starting point for this book is the assumption that speech acts are realized from culture to culture in different ways and that these differences may result in communication difficulties that range from the humorous to the serious. Importantly, a recurring theme in this volume has to do with the need to verify the form, the function and the constraining variables of speech acts as a prerequisite for dealing with them in the classroom.
In the disciplines of applied linguistics and second language acquisition (SLA), the study of pragmatic competence has been driven by several fundamental questions: What does it mean to become pragmatically competent in a second language (L2)? How can we examine pragmatic competence to make inference of its development among L2 learners? In what ways do research findings inform teaching and assessment of pragmatic competence? This book explores these key issues in Japanese as a second/foreign language.
For the first time, every finite group is represented in the form of a graph in this book. This study is significant because properties of groups can be immediately obtained by looking at the graphs of the groups.
Since the publication of the first edition, the U.S. Surgeon General released the first-ever report on bone health and osteoporosis in October 2004. This report focuses even more attention on the devastating impact osteoporosis has on millions of lives. According to the National Osteoporosis Foundation, 2 million American men have osteoporosis, and another 12 million are at risk for this disease.
Experimental approaches to evolution provide indisputable evidence of evolution by directly observing the process at work. Experimental evolution deliberately duplicates evolutionary processes--forcing life histories to evolve, producing adaptations to stressful environmental conditions, and generating lineage splitting to create incipient species. This unique volume summarizes studies in experimental evolution, outlining current techniques and applications, and presenting the field's full range of research--from selection in the laboratory to the manipulation of populations in the wild.
