Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-78) Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-161).

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 29, 1994." Also available in print.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1995. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 28, 1995." Also available in print.

This study examines the speech act of refusal among Saudis. Specifically, it investigates the refusal strategies implemented by Saudis in Saudi Arabian Social settings. Data was gathered using Discourse Completion Task (DCT). Thirty Saudi male and female students, graduate, undergraduate, and ESL students participated in this study creating 180 natural responses. The responses were coded and classified according to the classification of refusals proposed by Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss- Weltz. The results revealed that Saudi females and males choose to use indirectness more than directness when refusing an invitation. Even when using direct strategies, indirect strategies accompany the direct once to mitigate the threat of directness. The results also showed a great deal of implementing adjuncts as part of Saudis refusal statements. The result showed that Saudis use one new strategy, refusal-functioning acceptance, and one new adjunct, pray.

This study was designed to examine the hypothesis that the speech of criminal psychopaths is poorly integrated. Measures of cohesion (lexical, referential, conjunctive) and coherence (plot-units) were used to assess the degree to which independent clauses were linked together in the personal narratives of criminal psychopaths and criminal nonpsychopaths. General deviance in communication, as measured by the Scale for Thought, Language, and Communication Disorders (Andreasen, 1980), was also assessed. A significant number of psychopaths produced disordered communications. These communications failed on a number of levels: Psychopaths used relatively few cohesive links between sentences, failed to provide appropriate referents in discourse, failed to link action and resolution in stories, and showed significant clinical impairment in their ability to communicate. The results suggest that effective connections among speech units in psychopaths' discourse are not as numerous as those found in nonpsychopaths. In addition, psychopaths may suffer from a more general impairment in communication that is related to, among other things, discourse which has a tendancy to slip off track and a failure to directly answer a listener's questions. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate

Current technologies are not sufficient to support the full spectrum of organizational communications because organizations are open systems and organizational communication is rather complex (e.g., involves negotiations). Speech Acts is a branch of Linguistics which views speaking to be the same as acting. Recently, Speech Acts theory has been introduced into the design of computer systems, like organizational information systems (OISs), that require complex interactions among themselves. By doing so, it is hoped that actions can be incorporated into man-machine and machine-machine communications. In this thesis, one tractable portion of the speech act theory was identified which can provide a basis for the automation of a class of semi-structured communications (e.g., simple negotiations) in a distributed organizational environment. This portion of rather abstract Linguistics theory was transformed into a concrete application layer communication protocol (namely, the SACT protocol), which was then validated using a protocol validation tool (i.e., VALIRA), specified in a standard formal specification language LOTOS, and simulated using a protocol development toolkit (i.e., the Ottawa University LOTOS Toolkit). This protocol can be used by computer-based organizational systems to automate simple negotiations, as well as recurring tasks of collecting information in an organizational environment. In addition, a communication scheme (called SACT network) was added to the Woo and Lochovsky's MOAP (Micro Organization Activity Processor) model to automate inter-micro-organizational communications using the SACT protocol. The usefulness of this scheme is demonstrated through an example application. / Science, Faculty of / Computer Science, Department of / Graduate

This study addresses a familiar challenge in corpus pragmatic research: the search for functional phenomena in large electronic corpora. Speech acts are one area of research that falls into this functional domain and the question of how to identify them in corpora has occupied researchers over the past 20 years. This study focuses on apologies as a speech act that is characterised by a standard set of routine expressions, making it easier to search for with corpus linguistic tools. Nevertheless, even for a comparatively formulaic speech act, such as apologies, the polysemous nature of forms (cf. e.g. I am sorry vs. a sorry state) impacts the precision of the search output so that previous studies of smaller data samples had to resort to manual microanalysis. In this study, we introduce an innovative methodological approach that demonstrates how the combination of different types of collocational analysis can facilitate the study of speech acts in larger corpora. By first establishing a collocational profile for each of the Illocutionary Force Indicating Devices associated with apologies and then scrutinising their shared and unique collocates, unwanted hits can be discarded and the amount of manual intervention reduced. Thus, this article introduces new possibilities in the field of corpus-based speech act analysis and encourages the study of pragmatic phenomena in large corpora.

The following report discusses the design and formative evaluation of a prototype for a computer-based course to teach speech acts as part of the Technology Assisted Language Learning (TALL) program. The report includes a literature review on speech acts and current methods and strategies for language teaching and instructional design. Next, there is a description of the lessons and the design process, as well as a summary of the formative evaluation. Following is the prototype of the lesson on apologies. The report concludes with a discussion of the project's limitations and suggestions for future research.

This empirical study examines politeness phenomena in the English of first and second language students at an academic institution. Using the theoretical framework of the CCSARP, a OCT and a qualitative questionnaire were used to analyze the speech act realizations of requests and apologies. The main objective of the study was to establish the extent of differences in the choice of speech act realizations and whether distinct patterns of speech act behaviour obtained. Findings show evidence of a difference in preference for positive and negative politeness strategies. The L2's expressed more of a concern for solidarity, than for social distance and deference, using in-group markers to signal social closeness. The L 1 's use of internal modification, in the form of downgraders, exhibited negative politeness. The frequent use of indirectness, especially hints, reflected a hesitancy to impose. Results from the investigation could have implications for enhancing cross-cultural communication. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Linguistics)