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The paper is concerned with some aspects of politeness in the request act by the pragmatic connotations of syntactic structures in Hindi and Persian. Considering the role of politeness as an explanation for the deviation from the Grice’s cooperative principle, the main question of the paper is whether Leech’s maxims of politeness operate on the syntagmatic and paradigmatic relations and whether there is any hierarchy in their manner of application. To answer the abovementioned question the main hypothesis of the research posits that Leech’s maxims of politeness have a structure of hierarchy in both Persian and Hindi. Considering the Pandharipandes' (1979) hierarchy of the degree of politeness proposed for Hindi, this paper aims to develop a similar hierarchy of the degree of politeness for Persian and to analyze the Leech’s maxims operating in the respective hierarchies of politeness. The general theoretical framework adopted for the present study is based on Lakoff (1972), and Leech (1980). Whereas the findings of this research indicate a hierarchy in Hindi and Persian at the syntagmatic planewith regard to their respective Leech’s maxims,no such hierarchyis detectable for paradigmatic relationwhichholds good for all types of social situations.

The topic of this paper is represented by the translation of French contracts through functional equivalence. In the first part of the study, we present the avatars of the concept of equivalence in Translation Studies, the notion of dynamic equivalence introduced by Eugene Nida and the functional equivalence principle, theorized by Katarina Reiss and Hans Vermeer. We also analyze the concept of equivalence in relation with legal translation and we emphasize the normative nature of the legal text and the importance of adequacy in translation. The second part of the paper is represented by the contrastive analysis of translation difficulties implied by French contracts. Such difficulties pertain to two classes: they may be terminological or discursive. We also propose translation solutions based on the functional equivalence principle.

The purpose of our paper is to highlight that extensive and cohesive reading has an important role to play in EFL learning. Extensive reading broadens and increases the students’ vocabulary exposing them to various registers of the target language. Cohesion refers to the relations of meaning that exist within the text and that define it as a text. The teacher can help the students use various cohesive chains, which form the backbones of different types of texts. He also needs to monitor each student’s reading and offer guidance and encouragement. Besides, the selection of the reading material should be appropriate to the learners’ linguistic level and their cultural particulars.

The current paper aims at presenting several English grammar mistakes that occur most frequently with foreign English speakers. It debates upon the English grammatical contexts that are usually confused by this category of speakers, also providing the readers with correct variants for each of the respective situations as well as with the necessary explanations for these variants. The paper intends to help readers avoid this type of errors, thus enhancing the importance of a correct usage of the language

The aim of this paper is to discuss the phenomenon of underspecification in early child grammar with respect to the syntactic consequences it has in the child language system. The paper addresses the phenomena of verb placement and optionality and how they are accounted for by first language acquisition theories assuming identity between child and adult grammatical systems. These phenomena are discussed within the weak and strong continuity frameworks which account for L1A by incorporating the notion of underspecification among their basic assumptions. Continuity approaches to L1A find underspecification to be of crucial importance in the early grammar. It seems that underspecification of functional categories and their features is what makes the child and adult systems different by provoking a number of syntactic consequences evident in the child system, while absent in the adult one

Teachers of EFL often claim that reading, writing and grammar are emphasized more than listening and speaking. However, when one looks in detail at high school student’s writing experience in Jordan, we find that it has been mainly at the sentence level. Students enter universities with little or no experience in producing paragraphs or essays. The university task is to take students through the tedious process of paragraph and essay writing (Markline &Issacson 1987, Reid & Lidstorm 1985, Silva 1990, Fawset & Sandberg 1996, etc). Cognitive maturity is, yet, a metalinguistic problem that teachers have to take into consideration in teaching writing (Flavell 1985, Devine &Boshoff 1993, Kasper 1998). This paper aims at investigating some problems at both the micro and the macro levels of texts produced by Arab EFL learners. At the micro level the study will be limited to the problem of lexis and lexical choice. At the macro level the study will high light problems related to run-on sentences, reference relations, tense sequencing and logical organization. This study attempts to shed light on a more serious problem pertaining to discourse and cognitive development posed by the texts produces. The paper concludes with pedagogical implications, suggestions and recommendations for the teaching of writing to EFL learners.

The purpose of our paper is to demonstrate that toponymy is a science that studies place names both by considering the relationship they maintain with the geographic objects they individualize by naming, and by researching their significance, etymology and changes (phonetic, semantic, morphosyntactic and onomasiological) that occured along their history within the process of denomination. The approach of the place names we quote (e. g. ‘Obcina Bătrână’) include the synchronic and the diachronic criteria, that complement each other. This assertion is supported by the fact that synchronic toponymy describes the situation at a certain point in time, i. e. in the present stage of functionning and existence of place names, whereas diachronic toponymy researches the evolution of facts and phenomena. We have analyzed the toponyms that we quote in our paper according to a series of concepts that were proposed and theorized by Dragoş Moldovanu (1972: 73-100) (such as ‘toponymic field’, ‘polarization’ and ‘differentiation’), concepts that aim both at emphasizing the relationship between the name and the extralinguistic object it designates, and at presenting the significance, etymology and changes the toponyms underwent in time within the denomination process. We have also intended to prove that common names and place names do not exclude each other, but develop a relationship of reciprocity in spite of certain semantic, derivational and grammatical peculiarities that separates them. Some place names are entopic (descriptive toponyms), while there are other that come from anthroponyms (personal toponyms). The linguistic material (toponyms we quote in the paper) was obtained from field surveys (in the upper basin of the river Bistriţa), from the investigation conducted on historical and geographic documents, and also from the information we received from the surveyed individuals that mostly concerns the way certain place names appeared and changed in time.

This paper emphasizes the comprehension difficulties relating to the technical vocabulary present in the courses for learners of public health- nurses at the National Institute for Higher Paramedical Training. By following an engineering approach, we tried, first of all, to detect the flaws encountered by these learners when understanding specialized vocabulary and, secondly, to set up a system of assistance to the understanding.

This paper demonstrates that T.S. Eliot’s Waste Land is a magic incantation to restore the lost values of the Western culture on realistic foundations. The poem’s intertextuality, together with its versification are analyzed in order to show Eliot’s view on Western man’s history: one of sin, fall and increasing decay. The main argument is that, through his poem, Eliot is attempting to restore humanity and its destiny away from the sad history in which it was cast from the beginning.

The paper aims to present group discussions as an efficient means for raising the students’ motivation level and increasing their involvement in the language learning process. Problem-solving discussion is a task-based activity viewed as a structural language endeavor, which leads to a range of outcomes for those undertaking the task. An organizational framework plays the key role for determining successful discussions. There are procedural steps of the group discussion sessions: the chairperson is chosen; the teacher selects the discussion topics; after formulating solutions, the chairperson directs the students to give an oral summary of the discussion proceedings; the teacher acts as a language consultant. Taking into consideration the students’ individual needs, we may use some techniques in order to deal with the uncooperative students.

This paper aims at identifying and analyzing some of the specific linguistic features of Physics of electricity in Romanian, as well as the manner of formation and functioning of scientific discourse in this field. The emergence of new branches of science, in the twentieth century, led not only to the increase in number of terminologies and to referential delimitation of terms, but also to the creation of an emerging interdisciplinary scientific vocabulary. We performed a double analysis, in terms of lexical structure and discursive organization, in an attempt to capture the early technical and scientific discourse features, in its didactic subtype, from the beginning of the twentieth century. Regarding the text syntagmatic features, in this paper we will consider the interference of verbal and non-verbal signs. The semiotic approach aims at an analysis of the share occupied by the two types of signs and of the modality in which they combine to create the Physics of electricity discourse.

The present article starts from the already well-known relationship between translation studies and pragmatics and aims to offer an analysis of the way in which several instances of irony in John Galsworthy’s novels are translated into Romanian. The paper approaches the phenomenon of irony comprising pragmatic theories such as: irony as substitute of literal meaning, as echoic mention, as pretence or simulation of illocutionary force of speech acts.

The aim of this paper is to present the role of the exercise in professional French courses, used as a means to master French in professional interaction.

Teachers of foreign languages in French state schools used to enjoy relative autonomy in both their choice of content and teaching practices. The curricula imposed broad guidelines, yet they were not as constraining or rigid as those of other countries, for instance, the National Curriculum system in the United Kingdom. However, since the introduction of the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages and the most recent reforms concerning the baccalauréat, most teachers feel they are losing control. This paper examines the changes in modern language teaching in French high schools and the effects these changes have had on the staff involved.

The aim of this paper is to present the idea of teaching written comprehension (reading) in specialized French courses. This study relies on an example provided by the experience of working with Romanian engineering students and proposes a didactic approach which aims to achieve the main objective of written comprehension: using a specialized vocabulary.

The goal of this paper is to analyze the syntax of spatial preposition in Persian language. This account is pretty novel as it analyzes the Persian prepositional phrases in a unified way, which does not restrict itself to some simple spatial prepositions. Rather, the approach taken accounts for both simple and complex spatial prepositions. Furthermore, there is a clear difference in spatial prepositions between Persian and other languages, like Spanish and English. In this study, some of the nuanced differences between Persian and Spanish, when it comes to spatial prepositions, are offered. Moreover, it goes further than this, by analyzing wh-questions responses in the form of spatial prepositions and shows the ungrammaticality of some of the answers by adhering to the principles stated in this novel approach. In this work, some important features of Persian spatial prepositions are further detailed which shows the rich internal structure of Persian spatial preposition and its flexibility of movement/orientation aspect.

This paper investigates the phenomenology of the gift in Norman Mailer’s The Gospel According to the Son and in Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary. Both texts are contemporary reinterpretations of the Gospels and they are resurrecting the Word through the process of defamiliarization. In Mailer’s text this takes the shape of a full-fledged narrative of the Gospels in which we are very sparingly given the author’s insight on the events. In Toibin’s novel we are assisting at a fist-person narrative of Mary, the mother of Christ, who is telling her version of the events around Christ’s death. Both texts present themselves as a necessary correction to the mistakes made by the apostles in writing the Gospels. These novels will be interpreted through the lens of Jacques Derrida’s and Jean-Luc Marion’s theories on the gift. In The Gift of Death Derrida viewed God’s gift to the world through the sacrifice of Christ as fraught with shortcomings. Norman Mailer’s novel rediscusses some of these limitations and puts into a new light Christ’s relationship with the Father. In his own analysis of the phenomenology of the gift, Jean-Luc Marion put forward the notion of “saturated reader” which entails the reader (understood in the large sense of the word) faced with the exceeding revelation of God. Colm Toibin’s The Testament of Mary constructs such a reader and foregrounds in an original way the phenomenology of the gift

Taking in consideration the rise of the Chinese-French novel in XX century in Francophone context, our paper aims to investigate first of all the way in which writers such as François Cheng, Shan Sa, e Ying Chen practice multilingualism in their works. Our approach will focus on semiotics and rhetorical elements to come to surface the link between visual quality of Chinese ideograms and figures of speech of French Language. Paratextual elements such as cover and title will be also involved in our analysis. The final purpose will be that of to provide the comprehension of diversity and multilingualism in FLE class-room throughout the evidence of Chinese-French writers as French language learners and throughout the multilingualism that involve their work.

Expanding on the contemporary lines of thought about the precarious situation of Africa and her youth, and based on linguistic, sociolinguistic and didactic facts, this papers postulates that the command of quality French is an essential component for the development of the French-speaking African youth and even the Francophone world, as French is definitely a language of science and technology; a window on modernity. Based on the Cameroon case study, this article came to the conclusion that if decision-makers fail to take appropriate actions against the ongoing distortion of the French language, Cameroon youth will continue its inexorable journey toward (social, political, economic).

The Francophone African detective novel uses absurdity to reveal with hurtful cruelty the fate and tragic existence of a people at the edge of abyss. Thus, in this detective novel, the character at first sets himself up as a distinct being, and the story progressively becomes a place of breakup of the original being. One then attends a strange world. In the Francophone detective novel, one deals with a universe in with the irrationality borders the magico-religious thought. This paper aims at showing that the Francophone detective novel gives the opportunity to see a social and political structure of the African society in which the religious unity and magical practices appear as the only expression of a shared spirituality. One might come to the conclusion that fantasy and absurdity in the Francophone detective novel permit to reproduce the image of a social chaos which is the result of a historical disaster that involves the impossibility to give certain logic to the reality.