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Postilion sentences

University of Wales, Bangor

A pragmatic perspective in language intervention requires that we look critically at the kind of language we teach, to ensure that it is useful outside the teaching situation. However, many sentences introduced in teaching seem to have little or no chance of ever being used in real life (POSTILION SENTENCES), at least not without taking careful account of their contextual restrictions, and sometimes modifying their prosodic form. Their role is chiefly to instil a structure, and their pragmatic value is negligible. The contextual differences are illustrated from several sentences, to make the point that the goal of carryover is likely to be problematic when there is no pragmatic equivalence. If teaching and therapy is to be efficacious, generalization of skills from classroom and clinic to the outside world is essential, and this is possible only within a pragmatic frame of reference.

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