Few individuals--whether scholars or laypersons--think that the words "smart" or "intelligent" suffice to characterize a person's intellectual strengths. In this article, the author reviews a set of terms commonly used to characterize intellectual strengths and then introduces the concept of "synthesizing"--an…

In this study, we use temporally aligned word embeddings and a large diachronic corpus of English to quantify language change in a data-driven, scalable way, which is grounded in language use. We show a unique and reliable relation between measures of language change and age of acquisition ("AoA") while controlling for frequency,…

Scholars have long debated whether Old and Middle English (ME) are different diachronic stages of one language, or whether they are two closely related languages that have different historical roots. A general assumption is that Middle and Modern English descend from Old English (OE), similar to the way Middle and Modern German descend from Old…

This study investigated how adult second language (L2) speakers of French with near-native proficiency realize verbal negation, a well-known sociolinguistic variable in contemporary spoken French. Data included 10 spontaneous informal conversations between near-native speakers of French and native speakers (NSs) closely acquainted with them.…

The aim of this study is to explore (non)morphological processes that native speakers of Jordanian Urban Arabic and Jordanian Rural Arabic use to expand their own lexicon. Three Jordanian female respondents were interviewed to collect data. The data consist of transcriptions of recorded tokens, which were categorised into groups according to the…

This research aims to identify the types of interference and factor of interference. The object of this research is the daily conversations of the students at a University in Indonesia. The research focused on English interference that occurs in Javanese Language and Indonesian Language in everyday conversation. Data is obtained by observation…

Creativity is commonly assessed using divergent thinking tasks, which measure the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participant output on a variety of different tasks. This study assesses the degree to which creativity can be identified based on linguistic features of participants' language while completing collaborative…

This dissertation investigates code-switching (CS), the concurrent use of more than one language in conversation, commonly observed in bilingual speech. Assuming that code-switching is subject to universal principles, just like monolingual grammar, the dissertation provides a principled account of code-switching, with particular emphasis on OV~VO…

This article aims at the feature analysis of four expository essays (Text A/B/C/D) written by secondary school students with a focus on the differences between spoken and written language. Texts C and D are better written compared with the other two (Texts A&B) which are considered more spoken in language using. The language features are…

This article underscores the importance of keeping up to date with vocabulary which is currently employed in English-speaking countries. It argues that textbooks, dictionaries and even corpora are not the most reliable sources to do this, and puts forward a pedagogical proposal--grounded in the Lexical Approach and three pedagogical innovation…