Stance is a feature of academic writing that refers to how writers interact and engage with their readers by means of linguistic devices. This study focuses on the grammatical devices--and semantic distinctions thereof--that are employed by academic writers of English to express stance in research article abstracts in the areas of applied…

Innovation and the development of knowledge in the field of scientific research is increasing exponentially, but it continues to be disjointed. It makes it difficult to keep up with state-of-the-art and to be at the forefront of research and dissemination, as well as to evaluate empirical evidence in the area of academic excellence. Recent…

The dominance of syntactic studies in linguistics has caused lexis and grammar to be perceived as two distinct categories. With introduction of the paradigm of cognitive linguistics, the studies in syntax have been replaced by those in lexis and concepts. Semantics has come to the fore through the studies in cognitive linguistics, and there has…

This study aimed to investigate gender representation in an English textbook series used in Hong Kong schools. The corpus software AntConc was used to analyse the collocations of gendered terms "He/he," "She/she," "Man/man," "Woman/woman," "women," "Boy/boy," "Boys/boys,"…

The fact that English non-count abstract nouns such as knowledge are compatible with the indefinite article a/an is not only perplexing for second language (L2) learners of English but also troublesome for both native and non-native English teachers. This paper does research on this curious phenomenon of English grammar to clarify its mechanism…