The purpose of this research is to explore three English synonyms, namely critical, serious, and crucial, with a particular focus on meanings, degrees of formality, collocations, and semantic preferences. Two dictionaries, namely the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online, as well as the Corpus…

This research investigated three synonymous adjectives "perfect," "flawless," and "impeccable" in terms of meaning, degree of formality, collocations, and grammatical patterns. The three synonymous adjectives were scrutinized through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings suggested that these…

The preeminence of English as the lingua franca in global science has led to English-dominant publication practices, even in non-English-speaking countries. We examine the complex dynamics of language use in scientific publications in China, a major contributor to global scientific output, and the tensions between English and the native language.…

Lexical bundles are recurrent multiword combinations and often function as discourse building blocks. Lexical bundles have been analysed in university students' writing to detect linguistic errors, measure writing competence, and investigate the divergence between L1 and L2 writing. Few studies, however, have focused on the high-stakes genre of…

In this article we explore the ways in which academic citation practices have changed over the past 50 years. Based on the analysis of a corpus of 2.2 million words from the same leading journals in four disciplines in 1965, 1985, and 2015, we document a substantial rise in citations over the period, particularly in applied linguistics and…

Much research has been done in the realization of apology and request speech act but very few have explored this in the context of Arabic language. We perform a Systematic Literature Review (SLR) process in this paper to gather and analyze studies to identify the diverse apology and request strategies preferred by Arabic learners of English and…

Language education policies contain discourses that have language ideologies embedded within them. This study explores the language ideologies in official language education policy documents of Pakistan from 2000 to 2020. Using Corpus Assisted Critical Discourse Analysis techniques, a 1.28 million-word-corpus was generated from 32 policy documents…

This study adopts the revised interpersonal model of metadiscourse to discover whether and to what extent Chinese authors employ a varying amount of Interactional Metadiscourse (IM) in the past decade in English abstracts of economics Research Articles (RAs). The data was drawn from a prestigious economics journal in China to compose a corpus of…