This study examines the effect of familiarity, context, and linguistic convention on idiom comprehension in Mandarin speaking children. Two experiments (a comprehension task followed by a comprehension task coupled with a metapragmatic task) were administered to test participants in three age groups (6 and 9-year-olds, and an adult control group).…

We describe the nature of the evidential system in Tibetan and consider the challenges that any evidential system presents to language acquisition. We present data from Tibetan-speaking children that shed light on their understanding of the syntactic and semantic properties of evidentials, and their competence in the point-of-view shift required…

Drawing on the findings of an ESRC-funded research study, which included a detailed linguistic analysis of a large corpus of writing from secondary English classrooms, this article describes patterns of linguistic deployment at the level of the sentence. Given the limited number of applied linguistic studies which consider writing development in…

Differences in the ways that men and women use language have long been of interest in the study of discourse. Despite extensive theorizing, actual empirical investigations have yet to converge on a coherent picture of gender differences in language. A significant reason is the lack of agreement over the best way to analyze language. In this…

A study investigated late emergence, in learners of English as a Second Language, of the ability to interpret object gaps in purpose clauses (PCs). Subjects were 34 adult native speakers of French. Results indicate difficulty interpreting only PCs with prepositional object gaps, supporting the hypothesis that syntactically marked construction may…

This study investigated the earliest manifestations of verb tense and agreement in English-speaking children, using longitudinal data on the language of four children aged 1:6 to 3:5 years, drawn from a child-language database. Analysis focused on one aspect of inflectional phrase (IP), the children's use of the verbs "be" and "do" forms to mark…

A descriptive and cross-cultural analysis of greeting forms, both verbal and nonverbal, used among Uzbek and American people is presented. Aspects discussed include: the general usage patterns of greeting forms; their frequency and distribution in particular social situations in relation to the speakers' profession, age, gender, and social…