Language play is a key component of many children's popular graphic novels. The authors analyze the sound and word play in Dav Pilkey's illustrated Captain Underpants series. They argue that Pilkey's literary devices fall into two main areas of hyperbole and linguistic creativity and that Pilkey's language shifts the reader into a carnivalesque…

This article traces the history of college writing and suggests a different way ahead. To show why we need this approach, the article historicizes the start of postsecondary English as a paradoxical one, committed to egalitarian ideals while privileging narrow and exclusive English usage. To offer an alternative approach, the article synthesizes…

This article is concerned with the history of "yours sincerely," a popular closing formula in English epistolary discourse. The formula was already used sporadically in the seventeenth century, gradually increased in frequency in the Late Modern period, and was the preferred subscription in English business correspondence by the end of…

This article establishes a pedagogic reading of Wittgenstein's later work, which explores the significance of teaching and learning themes through close textual analysis and archival work on his Nachlass. I argue for the prevalence and importance of Wittgenstein's references to teaching, learning and training by showing the role these references…

Ambridge's proposal cannot account for the most basic observations about phonological patterns in human languages. Outside of the earliest stages of phonological production by toddlers, the phonological systems of speakers/learners exhibit internal behaviours that point to the representation and processing of inter-related units ranging in size…

The paper examines how children quote their parents' utterances. In other words, it investigates linguistic recycling as an aspect of language learning and how the child-directed speech (CDS) of adults influences child speech (CS). This topic is examined especially in the light of research made in the crosslinguistic project on pre- and…

This paper explores the applications of pattern grammar and local grammar in English language teaching, focusing specifically on the design of teaching materials. It shows that grammar patterns can be systematically analysed from a local grammar perspective, and further argues that the practice of local grammar analyses helps to raise language…

This study aims at identifying the poetic devices overlapping with the genre of fiction in Laila Al Atrash's novel "The Sons of the Wind". The devices the study explores are the poetics of the title, poetics of the prologue and poetics of the language upon which the writer relies to support her point of view about the topics and issues…

Appraisal/Evaluation within Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is a rather new framework for the analysis of evaluative language, focusing on how human beings reveal their emotions directly or indirectly, how they take stances, and how they align or disalign themselves with social subjects. Through an attitudinal analysis of the system of…

Teachers in their practice make choices grounded in their teaching experience resulting in what could be labelled design solutions. An identified problem is that these design solutions stay at the level of individual solutions and do not reach the teaching community. The aim of this article is to study how teachers´ design solutions can be…

In current literature, metaphor is treated as either an instance of implicit comparison or as a nonliteral class-inclusion statement. I will argue that, contrary to these positions, the notions of comparison and class-inclusion are not mutually exclusive in character but rather complementary cognitive concepts which entail one another. While…

Mother-tongue teachers teach argumentation analysis. To this end, among other things, they use a stylistic meta-language, i.e. the tropes and figures of style, to analyse arguments as well as more aesthetic communication. The best-known trope is the metaphor. In this article it is argued that a more pragmatic view on the related figure metonymy…

Time is a fundamental domain of experience. In this paper we ask whether aspects of language and culture affect how people think about this domain. Specifically, we consider whether English and Mandarin speakers think about time differently. We review all of the available evidence both for and against this hypothesis, and report new data that…

The basic questions that a scholar interested in the study of language asks are concerned with language structure, acquisition, and change. William Labov is a linguist who has deeply influenced the linguistic scene in the past 60 years. It is to Labov's credit that he showed, backed by solid evidence, that the questions concerning language change,…

It is a long-standing and commonly held belief in the United Kingdom and elsewhere that the use of elite forms of language reflects superior intellect and education. Expert opinion from sociolinguistics, however, contends that such a view is the result of middle-class bias and cannot be scientifically justified. In the 1960s and 1970s, such…