To secure mutual understanding in interaction, speakers sometimes explain or negotiate expressions. Adopting a conversation analytic and interaction linguistic approach, I examine how participants explain which kinds of expressions in different sequential environments, using the format "x heißt y" ("x means y"). When speakers…

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…

Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…

This chapter compares two teachers' definitional practices in two Content-and-Language-Integrated-Learning (CLIL) lessons, i.e. physics and history, which are taught in English in Finland. It adopts Dalton-Puffer's (Eur J Appl Linguistics 1(2):216-253, 2013; Cognitive discourse functions: specifying an integrative interdisciplinary construct. In:…

Collocations, no matter where to use them, are an important linguistic issue if it is native fluency that is longed for in academic writing. In line with that, the present study aimed at increasing the awareness towards the importance of collocations in order to have native fluency in academic writing; making some suggestions regarding involvement…

This study examined the effect of etymological elaboration, pictorial elucidation, and integration of these 2 strategies on idiom learning by L2 learners. A total number of 80 homogeneous intermediate learners studying English at 3 language institutes in Isfahan, Iran, were selected. The intermediate participants were selected as the result of…

The purpose of this study was to expand the current literature on word definitions by focusing on definitions of idioms provided by several age groups. Preadolescents, young adolescents, older adolescents, and adults wrote definitions for 10 frequently used idioms and also rated their familiarity with the idiomatic expressions. Participants'…

Since the late 1980s, collocations have received increasing attention in applied linguistics, especially language teaching, as is evidenced by the many publications on the topic. These works fall roughly into two lines of research (a) those focusing on the identification and use of collocations (Benson, 1989; Hunston, 2002; Hunston & Francis,…

This paper accepts Labov's (1973) criticisms of the categorial approach, i.e., the view that linguistic units are categories which are discrete, invariant, qualitatively distinct, conjunctively defined, and composed of atomic primes, and follows Labov in attempting to develop a non-categorial (or fuzzy-categorial) approach to lexical semantics,…

Reports three studies which explored relationships between prototypicality and sentence structure in recall, preference ratings, and natural dictionary definitions. The results can be explained in terms of the sensitivity of sentence production processes to the lexical or conceptual accessibility of prototypes. (Author/AMH)

Contends that the large vocabulary used for precise purposes in physics contains many words that have related but potentially confusing meanings in everyday usage. Analyzes the treatment of Newton's Laws of Motion in several well-known introductory textbooks for evidence of inconsistent language use. Makes teaching suggestions. (Contains 11…

This paper is an attempt to summarize as explicitly as possible certain empirical findings of classical biosystematics and modern semantic ethnography which may be considered to represent formal universals of human mental structure. The paper offers a formal treatment of the subject of taxonomy, and an application of the formalism to several…

Discusses the active contribution a learner/user must make in using a dictionary and breaks the look-up process into seven main steps. (EKN)

This article shows that bilingualism can be an enriching part of children's lives. A young child named Anna, living in a bilingual environment in which English and Finnish were spoken, was observed and her speech recorded. This discussion focuses on aspects of Anna's acquisition of language. Initial discussion works toward a definition of…

In a study at Memphis State University (Tennessee), international students training as teaching assistants were taught the importance of discourse markers and other techniques for communicating in the classroom. The discourse markers are verbal cues that serve important pedagogical functions such as separating ideas, indicating temporal…