The meanings of natural language utterances depend heavily on context. Yet, what counts as context is often only implicit in conversation. The utterance "it's warm outside" signals that the temperature outside is relatively high, but the temperature could be high relative to a number of different "comparison classes": other…

Automatic short answer grading is an important research direction in the exploration of how to use artificial intelligence (AI)-based tools to improve education. Current state-of-the-art approaches use neural language models to create vectorized representations of students responses, followed by classifiers to predict the score. However, these…

Background/Objectives: There is no attempt to investigate the relationships between dependency and markedness even though the syntactic roles in language are decided by dependency relations and markers. The main objective of this study was to understand markedness beyond syntactical tables and propose a syntax graph with various syntax structures…

Traditionally, transfer is described as interference and consequently as an unintentional mechanism. More recently, however, the perception of control in transfer has changed and it is now commonly accepted that transfer can occur both automatically and strategically. Studies have previously employed think-aloud protocols during writing tasks to…

Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two…

Suriname represents an interesting case of unidirectional multilingual convergence in a linguistic area. The multilingual ecology of Suriname is hierarchical. The Germanic language Dutch exerts structural and lexical influence 'downwards', but other languages do not do so 'upwards' to the same degree. This study analyses the development of word…

This study investigates the effects of Processing Instruction (PI) on the acquisition of grammatical gender and gender-marked pronouns in German. PI was compared to Traditional Instruction, i.e. a traditional, vocabulary-oriented approach using color cues (TI) and a Categorization and Memorization task (CM). The results of an immediate posttest…

Motion is a universal concept in common human perception. In the word system of a language, verb is inherently a very complex real word, both in terms of grammar and semantics, that complexity is due to the influence of the semantics of this word. However, in most of the previous studies, the authors often only focused on studying single word…

President Barack Obama's use of the hedging language is an evidence of his unique mastery of rhetorical strategies, power of persuasion and an influential speaker. The purpose of this study was to identify and retrieve the hedging devices contained in President Obama's speeches. For this purpose, his most important and decisive speeches were…

Languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area have been reported to lack a dedicated means of expressing the privative meaning that encodes the absence of a participant in a situation. This micro-typological study identifies alternative strategies that the languages in this area employ to function without dedicated privative markers, namely…

Research on second language (L2) pronoun use in null-argument languages has traditionally focused on whether or not a speaker's first language (L1) also allows null pronouns. However, recent studies have pointed out that it is equally important to consider the specific linguistic properties of overt pronouns in the L1 and L2, which may differ even…

Synonyms can be problematic for EFL learners since each synonym has distinct meanings to be used in different context. The purposes of this corpus-based study are to investigate distinctions of the synonymous nouns purpose, goal and objective based on the distribution across genres in which the degree of formality is determined and to examine…

While it is known that heritage speakers diverge from the homeland baseline, there is still no consensus on the mechanisms triggering this divergence. We investigate the impact of two potential factors shaping adult heritage language (HL) grammars: (1) cross-linguistic influence (CLI), originally proposed for second language acquisition (SLA), and…

This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…

Since the Korean pronoun system does not specify gender indication, Korean speakers of English tend to have difficulties when they use English pronouns. This paper explores how absence of obligatory gender marking in Korean affects gender errors in the production of English. Gender pronoun errors made by Korean learners of English were analyzed…