This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

Children begin to learn abstract rules at an early age, in an implicit way, without access to rule descriptions. They rely on specific rule instances that they encounter. However, rule instances often co-occur with rule-inconsistent instances. One kind of inconsistent input, non-application instances, constitutes a learnability problem. For…

Causal sequences can be segmented into cause and effect. However, some argue causal relations in discourse are by default in "effect-cause" order. Others claim "cause-effect" order is easier to process and the default way of expressing causality, due to iconicity. We conducted experiments testing participants' production…

Human beings need to interact and communicate with each other in their life. This interaction and communication may appear in different language styles. This is much more influenced by a situation or place where communication takes place. In class, for example, the language utilized by lecturers in the class room is different from others. This…

This study investigates the use of anadiplosis in both English and Arabic. It focuses primarily on outlining and defining the so-called "reduced" anadiplosis in some Quranic verses. The study investigates, too, the most popular English translations of them, highlighting the mismatches between the original holy text and its translations.…

The present research work deals with subtitling errors encountered by simulators and proof-readers. The resultant work is of significant contribution to problem decision makings in the field of quality assessment of audiovisual translation (AVT). The outcome of this paper is the result of accumulated working experience in this domain. The relevant…

A study was conducted to examine the differences in narrative essays produced by skilled and unskilled EFL student writers. Twenty-six Japanese university students participated in the study. They were told to write a narrative story based on six-frame pictures. The students were classified into two groups, skilled and unskilled, according to the…

The present study aimed at analyzing writing errors caused by the interference of the Persian language, regarded as the first language (L1), in three writing genres, namely narration, description, and comparison/contrast by Iranian EFL students. 65 English paragraphs written by the participants, who were at the intermediate level based on their…

Studies indicate that cultural properties of texts affect reading at the content and textual levels. However, research has not adequately addressed the effects of the cross-cultural pragmatics of discourse on readers. Therefore, this study explored whether or not cultural factors play a role in reading comprehension by comparing Turkish and…

Inverted sentence order (order other than subject-verb-object) may be used to mimic the rhythm of real dialogue; give the play-by-play announcer time to come up with the player's name; indicate the relative importance of the subject, verb, and object; distribute information; and indicate connection with prior information. As a stylistic option,…

Syntactic synonymy enables the speaker to use syntactic devices to say the same thing in a number of different ways. It is based on three criteria: (1) similarity of semantic content, (2) certain syntactic similarity between the components of the synonymous structures, and (3) differences in surface structures. The third criterion separates…

This paper describes a demonstration of a totally integrated discovery procedure to present sentence-combining practice. This practice makes students aware not only of the complex structures but of the usage and style related to each structure. Guidelines for the execution of the practice include: (1) the use of a sequence of questions by the…

An examination of the stylistic differences among writing from literary specialists, from science, and from social science shows that a more precise diagnosis of the writing problems of clarity and coherence is possible. Ten randomly selected paragraphs from each of four publications, the "Canadian Medical Association Journal," the "Canadian…

The existence of a "literary dialect" was postulated on several grounds, and specific syntactic structures were hypothesized to be literary or nonliterary. This was tested by obtaining judgments from adults on hypothesized literary and nonliterary structures, each presented at two levels of vocabulary difficulty. (HOD)

Tests claims regarding "get"-passives in English via interrogation of a set of written and spoken corpora. The data suggest that "get"-passives are often associated with two types of pragmatic implicature. Finally, the corpus provides evidence of three types of variation with 'get'-passives: regional, stylistic, and diachronic.…