Two issues pertaining to the use of metonymy that plays a central role in Slabakova et al. (2016) are mentioned in the very title of their study--novel metonymy and regular metonymy. In this article I draw attention to some problems with the identification of these as well as with the assumption that these are opposites of each other.

In this article, the central argument is that research on the semiotic repertoire should also focus on how repertoires are racialized, and race is evoked through the semiotic repertoire. The article uses data from the South African educational context to advance a position in which semiotic repertoires simultaneously give and restrict access,…

The aim of this commentary is to discuss and promote discussion on some linguistic and pedagogical issues around the use of gender inclusive language, particularly the -e morpheme in plural forms, in Spanish. Its speakers are experiencing and becoming aware of language change in real time concerning the use of morphosyntactic choices that seek…

Measuring lexical diversity in texts that have different lengths is problematic because length has a significant effect on the number of types a text contains, thus hampering any comparison. Treffers-Daller et al. (2018) recommended a simple solution, namely counting the number of types in a section of a given length that was extracted from the…

Applied linguists and Communication scholars have mainly adopted different yet complementary approaches to research on language and health communication. Using discourse-analytic (DA) approaches such as conversation analysis and corpus analysis, applied linguists tend to focus on describing and explicating health messaging techniques in naturally…

In the field of educational psychology, self-regulation is part of a well-established research paradigm that has been extensively applied to learning contexts. However, despite proposals highlighting its benefits, some researchers claim that its cross-pollination into applied linguistics has been slow. In their recent "Applied…

The focus to date on interactive encounters has resulted in there being little research into monological texts and speeches produced in English as a lingua franca (ELF) contexts. They are, however, the very substance of what interpreters and translators increasingly deal with today. The quality of these language professionals' performance depends…

Periods of extremely hot and cold weather can cause significant mortality and morbidity in both temperate and more extreme climates. In the UK, their occurrence prompts the issuing of number and colour coded warnings providing an assessment of the level of risk. These are designed to minimize health impact by prompting timely and appropriate…

This article combines research results centred on theory of mind (ToM) from cognitive and developmental psychology (Goldman 2006; Apperly 2010; Wilkinson and Ball 2012) with the notion of intersubjectivity in usage-based linguistics (i.a. Verhagen 2005; Nuyts 2012; Traugott 2012). It identifies some of the controversies in the literature from both…

In this article we explore the ways in which academic citation practices have changed over the past 50 years. Based on the analysis of a corpus of 2.2 million words from the same leading journals in four disciplines in 1965, 1985, and 2015, we document a substantial rise in citations over the period, particularly in applied linguistics and…

In the highly multicultural workplace of today's multinational corporations (MNCs), translating across different cultures becomes a crucial issue. But what precisely counts as culture in the global workplace of the MNC? What does it exactly mean to be able to translate across cultures under the regimes of evaluation adopted by MNCs? In this…

In institutional settings of globalization, labelled languages are generally preferred over multilingual repertoires and mobile language resources. Drawing on linguistic-ethnographic analysis of the way English is treated as an invariable "ad hoc" idiom in the Belgian asylum interview, this article demonstrates how institutional measures…

The article discusses epistemic stance in spoken L2 production. Using a subset of the Trinity Lancaster Corpus of spoken L2 production, we analysed the speech of 132 advanced L2 speakers from different L1 and cultural backgrounds taking part in four speaking tasks: one largely monologic presentation task and three interactive tasks. The study…

The mass media has an important role in informing the general public about emerging health risks. Content-based studies of risk communication in the media have revealed a tendency to exaggerate risks or simplify science, but linguistic studies in this area are still scarce. This paper outlines a corpus based investigation of media reporting on the…

John McHardy Sinclair has made major contributions to applied linguistics in three related areas: language in education, discourse analysis, and corpus-assisted lexicography. This article discusses the far-reaching implications for language description of this third area. The corpus-assisted search methodology provides empirical evidence for an…