The words in a language or language variety are often rank ordered in lists that are meant to reflect the relative importance of those words to language users and learners of a language. This rank ordering is done on the basis of the relative prevalence of words in a corpus. Lexical prevalence is often operationalized as measures of frequency,…

With the increasing use of mobile phones among young people, there is growing public concern about possible detrimental effects of digital writing on learners' literacy and language skills. We ask whether and to what extent nonstandard forms typical of spoken Hebrew and of digital communication are also found in the formal writing of high-school…

One of the important components in second language (L2) development is to produce clause-level units of form-meaning pairings or argument structure constructions. Based on the usage-based constructionist approach that language development entails an ability to use more diverse, more complex, and less frequent constructions, this study tested…

This article studies the Western perceptions of and relations with Hong Kong a decade after the reversion of the sovereignty from Britain to China in 1997. Previous studies have demonstrated that the West had a significantly negative view on the future of Hong Kong with respect to the handover. According to recent observations, however, the…

This article makes a contribution to understanding informal argumentation by focusing on the discourse of reading groups. Reading groups, an important cultural phenomenon in Britain and other countries, regularly meet in members' houses, in pubs or restaurants, in bookshops, workplaces, schools or prisons to share their experiences of reading…

The relationship between language and identity has been explored in a number of ways in applied linguistics, and this article focuses on a particular aspect of it: self-representation in the oral history interview. People from a wide range of backgrounds, currently resident in one large city in England, were asked to reflect on their lives as part…