Amidst ongoing global debate about reproductive rights, questions have emerged about the role of language in reinforcing stigma around termination. Amongst some 'pro-choice' groups, the use of "pro-life" is discouraged, and "anti-abortion" is recommended. In UK official documents, "termination of pregnancy" is…

This paper offers a linguistic approach to narrative analysis, illustrated through a quantitative/qualitative lexico-semantic study of sustainability reports by BP, Equinor, ConocoPhillips, and ExxonMobil. It contributes novel insights into how major CO2 emitters present themselves in climate narratives. My aim is, first, to show how the basic…

This article presents results of two off-line comprehension tasks investigating the acceptability of unconventional and conventional metonymy by native speakers of Korean and Spanish who speak English as a second language. We are interested in discovering whether learners differentiate between conventional and unconventional metonymy, and whether…

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…

Illuminates the psycholinguist mechanism that underlies the claim made by the output hypothesis that production makes the learner move from semantic processing prevalent in comprehension to more syntactic processing that is necessary for second language development. Reviews previous literature in language acquisition and cognitive psychology on…

In line with recent critiques of communicative language teaching (Byrnes and Maxim 2004; Byrnes 2006), this paper considers how instances of spontaneous, creative language play can afford access to a range of linguistic practices that are often devalued or ignored in classrooms. To this end, it examines how university students in an advanced…

Examined the intonation of second-language speakers of English from three language groups--Spanish, Japanese, and Thai--focusing on how native nonnative speakers use intonation to signal meaning in the structure of their discourse. Results revealed that nonnative speakers did not consistently use pitch to signal meaningful contrasts in many…

The objective of this response article is to think through some of what I see as the far-reaching implications of a recent paper by Eric Hauser (2005) entitled "Coding 'corrective recasts': the maintenance of meaning and more fundamental problems". Hauser makes a compelling, empirically-backed case for his contention that, contrary to widespread…

Analyzes the use of language in two British and Australian secondary school textbooks and a corpus of written British English of one million words. Significant differences were found in the distribution of syntactic patterns in the two books, and these differences are discussed as evidence of the ideological stances expressed in the books.…

Considers previous research and data regarding the relative frequencies of a wide variety of lexical items expressing doubt and certainty in written and spoken corpuses and uses the data to evaluate the adequacy of some well-known English as a second language textbooks. (Author/CB)