Taking a dynamic usage-based perspective, this longitudinal case study compares the development of sentence complexity in speaking versus writing in two beginner Taiwanese learners of English (identical twins) in an extensive corpus consisting of 100 oral and 100 written texts of approximately 200 words produced by each twin over 8 months. Three…

The processing difficulty of nested grammatical structure has been explained by different psycholinguistic theories. Here I provide corpus and behavioral evidence in favor of usage-based models, focusing on the case of object relative clauses in Spanish as a first language. A corpus analysis of spoken Spanish reveals that, as in English, the…

In Japanese, self-qualification, or a qualifying segment of talk that reduces the force of the speaker's own utterances, is frequently introduced with contrastive markers, such as "demo," "kedo," and "ga." This study explores the relationship between the grammatical and pragmatic competence of Japanese L2 learners by examining their use of such…

Reviews research that has been emerging from the availability of corpora on the grammar of spoken English. Presents arguments for the view that spoken and written language utilize the same basic grammatical repertoire, however different their implementations of it are. (Author/VWL)