This study compares English- and Korean-speaking university students' colloquial and mathematical discourses on the notion and practice of limit. There exists a lexical discontinuity in Korean with the word limit, since the mathematical word for limit is not commonly used as a colloquial word in Korean, unlike its use in English. This study…

Refusing is a common speech act; nonetheless people from different cultural backgrounds employ different refusal strategies. The present study compares refusal strategies used between native speakers of Javanese in Indonesia and native speakers of British English in the United Kingdom. Empirical data were elicited by means of discourse completion…

Previous research indicates that features of speech during mother-toddler interactions are dependent on the situational context. In this study, we explored language samples of 69 mother-toddler dyads collected during standardized toy play and book-reading situations across two countries, Germany and the United States (US). The results showed that…

This paper investigated the language resources needed for communication in Vietnam's import/export services and the level of alignment with the associated English for Specific Purposes (ESP) course. To examine the communicative practices used in this workplace, the study employed methods of semi-structured interviews and a collection of 48 emails…

This article reports on a study investigating the role of scientific concepts in the metapragmatic awareness of Norwegian primary EFL learners following a four-week instructional intervention on requesting informed by sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 2012/1934). Through introducing pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic dimensions of requesting, the…

This article explores the use of two epistemic adverbs in Argentine Spanish, "quizás" and "capaz". While scholars have noted the existence of "capaz" as an epistemic adverb, it had not been systematically studied prior to this investigation. To examine the epistemic stance of the adverbs, 117 participants completed an…

There is an ongoing debate whether phenomena of disfluency (such as filled pauses) are produced communicatively. Clark and Fox Tree ("Cognition" 84(1):73-111, 2002) propose that filled pauses are words, and that different forms signal different lengths of delay. This paper evaluates this Filler-As-Words hypothesis by analyzing the…

The study examines formulaic politeness expressions used in Jordanian Arabic by looking into two salient features that characterize this set of idioms: figuration and traces of religious texts. One main goal is to explore the conceptual metaphors that are represented in these idioms and show their coherence and consistency with cultural values.…

In this dissertation, I conceptualize a rhetorical and linguistic analysis of politics from a decolonial framework (Mignolo, 2011; Smith, 2012). My analysis draws on classical rhetoric (Aristotle, 2007), cultural rhetoric (Mao, 2014; Powell, et al., 2014; Yankah, 1995), and linguistics (Chilton, 2004) to reveal the different ways ideological and…

Discourses which seek to position different speakers/users of Breton through the use of labels such as 'traditional', 'new', 'learner', 'néo-bretonnant', 'brittophone', etc. draw on persistent essentialist ideologies of language and create, in the process, contested elites and counter-elites in Breton-speaking networks. These discourses can be…

Discourse markers (DMs) are significant for fluent speech. Furthermore, they are essential elements of language for conversation organisation, reciprocal relation of interlocutors, productive speaking and comprehension. Although they have critical functions for pragmatic development, they are neglected in language teaching either because of the…

This paper explored a less-studied preposition, "after," and its uses in a corpus. The analysis included an inspection of dictionary senses, followed by the distributional patterns of parts-of-speech, the co-appearing verbs of "after," the contextual uses of [-"ly after"] and [-"ly after"+NOUN], and finally…

Although not often discussed, complementary ('mother tongue') classrooms comprise participants who differ substantially in a number of ways. Differences comprise, e.g. participants' orientations to and understandings of the indexicalities of linguistic registers, which may have been brought along from the presupposed country of origin. It has…

This paper introduces the term 'trans-scripting' to examine fleeting, socially unstable practices of writing a language in a non-canonical script. As a theoretical notion, trans-scripting conceives of script as a semiotic resource whose situated choice and sequential alternation can create discursive meaning. The case study is on 'Hellenized…

The acquisition of a particular language and its standard norms of use have been traditionally channeled through education, dictionaries and institutional publications, but more and more, the internet has become a recurrent platform to consult norms and rules, through different forms of electronically mediated communication in which language users…