In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/or formal discourses. The present study…

This study aims to extend statistical learning (SL) research to multilinguals and provide an insight into what could facilitate word segmentation. We studied how the number of cues available in the input as well as the number of languages spoken influence SL and word segmentation. We used two SL tasks: one involving the tracking of transitional…

English contains a considerable number of lexical combinations with various forms and labels, making it an interesting field of inquiry for researchers. The significance and popularity of support verb constructions (SVC) is that they are used largely by native speakers and include some of the most common words in English but seem to be problematic…

This corpus-based study provides a baseline of complex word usage patterns in the spontaneous speech of English preschool children to ascertain the characteristics of their derivative vocabulary before literacy development affects language skills. Frequencies of suffixed derivatives produced by (N = 243) children aged 2-5 and their caregivers were…

In this article, we explore whether cross-linguistic differences in grammatical aspect encoding may give rise to differences in memory and cognition. We compared native speakers of two languages that encode aspect differently (English and Swedish) in four tasks that examined verbal descriptions of stimuli, online triads matching, and memory-based…

Using the academic writing sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and building on previous research, this study strives to identify the most frequently-used multi-word constructions (MWCs) of various types (e.g., idioms, lexical bundles, and phrasal/prepositional verbs) in general…

This contribution assesses in quantitative terms frequent collocates and major senses of "between" and "through" in the corpus of Cameroonian English (CCE), the corpus of East-African (Kenya and Tanzania) English which is part of the International Corpus of English (ICE) project (ICE-EA), and the London Oslo/Bergen (LOB) corpus…

The present study is an attempt to account for current changes taking place in the behaviour of what are commonly taken to be stress-neutral endings in contemporary British English. The methodological framework being that of Lionel Guierre, this study aims for comprehensive coverage, via a survey of Guierre's original database (which was initially…

This study examines the perception of paralinguistic intonational meanings deriving from Ohala's Frequency Code (Experiment 1) and Gussenhoven's Effort Code (Experiment 2) in British English and Dutch. Native speakers of British English and Dutch listened to a number of stimuli in their native language and judged each stimulus on four semantic…

A study investigated the importance of three elements of intonation (tone units, key, prominence) in three readers of English radio news. Results indicate intonation is used to present the structure of information as the speaker intends it to be interpreted. Intonation functions can be categorized simply under a few discourse functions easily…

In Bulgaria, a complex matrix of power relations governs English language education, and a triangle of international and intercultural relations between Bulgaria, United States, and United Kingdom. In the context of the changing economic and political milieu of central and eastern Europe, a study examines how Bulgaria fits into the emerging…

Phonological awareness is thought to become increasingly analytic during early childhood. This study examines whether the proposed developmental sequence (syllable[right arrow]onset-rime[right arrow]phoneme) varies according to the characteristics of a child's native language. Experiment 1 compares the phonological segmentation skills of English…

This book analyzes an intercultural project undertaken by French and English 14-year-olds based on an exchange of materials created by the pupils and focused on the topic of law and order. The project was based on a view of learning as a dialogic process in a more meaningful way than is often the case in foreign language classrooms. Chapter 1…