The purpose of this research is to explore three English synonyms, namely critical, serious, and crucial, with a particular focus on meanings, degrees of formality, collocations, and semantic preferences. Two dictionaries, namely the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online, as well as the Corpus…

The definitions of internationalisation have been contested and require contextualisation. Despite the long-standing practice of and research on higher education internationalisation in Mainland China, ambiguities regarding the concept persist. This study examines academic discourses on the internationalisation of Chinese higher education. It…

The aim of this study is to explore and analyze metaphors constructed around academics, in both the contexts of the UK and Turkey, to see if general opinion on academics seems to be shifting from the well-known 'ivory-tower' reputation, and if the perception differs amongst sub-groups based on their varying amounts of exposure to the reality of…

312 Singaporean children aged 4, 7, and 10 years from four different home language backgrounds--English, Malay, Mandarin, and Tamil--were tested for their recognition of animals and non-animals. The Malay-speaking group of children was the notable group that showed a different developmental pattern from the other three groups. They performed…

This paper studies the two English synonymous words "little" and "small," and their Thai equivalents n??j4 and lek4. In addition to monolingual and bilingual dictionaries, British National Corpus, Thai National Corpus and an English-Thai parallel corpus were used in this study. It is found that "little" and…

This study investigates the role of emotional linguistic input in learning novel words with abstract and concrete denotations. It is widely accepted that concrete words are processed more easily than abstract ones. Several theories of vocabulary acquisition additionally propose a critical role of sensorimotor and emotional information during novel…

A particular status of the English language as the language of international communication and connections between the nearly related English and German languages resulted in the emergence of many interlingual borrowings in the Modern English and German language vocabularies. The paper aims to consider the functioning of borrowings (loanwords) in…

This article centers on the discursive moves that two adolescent girls in rural Appalachia use to negotiate dominant discourses regarding Appalachian identity and language. The data is drawn from a year-long critical ethnographic teacher-researcher study in a senior English class located within a rural high school in the Appalachian region of the…

Words that are part of colloquial English but used differently in a technical domain may possess lexical ambiguity. The use of such words by instructors may inhibit student learning if incorrect connections are made by students between the technical and colloquial meanings. One fundamental word in statistics that has lexical ambiguity for students…

This article analyzes four questions on the meaning of uniqueness that have contrasting answers in common language versus mathematical language. The investigations stem from a scenario in which students interpreted uniqueness according to a definition from standard English, that is, different from the mathematical meaning, in defining an injective…

This dissertation explores the main question, "What are the issues involved in the definition and translation of color terms in dictionaries?" To answer this question, I examined color term definitions in monolingual dictionaries of French and English, and color term translations in bilingual dictionaries of French paired with nine…

There has been a long-standing debate about how 'English' can be defined. Educational policy changes have typically been driven by differing representations of the subject, and have ranged from broad 'aesthetic' definitions to more narrow 'functional' views. The present study aims to analyse areas of consensus and contention in stakeholders'…

Provides definitions and sample citations for eight new English words and expressions. Journal availability: see FL 512 512. (AM)

Revised version of a paper presented at the 11th International Congress of Linguists, Bologna, Italy, 1972. (DD)

Usage patterns of the three most common Russian equivalents of the verb "use" are outlined with three types of criteria for judging usage: definitional, contextual, and stylistic considerations. Typical usage is discussed, and the issue of questionable acceptability is touched upon. (MSE)