Suriname represents an interesting case of unidirectional multilingual convergence in a linguistic area. The multilingual ecology of Suriname is hierarchical. The Germanic language Dutch exerts structural and lexical influence 'downwards', but other languages do not do so 'upwards' to the same degree. This study analyses the development of word…

Languages in the Mesoamerican linguistic area have been reported to lack a dedicated means of expressing the privative meaning that encodes the absence of a participant in a situation. This micro-typological study identifies alternative strategies that the languages in this area employ to function without dedicated privative markers, namely…

Research on second language (L2) pronoun use in null-argument languages has traditionally focused on whether or not a speaker's first language (L1) also allows null pronouns. However, recent studies have pointed out that it is equally important to consider the specific linguistic properties of overt pronouns in the L1 and L2, which may differ even…

This study investigates whether there are different first-language-second-language (L1-L2) dependency resolutions by focusing on less-studied crosslinguistic variances in L2 acquisition of Chinese, a null-subject language, by speakers of English, a non-null-subject language. The overt subject pronoun of a Chinese main clause has free orientation…

Students' Arabic thesis writing comprises several grammatical errors of different types. This study aimed to find out: (1) errors in writing Arabic phrases on students of the Arabic Language Education Master's Program at universities of Indonesia, and (2) factors that caused these writing errors. This research sued a qualitative research design,…

How does linguistic structure affect children's developing cardinal number knowledge? The bootstrapping theory proposes that children might use syntactic information provided by known words such as quantifiers to bootstrap the meanings of unfamiliar words such as number words. Prior studies of numeral and quantifier development have indicated that…

The acquisition of passives is well-studied in many languages, with evidence of crosslinguistic differences in the age at which passives are acquired. The aim of this study is to add to the existing knowledge of child acquisition of passives by providing data from Afrikaans and isiXhosa, two under-researched and typologically different languages…

English argumentative writing is difficult in second language writing for ESL students. Although there has been a lot of research on English argumentative writings, empirical research focusing on claims in argumentative writing is very scarce. Based on the Toulmin model, this paper studied the relationship between the claims and English…

While there is overall consensus that narratives obtained by means of visual stimuli contain less natural language than free narratives, it has been less clear how the naturalness of a narrative can be measured in a crosslinguistically meaningful way. Here this question is addressed by studying the differences between free narratives and…

The role of context in cloze tests has long been seen as both a benefit as well as a complication in their usefulness as a measure of second language comprehension (Brown, 2013). Passage cohesion, in particular, would seem to have a relevant and important effect on the degree to which cloze items function and the interpretability of performances…

Clipping is a word formation process in which a word is reduced/shortened to one of its parts as in exam, math, grad, lab, Sue while still retaining the same meaning and same part of speech. Clipping is classified into: (i) Initial clipping: phone (telephone), net (Internet); (ii) Medial clipping: fancy (fantasy), ma'am (madam); (iii) back…

The selection of an appropriate word counting unit (WCU) for the purpose of second/foreign language vocabulary acquisition (SLVA) in the last decade has become a very important and relevant topic in academic circles. However, few studies address on-the-ground teaching practices and perspectives. This mixed-approach study, conducted through an…

The usage of hedges in trial discourse context is interested to be explored. This paper presents a description of phenomena related to the use of hedges by witnesses and experts in Indonesian court trial. It focuses on the usage of hedges in the form of words, phrases, clauses, and utterances in court trial context. Conversation among participants…

This study used a pre-test post-test research design to investigate the role of explicit strategy instruction on Spanish English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' ability to write authentic email requests to faculty. Drawing on Taguchi's (2018) classification of pragmatics learning strategies, the instructional intervention followed a…

With the change in socio-political and educational contexts in global academia, the trend of writing academic papers has arisen among Nepali students and educators in higher education. However, many of them are still unfamiliar with the basic standard to be incorporated in an academic paper. In this context, this study examined the post-graduate…