This paper argues that descriptions of Sri Lankan English (SLE) are influenced by ideologies of linguistic racism and coloniality through an examination of the possible reasons for their neglect of Burgher English -- an underprivileged variety of SLE spoken by a minority community. Although descriptions of SLE identify different categories of the…

Dative alternation between prepositional and double object datives has been a popular topic in second language (L2) acquisition, but only few studies deal with discourse constraints such as the "given-before-new" principle, or given-new (GN) ordering, which describes the tendency to place given information before new information. The…

This article adopts the surface overlap and derivational complexity hypotheses to study crosslinguistic transfer in the adult second language (L2) acquisition of English genitive alternation (between the s-genitives and the of genitives) by intermediate and advanced Egyptian Arabic-speaking learners. While the "s"-genitive (e.g.…

To participate in the global conversation on how to combat climate change, Japanese university students need to better utilise their English for Academic Purposes (EAP) skills outside the second language (L2) classroom. Therefore, this study seeks to enhance the public speaking skills of Japanese university students by analysing and drawing from a…

How strongly a verb is associated with a construction plays a crucial role in the learning of argument structure constructions. We examined the effect of verb-construction association strength on second language (L2) constructional generalization by analysing L2 learners' production and comprehension of two complex constructions (i.e. ditransitive…

This study demonstrates how native and learner corpora can enhance modal verb treatment in English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) textbooks used in mainland China. Data analysis compares modal verbs in the textbook and native corpus by referring to distributional features, semantic functions and co-occurring constructions; and the analysis of the…

This article reports on the first results of a large-scale research programme that aims to define and circumscribe the construct of phraseological complexity and to theoretically and empirically demonstrate its relevance for second language theory. Within this broad agenda, the study has two main objectives. First, it investigates to what extent…

In recent second language (L2) research it has been proposed that unlike linguistic phenomena pertaining to internal interfaces, those at external interfaces pose greater difficulty to adult L2 learners and may not be fully acquired. It has further been pointed out that such problematic acquisition at the interface level should not be attributed…

This thesis examines the role of the African substrate languages in the emergence of Atlantic Creole grammatical structures. Alleyne (1980) and Faraclas (1990) have convincingly demonstrated that a survey of the grammatical features that typify the Colonial Era English-Lexifier Creoles of the Atlantic reveals remarkable similarities with those…

This corpus study brings a second language (L2) research perspective, insights from generative grammar, and new empirical evidence to bear on a long-accepted claim in the World Englishes literature--namely, that inversion with "wh"-movement in colloquial Indian English is obligatory in embedded clauses and impossible in main clauses. It…

Every text has a communicative purpose that it performs by dividing itself into generic stages. These stages are assigned specific goals and have differing linguistic structures. This paper makes an attempt to investigate whether there is a definable co-relation between linguistic features and stages in the genre of look-good advertisements. It…

In Malta, mathematics is often taught through code-switching between Maltese and English, mainly due to the use of textbooks published in the UK. The mixing of the languages has been a source of discussion for several years, with some educators accepting the mixed pattern, and others arguing in favour of using English alone. Furthermore, the…

This study aims to investigate the cultural identity of Korean English and to make the intercultural communications among non-native speakers successful. The purposes of this study can be summarized as follows: 1) to recognize the concept of English as an International Language (EIL), 2) to emphasize cross-cultural understanding in the globalized…

Complement constructions vary significantly in English and Persian. There are more complementation structures in English than in Persian and a complement structure in Persian might have more than one equivalent in English. Producing complement structures (CSs) in English is very difficult for native speakers of Persian, especially in an EFL…

Grosjean and Gee's prosodic structure theory is applied to second-language listening comprehension. It is argued that second-language students whose native language is syllable-timed do not have a mechanism to deal with unstressed syllables and must create one. The absences of this mechanism helps explain difficulties in listening comprehension.…