This research investigated three synonymous adjectives "perfect," "flawless," and "impeccable" in terms of meaning, degree of formality, collocations, and grammatical patterns. The three synonymous adjectives were scrutinized through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings suggested that these…

We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) "mub" as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) "maa," which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by…

Texts generated by artificial intelligence agents have been suggested as tools supporting students' learning. The present research analyses the language of texts generated by ChatGPT when solving mathematical problems related to the quadratic equation. We use the functional grammar theoretical framework that includes three meta-functions: the…

We investigated the acquisition of Hindi split ergativity (zero or "-ne" marking) and Hindi differential object marking (DOM; zero or "-ko" marking) by L1 speakers of Dutch. Both grammatical phenomena are conditioned by multiple syntactic and semantic features. On a descriptive level, the study aims to examine when and how…

Previous research has revealed that distributional information obtained from child-directed speech could be informative for children when they are learning grammatical categories. Frequent frames are distributional units proposed by Mintz and explored by researchers in many languages with different typologies. This study investigated two…

Google Translate is a free and practical online translation service that allows millions of people around the globe to translate words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs into an intended target language. However, in 2015, some Google Translate users in Indonesia, filed complaints, asserting that the machine was often inaccurate, speculating that…

In many so-called canonical null subject languages, null and overt subject pronouns have contrasting referential preferences: null subjects tend to maintain reference to the preceding subject while overt pronominal subjects do not. We propose that children acquire this contrast by initially restricting their attention to 1st and 2nd person…

In this article, we propose a reconceptualization of the principles and parameters (P&P) framework. We argue that in lieu of discrete parameter values, a parameter value exists on a gradient plane that encodes a learner's confidence that a particular parametric structure licenses the utterances in the learner's linguistic input. Crucially,…

It is standardly believed that some occurrences of expressions designate singularly, while other occurrences of expressions designate plurally. For instance, the singular expression the student may be used on an occasion to talk about one particular student, while the plural expression the students may be used on an occasion to talk about several…

The dependency grammars for such languages as Russian usually treat the prepositions in combination with subordinate nouns as major elements as if the case form in the prepositional construction had some self-contained meaning subjected to the regular transformation. This scheme may be valid for languages with restricted declensional paradigms,…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the grammatical complexity features of international teaching assistants' (ITAs) mock-teaching presentations and to compare the distributions of these features to those found in the Oral English Proficiency Test (a local ITA assessment), university classroom teaching, conversation, and academic writing. The…

The present study implements a corpus-assisted approach with data-driven learning (DDL) in the EFL classroom to investigate its effectiveness in learning target grammatical collocations (verb-, adjective-, and noun-preposition collocations) of Thai undergraduate students and to examine the extent to which the students incorporate the collocational…

It is well known that English speakers produce fewer pronouns when discourse contexts include more than one entity that matches the gender of the pronoun, i.e., gender effect. It is controversial, however, what causes the gender effect. Some suggest that it results from speakers' avoidance of linguistic ambiguity, while others suggest that it…

This dissertation investigates how bilinguals use their two grammars to comprehend written intra-sentential codeswitches. I focus on adjective/noun constructions in Spanish and English where I manipulate the congruence of grammatical word order in the two languages across the codeswitch boundary. This allows me to test three codeswitching…

A growing trend exists for authors to employ a more informal writing style that uses "we" in academic writing to acknowledge one's stance and engagement. However, few studies have compared the ways in which the first-person pronoun "we" is used in the abstracts and conclusions of empirical papers. To address this lacuna in the…