Research has demonstrated that features of lexical and lexicogrammatical use are important predictors of productive second language (L2) proficiency (e.g. Kyle et al. 2018). While some features of lexical use have been studied with L2s other than English (e.g. Tracy-Ventura 2017), multivariate lexical and lexicogrammatical approaches in these L2s…

An important skill for L1 language teachers when teaching grammar is the ability to produce and quickly evaluate arguments that underpin a grammatical analysis. Previous research has revealed that the strongest arguments in favour of a particular grammatical analysis are based on linguistic manipulations (LM) rather than on rules of thumb (RoT).…

Although there is consensus that second language grammar instruction is needed, some controversial issues remain. Whatever instructional options are selected, it is vital that they allow the development of not only explicit knowledge but also implicit or at least automatized knowledge that can be used in real-time interaction. Since this aim is…

This article opens a conversation between disability studies and linguistics from the author's positionality from the Global South. It argues that capacity building for both the abled and disabled in the North is implicated in the disablement of people in the Global South. A decolonial orientation to disability studies values vulnerability,…

Grammatical complexity has been established as a key indicator of language and writing development (Ortega 2003; Bulté and Housen, 2014; Crossley and McNamara 2014). The present study uses the Register-Functional approach to complexity (Biber et al. 2022) to compare the development of L1 English and L2 English writers across year of study and…

This article takes as its starting point the analysis of adjective complementation patterns and sets this in the context of other studies of phraseology, especially Construction Grammar. The article proposes that a large number of meaning-pattern combinations can be identified as constructions. This endeavour assists and is assisted by the…

Using data of articles from 42 Social Science Citation Index (SSCI)-indexed journals of applied linguistics, this study renders a bibliometric analysis of the 2005--16 research trends in the eld. The analysis focuses on, among other issues, the most frequently discussed topics, the most highly cited publications, and the changes that have occurred…

In this article, we report the results of a study undertaken at the University of Cyprus (2017-2020) in the framework of the research project MapCyArS financed by the Leventis Foundation. The study concerns the design and development of an assessment test to evaluate proficiency in Cypriot Arabic (CA), a severely endangered language spoken in…

With the increasing use of mobile phones among young people, there is growing public concern about possible detrimental effects of digital writing on learners' literacy and language skills. We ask whether and to what extent nonstandard forms typical of spoken Hebrew and of digital communication are also found in the formal writing of high-school…

While there have been many investigations of academic genres, and of the linguistic features of academic discourse, few studies have explored how these interact across a range of university student writing situations. To counter misconceptions that have arisen regarding student writing, this article aims to provide comprehensive linguistic…

This multifactorial corpus-based exploration of past tenses focuses specifically on the present perfect (PP) versus simple past (SP) alternation in intermediate-to-advanced learner English produced by French and German native speakers. While existing work on past tenses in L2 has traditionally focused on the role of lexical aspect in the…

A challenge of large-scale oral communication assessments is to feasibly assess a broad construct that includes interactional competence. One possible approach in addressing this challenge is to use a spoken dialog system (SDS), with the computer acting as a peer to elicit a ratable speech sample. With this aim, an SDS was built and four trained…

This investigation responds to the need for longitudinal data-driven research on additional-language (AL) acquisition by examining grammatical-gender marking among AL learners of French during a 21-month period, which included an academic year abroad (LANGSNAP corpus). The analysis of oral production consists of a generalized linear mixed model…

Conversely to plenty of studies describing how L1 transfer affects L2 systems, where the two grammars, L1/L2, often only come to interact later in life, less is known of dominant language transfer in heritage language grammars. Unlike in L2 speakers, the dominant language of the heritage speaker potentially affects its weaker language already from…

We examine the syntactic structures exhibited by persons with dementia in conversation. Traditionally, research on the linguistic abilities of persons with dementia is either observational (reports kept by caregivers) or experimental (e.g. based on comprehension tasks), and the focus is not on the syntactic competence of the speaker. We combine…