The article revisits the canonical (Dem>Num>A>N) and non-canonical (A>Dem>Num>N & Dem>A>Num>N) prenominal patterns in Mandarin Chinese, from the perspective of the Labeling Algorithm. It shows that the syntactic distribution of adjectives are different, depending on the attributive-predicative sources and the…

This corpus-based multifactorial study delves deeper into the well-known alternation between bare and full infinitive complements, specifically regarding the "help" concordances. It extends the line of research to learners' language productions with a focus on comparing and contrasting the probabilistic grammatical knowledge reflected in…

Dependency distance has increasingly become a key measure of interest in cross-linguistic corpus studies from multiple perspectives. Based on a syntactically annotated corpus of 400 PhD dissertation abstracts written by native English (L1) and English as a foreign language (L2) academic writers, the current study investigated the mean dependency…

In order to facilitate the instruction and acquisition of EFL writing, this paper compares the uses of the light verb "get" in English writing by Chinese and L1 undergraduates by drawing on insights from the theory of norms and exploitations (TNE). Corpus pattern analysis (CPA) is conducted to analyze the data taken from two comparable…

There has been a growing interest in the rhetorical move structure of research articles (RAs). Research studies reveal that articles written by native and nonnative English speakers show some similarities and differences in their rhetorical structure and linguistic features across disciplines. This study was therefore undertaken to investigate the…

Anticipatory "it" pattern, which encodes interpersonal stance, plays a crucial role in academic writing. While previous studies have been explored the overuse and the underuse of this pattern among English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners and published writers, there has been limited exploration of how EFL learners use the…

Inasmuch as the fact that writing is a cognitively demanding task and as a step toward overcoming some of the barriers English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learners face during writing performance, this study attempted to investigate Iranian EFL learners' perceptions toward the most common writing difficulties. To this end, 120 Iranian EFL learners…