Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…

Ambridge's proposal cannot account for the most basic observations about phonological patterns in human languages. Outside of the earliest stages of phonological production by toddlers, the phonological systems of speakers/learners exhibit internal behaviours that point to the representation and processing of inter-related units ranging in size…

Compound surnames in Japanese show complex phonological patterns, which pose challenges to current theories of phonology. This dissertation proposes an account of the segmental and prosodic issues in Japanese surnames and discusses their theoretical implications. Like regular compound words, compound surnames may undergo a sound alternation known…

Understanding the linguistic and rhetorical patterns of an academic discipline strengthens students' abilities to write in professional settings. Data-driven learning and corpus-linguistic methods can increase this understanding and should be considered valuable contributors to any writing curriculum. In this paper, I present a case history on…

The regularity of stress patterns in a language depends on "distributional stress regularity", which arises from the pattern of stressed and unstressed syllables, and "durational stress regularity", which arises from the timing of syllables. Here we focus on distributional regularity, which depends on three factors. "Lexical stress patterning"…

Under the assumption that, with the exception of certain learned, retarded, and borrowed words, the bulk of any language undergoes sound changes that are regular over any given geographical area, over any given time span, and in any given sound environment, these sound changes have been reduced to logical terms and have been programmed to generate…

Fifty-three papers on linguistic theory and language research, including a number of prize-winning essays, address these topics: aspects of discourse analysis; bilingualism; Chinese modal verbs; early bilingual speech; linguistic metatheory; music and accent discrepancy; diphthongs; hiatus; vowel patterns; suprasegmentals; neologisms; aspects of…