This study analyzed the forms of temporal deixis found in Balinese, one of the biggest local languages in Indonesia. Data was collected from oral communication by Balinese speakers who live in Denpasar, the capital city of the island of Bali. Data was obtained through observation and elicitation method completed with recording and note taking…

This dissertation provides a comprehensive description of courtroom language as a register by exploring the situational and linguistic features of authentic and TV courtroom language, as well as four public sub-registers that occur within authentic and TV courtroom (opening statement, direct examinations, cross-examinations, closing argument). It…

We report on three experiments that aim at measuring the role of prosody in the acceptability and interpretation of discourse relations between utterances connected by two French discourse markers, viz. "et" "and" and "alors" "then/well." These two discourse markers are highly polyfunctional: "et"…

This paper represents a multimodal analysis of the paraverbal (prosodic and gesture) features of expressive female political speech in Latin America and Spain. The language corpus consisted of public speeches delivered by Spanish-speaking female politicians Eva Peron, Christina de Kirchner and Manuela Carmena. The article includes an overview of…

This article discusses the use of the Finnish change-of-state token "aa" that has previously not been identified. The central claim is that even though "aa" indicates a cognitive shift experienced by the speaker, it does not function as a receipt of new information. Instead, the token "aa" indicates that the speaker…

Taking a psycholinguistic orientation within task-based language teaching scholarship, this study investigated the effects of mode (oral vs. written) and task complexity on second language (L2) performance. The participants were 78 Catalan/Spanish learners of English as a foreign language. Half of the participants performed the simple and complex…

Adjectives, like nouns and verbs, are one of the three major classes of lexical words. But, unlike nouns and verbs, they emerge late in acquisition. In Catalan, as in many other languages, their use is closely linked to the literate lexicon learned at school-age. Thus, the use of adjectives can be a good indicator of later language development.…

Recent studies have used Coh-Metrix, an automated text analyzer, to assess differences in language characteristics across different genres and academic disciplines (Graesser, McNamara, & Kulikowich, 2011; McNamara, Graesser, McCarthy, & Cai, 2014). Coh-Metrix analyzes text on many constructs at different levels, including Word Concreteness…

This dissertation aims to extend our knowledge of prosody--in particular, what kinds of information may be conveyed through prosody, which prosodic dimensions may be used to convey them, and how individual speakers differ from one another in how they use prosody. Four production studies were conducted to examine how various factors interact with…

Sarcasm, or sarcastic irony, involves expressing a message that is often opposite of the literal meaning of what is being said, in a way that may sound bitter, or caustic (Gibbs, 1986). In the past, sarcasm has been viewed as a method of introducing the possibility of alternative interpretations of a discourse, by creating ambiguity as to the…

In the last 20 years, technological advancement and increased multidisciplinarity has expanded the range of data regarded as within the scope of languages for specific purposes (LSP) research and the means by which they can be analyzed. As a result, the analytical work of LSP researchers has developed from a narrow focus on specialist terminology…

Due to the recent shift in the linguistic pragmatics literature from the analysis of isolated speech acts to the focus on phenomena which affect the global meaning of a message, discourse markers (DMs) have become a frequent research topic. Despite their popularity, the evolution and development of these forms is often neglected in investigations…

This paper reports findings from a study on the discourse functions of basic "wh"-clefts such as "what our brains do is complicated information processing" in 160 lectures drawn from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. Like much linguistic research on this academic genre, the investigation is motivated by the…

This is the book of abstracts for the conference held in 2017 entitled: ''METADISCOURSE ACROSS GENRES: MAPPING INTERACTION IN SPOKEN & WRITTEN DISCOURSES'', also known as MAG2017. The 1st International Conference on Metadiscourse Across Genres took place in METU Northern Cyprus Campus, Cyprus between 30 March-1 April 2017 with the…

The present study is concerned with the upper limits of SLA--specifically, mastery of the syntax-discourse interface in successful endstate learners of second-language (L2) French (near-native speakers). Left dislocation (LD) is a syntactic means of structuring spoken French discourse by marking topic. Its use requires speakers to coordinate…