Although identifying the referents of single words is often cited as a key challenge for getting word learning off the ground, it overlooks the fact that young learners consistently encounter words in the context of other words. How does this company help or hinder word learning? Prior investigations into early word learning from children's…

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are spectacular narratives, widely spread, that pose societal threats. We test whether CTs might be linguistically creative products, which would facilitate their transmission and thereby account for their widespread popularity. We analyzed nominal compounds (e.g., "mind control," "carbon dioxide"; N =…

The ongoing tonogenetic sound change in Seoul Korean involves transphonologization in phrase initial position, where the fundamental frequency (F0) of the vowel following aspirated or lenis stops becomes associated with the aspirated-lenis stop contrast (phonologization), while the originally contrastive Voice Onset Time (VOT) values merge…

This study compared the five-word lexical bundles (LBs) expressing gratitude in acknowledgments of dissertations written by Chinese and American PhD students of linguistics. Two corpora were built: (1) The Chinese University Dissertation Acknowledgments Collection (CUC) which contained 700 acknowledgments with a total of 300,686 tokens, and (2)…

Tiered vocabulary is a pervasive concept in academic scholarship, education policy, and schools. It involves placing individual words into hierarchically arranged tiers, based on their apparent simplicity, sophistication, utility, and complexity, with these categorisations used to determine which words carry value in the classroom. In this article…

Collocations are understood to be integral building blocks of language processing, alongside individual words, but thus far evidence for the psychological reality of collocations has tended to be confined to English. In contrast to English, Turkish is an agglutinating language, utilizing productive morphology to convey complex meanings using a…

Student-written evaluation (N = 600) of professors was examined to determine the emotional tone of the words used to evaluate faculty. Using the revised Dictionary of Affect (DOA; Whissell, 2009), evaluation words (N = 26,764) uploaded to the "Rate My Professors" website between 2018 and October of 2023 were measured for their…

Research has indicated that lexical richness is an important indicator of second language (L2) proficiency. However, most research has examined written, cross-sectional English L2 corpora and does not necessarily indicate how spoken lexical use develops over time or whether observed trends are stable across L2s. This study adds to previous…

Emotiology is a growing area of interdisciplinary research and academic discourse which focuses on the linguistic manifestation of emotions. This study employs psycholinguistic methodologies to examine the rationale behind word selection in emotional communication, integrating linguacultural, psycholinguistic, structural, and comparative analyses.…

As globalisation advances, an influx of loanwords has been seen in many languages in recent years. Japanese and Korean have similar grammatical features and many English-based loanwords. This study aims to clarify the difference in loanwords in Japanese and Korean adaptation, focusing on substituting alternative native lexicons through COVID-19.…

Modifying and hedging one's claims appropriately is an important characteristic of academic writing. This study focuses on the three main English modal verbs used to express "epistemic possibility" to avoid making strong statements, viz., "may", "might", and "could". The purpose of this corpus-based study is…

Lexical bundles and moves are essential for vloggers to communicate clearly and purposefully within travel vlog discourse. It is crucial for L2 learners and practitioners aiming to enter the industry to master these bundles and understand the moves used in creating travel vlogs. This corpus-based study compiled a list of 239 four-word lexical…

While discourse markers (DMs) are crucial for coherence and interactional competence, previous research suggests that learners' usage of DMs differs from L1 speakers. Prior research has taken either a discourse-functional or interactional approach, yet combining these two methods may provide greater understanding of the unique learner…

Young people use slang for identifying themselves with a particular social group, gaining social recognition and respect from that group, and expressing their emotional state. One feature of Internet slang is its active use by youth in online communication, which, under certain conditions, may cause problematic Internet use (PIU). We conducted two…

This study examines the use of English film subtitles to cultivate critical language awareness (CLA) and enhance language skills via a corpus-based approach. Creating and analyzing a specialized corpus of film subtitles reveals the cultural, social, and ideological dimensions of language usage. The findings show that film subtitles provide an…