This research investigated three synonymous adjectives "perfect," "flawless," and "impeccable" in terms of meaning, degree of formality, collocations, and grammatical patterns. The three synonymous adjectives were scrutinized through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings suggested that these…

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…

Collocations, no matter where to use them, are an important linguistic issue if it is native fluency that is longed for in academic writing. In line with that, the present study aimed at increasing the awareness towards the importance of collocations in order to have native fluency in academic writing; making some suggestions regarding involvement…

An editorialized report of data accumulated in a study of current American practice in the treatment of problems of usage in general purpose dictionaries. Their descriptive objectivity is characterized as "that of the blind men examining the elephant." Such practices reveal little change from that of Samuel Johnson's 1755 English…

This article discusses various definitions and uses of the Spanish verb "to contemplate." (Text is in Spanish.) (CLK)

Neologism is a term for any word introduced into a language regardless of the method of its creation. (DD)

Two different approaches to the definition of literature (criterial and prototypical) are described, and some features of a prototypical literary work are outlined. The criterial approach attempts to provide criteria that must be met by all texts to be called literature. The prototype approach focuses on a particularly good example to which other…

Presents 41 German words and phrases that are used in Spanish today. Definitions are provided and examples of their use in Spanish texts are given. (NCR)

Examines the challenge posed by the naturalist philosophy of language--the view that the meanings of symbols are fixed by the environment. Compares the naturalist philosophy with that presented in an activist Native American essay that argues for the preservation of traditional native languages. (SRT)

The choice of a reliable authority for use in decisions of grammatical acceptability in English is discussed. It is argued that commonly-heard "rules" of English grammar offer advice that is either prescriptive or proscriptive, not descriptive, and often based on inaccuracies or flawed linguistic analyses. This is illustrated in the case of…