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…

This study is concerned with addressing the limitations with the authorship attribution of flash or micro-fiction. The shortness of linguistic data in texts of the kind makes it challenging for conventional stylometric authorship methods to assign disputed texts to their real authors. As thus, this study proposes a new stylometric authorship…

This dissertation draws on both qualitative and quantitative approaches to investigate the linguistic practices of teachers and children who are learning Mandarin Chinese as a Heritage Language (CHL) in two dual immersion preschools in California. CHL children have been interpreted as novice members in local speech communities who actively explore…

This article focuses on the use of collocations in language learning research (LLR). Collocations, as units of formulaic language, are becoming prominent in our understanding of language learning and use; however, while the number of corpus-based LLR studies of collocations is growing, there is still a need for a deeper understanding of factors…

Students' preferences are being shaped by what they view in advertisements. Hence, this study examined the occurrence of code-switching in Philippine TV advertisements. Particularly, it analyzed syntactic patterns of code-switching, pragmatic/discourse functions and motivations present in the code-switched ads aired from the country's giant TV…

This research aims to identify the types of interference and factor of interference. The object of this research is the daily conversations of the students at a University in Indonesia. The research focused on English interference that occurs in Javanese Language and Indonesian Language in everyday conversation. Data is obtained by observation…

In the present study, we take a longitudinal, corpus-based perspective to investigate short-term (over 9 months) linguistic change in the language produced for the spoken and written sections of the "TOEFL iBT"® test by a group of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in China. The goal of the study is to identify patterns that…

Creativity is commonly assessed using divergent thinking tasks, which measure the fluency, flexibility, originality, and elaboration of participant output on a variety of different tasks. This study assesses the degree to which creativity can be identified based on linguistic features of participants' language while completing collaborative…

The central role played by language in mediating school experience and the prestige accorded to standard language varieties within the field of education provide the broad rationale for this paper. This qualitative study, based on a friendship focus-group design, was conducted in two groups of 12-year-old children from contrasting "ideal…

This study aims to provide a perspective which allows honorifics to be seen beyond the frame of politeness and/or formality in social structures. Korean school grammar explains honorifics as linguistic forms that reflect relative social positional difference (e.g., K-H. Lee, 2010), and has assumed that social structure and language use have a…

This dissertation is a study of Castilian transcodic markers in the Catalan written on the Internet. Thirty Castilian transcodic markers representing five categories were run through the interface of the Corpus d'Us del Catala a la Web (CucWeb) to collect information in order to conduct both qualitative and quantitative analysis. The major…

Discusses the use of split infinitives in written language and suggests a compromise rule. (RB)

This volume opens with an examination of the decay that the English language has suffered over the past century and explains the origin and remedy of its two chief menaces: ambiguity and cacophony. The second part of the book illustrates the manner in which speakers and writers misuse language. Chapters include "The Prodigal…

Percentages of unexpected pronominal usage in Japanese are listed. Data was gathered from Japanese magazine articles concerning individuals. Tendencies rather than strict rules became evident. (SC)

Suggests that the form of English called "E-Prime" (which eliminates all forms of the verb "to be") has a certain attraction, but argues that many important uses of the verb "to be" remain in the English language. Provides examples and develops a method of designating the various forms of the verb in terms of the…