As a kind of indirect and coded language, metonymy not only inspires others but also helps one to reach goals set by cultural standards, society values, practices, and beliefs. Metonymy's rhetorical power comes from its ability to change meaning from a literal interpretation to an intended conceptual message, therefore enabling communication both…

This paper analyzes some of the ambiguities that arise among statements with the copular verb "is" in the mathematical language of textbooks as compared to day-to-day English language. We identify patterns in the construction and meaning of "is" statements using randomly selected examples from corpora representing the two…

The purpose of this research is to support the language revitalization and reclamation of Nuu-wee-ya', a Dene language from Southern Oregon and Northern California, and to contribute to the discussions on methodological particularities of archive-based research for language revitalization. Nuu-wee-ya' is a sleeping language comprising three…

The aim of this study is to analyze spoken linguistic features of three-minute startup pitches. Linguistic features analyzed included discourse markers, dysfluency, modality, numeral phrases, pronouns, reduced forms, repetitions, rhetorical questions, vague expressions, and vocatives. The corpus is comprised of 92 startup pitches delivered in real…

A correlation between media, gender identity and society is central in this information era. Gender and sexuality has seen a paradigm shift in recent decades, making female representation a subject of several cultural studies. International media contributed to shaping women's identity and impacting social construction. The aim of this study was…

The mass media are blamed for constructing a negative image of Islam through the use of Islam-related terms in reporting terrorism. It is presumed that when Islam-related terms are used without regard to their original connotations, they are likely to lose their original meanings and begin to take on altered meanings created by the media.…

No research article is imaginable without reporting verbs. They help the writer voice his/her own views against the backdrop of other community voices, while also serving to project his/her authority and expertise in the field. The vast variety of reporting verbs in academic discourse and their disciplinary specificity account for a huge challenge…

Social studies texts often pose a challenge for readers because of their complex linguistics features, which can cause comprehension issues. Drawing upon Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL), this study examines how authors create cohesive messages and meaning in an 11th-grade U.S. history textbook in relation to the history of diseases. Findings…

This article compares and contrasts two dictionaries: "The American Heritage College Dictionary" and the "Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary." This review is written to provide English language learners -- and others -- who are taking undergraduate-level courses in linguistics, with in-depth advice on how to best support…

Lexical semantics provide many important resources in natural language processing, despite the recent preferences for distributional methods. In this dissertation we investigate an under-represented lexical relationship, that of scalarity. We define scalarity as it relates to adjectives and introduce novel methods to identify words belonging to a…

The power of music to entertain and to affect people psychologically makes it a significant part of human society and a ripe field for empirical investigations. Researches about music's psychological and physiological effects on people as well as music's pedagogical value in language teaching and learning have shown interesting results. However,…

Few studies in language teacher education programs provide insight on how knowledge of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is developed by teacher candidates to support their metalinguistic awareness and preparation to teach language. Building upon the contributions of Johnson and Byrnes, we combined Halliday's language-based theory of learning…

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…

Learning statistics requires learning the language of statistics. Statistics draws upon words from general English, mathematical English, discipline-specific English and words used primarily in statistics. This leads to many linguistic challenges in teaching statistics and the way in which the language is used in statistics creates an extra layer…

Patterns of conceptualization reflected in figurative language are motivated by embodied experience, and comparisons of emotion metaphors in English, Mandarin Chinese and other languages have shown widespread similarity in such metaphors cross-culturally (Lakoff & Johnson 1980, 1999; King 1989; Yu 1996; Kovecses 2005). Nonetheless, we can also…