This paper tries to answer whether Iraqi EFL college students are able to reset the parametric values of their native Arabic into those which suit English. It aims at enhancing Iraqi students' knowledge of some of the parametric values of English via tackling three parameters: "Null-subject parameter," "Head-parameter," and…

Background: Vocabulary frequency results have been reported to design and support augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) interventions. A few studies exist for adult speakers and for other natural languages. With the increasing demand on AAC treatment for Korean adults, identification of high-frequency or core vocabulary (CV) becomes…

Previous analyses of the Spanish deictic verbs "venir" "to come", "ir" "to go", traer "to bring" and "llevar" "to take" have drawn upon Fillmore's (1975) series of lectures on deixis in noting that speakers of Spanish forbid the use of the verbs "venir" and…

This study was designed to examine difficulties in interpreting English phrasal verbs (PVs) that individual college student of English face during their academic career. Interpretation is an apparent obstacle that Jordanian English students encounter as they learn language systematically. The learners being investigated were divided into two…

The aim of this study is to investigate ideological structures of polarized discourse coded in the reports of two online news websites: egyptindependent and ikwanweb. The study focuses on online news reports relating to three interrelated events: the issuing of a constitutional declaration by Egyptian president, the aftermath clashes outside…

According to Question-Under-Discussion (QUD) models of discourse interpretation, clauses cohere with the preceding context by virtue of providing answers to (usually implicit) questions that are situated within a speaker's goal-driven strategy of inquiry. In this article we present four experiments that examine the predictions of a QUD model of…

In this article the way bilinguals handle differing semantic categories in their two languages will be investigated. Drawing on bilingual data from multilingual speakers of Romansh as well as from speakers of (Swiss) German, the tensions that emerge from "conflicting habits" in the two languages are analyzed in the semantic domain of…

By taking Hyland and Tse's (2004) interactional metadiscourse model, this study attempts to compare the incidence of the interactional metadiscourse markers in letters to shareholders of American and Chinese companies in the financial industry and their rhetorical functions. This study makes American corpus of 41 letters and Chinese corpus of 37…

Research Findings: Mental state verbs (MSV), a component of literate and academic language, may facilitate vocabulary growth, as they relate to metacognitive and metalinguistic awareness as well as decontextualized talk, all of which have been associated with vocabulary growth. In this study, we examined teacher MSV use in group content…

Over the past 45 years, the construct of syntactic sophistication has been assessed in L2 writing using what Bulté and Housen (2012) refer to as absolute complexity (Lu, 2011; Ortega, 2003; Wolfe-Quintero, Inagaki, & Kim, 1998). However, it has been argued that making inferences about learners based on absolute complexity indices (e.g., mean…

This study investigated how frequency influenced acquisition of L2 English infinitive and gerund complements among L1 Thai learners. Participants were separated into low and high proficiency groups based on their CU-TEP scores. Each group consisted of 30 participants. Data were collected using the Word Selection Task (WST) and the Grammaticality…

Cognitive Linguistics has been applied in SLA in order improve the learning/acquisition process of foreign/second language. This quasi-experimental study was conducted to find the impact of the Cognitive Linguistics on learning/ acquiring the Phrasal Verbs among EFL learners at intermediate level. In this study the orientational metaphors were…

This study investigates the use of the Spanish subjunctive in bilingual children with and without specific language impairments (SLI). Using an elicitation task, we examine: (i) the potential of the subjunctive as a grammatical marker of SLI in Spanish-English bilingual children, (ii) the extent to which degree of bilingualism affects performance,…

Lexical development in first language (L1) Turkish and second language (L2) German in two- to three-year-old children was examined, using parental vocabulary checklists in Turkish and in German. Children showed strong Turkish dominance in the number of lexical items they produced, which was due to the more frequent exposure to Turkish and higher…

This study adopts the revised interpersonal model of metadiscourse to discover whether and to what extent Chinese authors employ a varying amount of Interactional Metadiscourse (IM) in the past decade in English abstracts of economics Research Articles (RAs). The data was drawn from a prestigious economics journal in China to compose a corpus of…