Over a century ago, rhetoricians called on writing instructors in the U.S. to accept and even encourage language diversity among learners. Yet scholars of composition, rhetoric, and writing studies are still advocating for this via arguments for linguistic justice and translingualism, even referring to strict adherence to a single, mainstream…

The vocabulary of human languages has been argued to support efficient communication by optimizing the trade-off between simplicity and informativeness. The argument has been originally based on cross-linguistic analyses of vocabulary in semantic domains of content words, such as kinship, color, and number terms. The present work applies this…

A quarter of a century has passed since complex dynamic systems theory was proposed as an alternative paradigm to rethink and reexamine some of the main questions and phenomena in applied linguistics and language learning. In this article, we report a scoping review of the heterogenous body of research adopting this framework. We analyzed 158…

The interpretation of numerals has been traditionally debated across disciplines including, but not limited to, Linguistics, Developmental Psychology, and Philosophy. A big portion of the debate concentrates on the ontology of numerals, i.e., their basic meaning, and the mechanisms by which (non) exact interpretations (e.g., at least) are derived.…

This special issue revisits a classic topic in linguistic theory, A-bar movement, applied to developing and bilingual grammars. We claim that A-bar movement, or filler-gap dependencies, is still the quintessential linguistic phenomenon to illustrate the interaction between the biological endowment, the experience with language (past and present),…

Languages that have complex syllable patterns also share linguistic features with each other. These features can be identified through diachronic paths developed by these syllable patterns this study aimed to show the universality of syllabemes in Kazakh and other languages, focusing on questions like evolution of syllables in the Turkic…

A process of abstraction initiates the development of a theory of applied linguistics, beginning with the distinction between technical norm and technical fact. Each applied linguistic intervention has a normative dimension and a factual interface with its users. The second step is to abstract the qualifying technical modality of these artefacts,…

A fundamental question in psycholinguistics concerns how grammatical structure contributes to real-time sentence parsing and understanding. While many argue that grammatical structure is only loosely related to on-line parsing, others hold the view that the two are tightly linked. Here, I use the incremental growth of grammatical structure in…

This paper aims to analyze the concepts of the deictic shift theory and discourse theory of silencing. It has been written on the basis of synchronic descriptive method in the study of the English language. For this purpose we wish to introduce a theoretical framework for the study and then we hope to present the deictic shift theory and discourse…

This article follows Johnson and Liddell (2011a, 2011b, 2011c, 2012) and Liddell and Johnson (2019), which introduce the concepts of sequentiality and contrast, a segmental framework consisting of postures and trans-forms, and features describing the configuration of the fingers and of the thumb. This article further develops that theory of…

By exploring the faces of context from the perspective of components, knowledge and cognition, this article concludes that context is at the core of pragmatic studies, which examines how context contributes to meaning and pragmatics will gain momentum when linguists and non-linguists tap into the field of context.

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…

The initial high expectations of applied linguistic work did not endure. Applied linguistics is divided between adopting either a modernist or a postmodernist approach. Despite their relevant critique of modernism, the relativism promoted by postmodernist perspectives is an inadequate response to the challenges of the field. A non-reductionist…

Whole language (WL), emerging in the late 1970s, was a theory-in-practice, grass-roots teachers' movement that dramatically changed classrooms worldwide. With an emphasis on student-centered, meaning-focused, experiential, and interactive engagement with the curriculum, this movement offered more choices and possibilities for classroom teachers…

African American Vernacular English (AAVE) is a distinct variety of English that exhibits unique phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. However, the focus of this study was on the grammatical aspects of AAVE. The objectives were to identify and analyze the predominant grammatical features of AAVE employed by Justin Bieber in his songs from…