This commentary proposes the metaphor of "languaging-as-practice" in science education as an alternative to "language-as-tool" metaphors. Describing language as a tool implicitly positions language as static and unchanging and assumes that named languages are distinct and bounded entities. In contrast, describing languaging as…

In linguistics, onomastics is the science that studies the history and origin of toponyms, along with their structural aspects. This study aimed to determine the origin of toponyms by comparing their linguistic and ethnocultural, as well as mythical, information. A qualitative research design guided this study. A few toponyms were identified…

This article compared three-word move-specific lexical bundles (MLBs) in dissertation abstracts authored by linguistics doctoral students from China and the United States. Two separate corpora were constructed for analysis: (1) The China Linguistics PhD Abstracts Corpus (CLC), consisting of 700 abstracts totaling 613,713 words generated by…

Critical literacy in EFL context has been examined from different perspectives. However, there is limited empirical evidence of how news critical literacy is examined discursively among college EFL learners. By deploying a Projection profile from Systemic Functional Linguistics, this paper contributes to the written evaluation of college EFL…

This study aims to relate readability degree with thematic structures, a concept based on Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL). The texts chosen were fragments purposively sampled from three popular academic texts written by Pierre Bourdieu (1991) (Text 1), Norman Fairclough (1989) (Text 2), and Bill Ashcroft et al. (2002) (Text 3). The Theme…

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…

Dissertation introductions (DIs) have received on-going attention because they are considered to be the most challenging and difficult part of an academic text for graduate students, particularly for non-native English speakers (NNES). However, research that has investigated DIs written by native English speakers (NES) and by NNES, particularly…

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 reports a systematic narrative synthesis review conducted on the educational effectiveness of genre theory/systemic functional linguistics pedagogies for improving reading and writing outcomes in K-10 education within mainstream classrooms in Australia, the UK, the USA, New Zealand, and Canada. This framework has significant influence…

In this article, I reflect on the complexities of signification and suggest that the study of music allows us to push forward the radical project of dis-inventing language in applied linguistics (Makoni and Pennycook 2007). In thinking about language, music, and meaning, I focus on a song that has travelled around the globe and that has sounded…

This study conducts a stylo-linguistic analysis of Niyi Osundare's poem "The Rainsong," examining the language, form, and structure used to convey meaning and impact. Through a detailed analysis of graphological, phonological, syntactic, and lexico-semantic features, the study reveals the poet's deliberate choices in crafting a powerful…

Interpreting how people accord meaning to life situations is an old challenge in sociology. Emphasis has been given to values shared within social groups; other sociologists have stressed the discursive or communicative dimensions of society. This paper seeks an alternative interpretation by combining sociological inquiry and insights from…

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.

Migration, among the most important sociocultural phenomena of contemporary global societies, is complex, dynamic, and multifaceted. At the heart of migration is language, the indispensable agent of migration. Hence, in this article, a new sub-discipline of linguistics is presented, and that is 'migration linguistics'. It is the interdisciplinary…

Term extraction from textbooks is the cornerstone of many different intelligent natural language processing systems, especially those that support learners and educators in the education system. This paper proposes a novel unsupervised domain-independent model that automatically extracts relevant and domain-related key terms from a single PDF…