The purpose of this research is to explore three English synonyms, namely critical, serious, and crucial, with a particular focus on meanings, degrees of formality, collocations, and semantic preferences. Two dictionaries, namely the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online, as well as the Corpus…

Many studies have shown that morphological knowledge has effects on reading comprehension separate from other aspects of language knowledge. This has implications for reading instruction and assessment: it suggests that children could have reading comprehension difficulties that are due to a lack of morphological knowledge, and thus, that explicit…

This research investigated three synonymous adjectives "perfect," "flawless," and "impeccable" in terms of meaning, degree of formality, collocations, and grammatical patterns. The three synonymous adjectives were scrutinized through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings suggested that these…

The article presents a lexical study that investigates the lexical demands of academic written texts at different levels of writing. By employing the British National Corpus/ Corpus of Contemporary American English (BNC/COCA) word list and the Academic Word List (AWL), the present study analyzed data from the British Academic Written English…

This paper presents a corpus-driven analysis of the linguistic competition between the suffixes "-our"/"-or" in Early Modern English. It is conceived as a state of the art to provide an explanation of the development and distribution of these competing suffixes in Early Modern English. The study is based on the distribution of…

English phrasal verbs (PVs) are ubiquitous and often polysemous. These lexical items are thus very important, but also challenging for ESL/EFL learners. Substantial research that can inform instructional approaches to PVs has already been conducted. One strand of this research has focused on identifying PVs that merit prioritization in learning.…

The study was a humble attempt at cross-analyzing court decisions drafted in American, Philippine, and Indonesian Englishes in the perspective of world Englishes (WEs). Using the contrastive genre analysis framework of Le, Kui, and Ying-Long (2008), and Cheng, Sin, and Li (2008), the study examined three authentic court decisions taken from the…

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…

Problem: The studies of the English-language accent preferences of prospective and practicing businesspersons from around the world have not been integrated. Research Questions: What are the English-language accent preferences of prospective and practicing businesspersons from around the world, and how are those preferences influenced by the…

Briefly explores the usage patterns of American English words, terms, or expressions such as "y'all" and other second plural pronouns, English conditionals, "greasy' by East-Central Pennsylvanians, who or whom, the genderless "-person" suffix, and Russianisms. (CB)

Analysis of the major changes and shifts of American English personal pronouns, possessive adjectives, and archaic forms concludes that: (1) an anaphoric pronoun unmarked as to gender is being created by usage; and (2) clear, grammatical, pronominal plurality is sought, but not at the expense of unmarked gender. (CB)

Summarizes the main points presented in the 1989 book, "The Death of Black English" by R.R. Butlers (1989). Butler's book presents most important research of last 20 years and subjects the results to variation analysis. It is concluded that the history of linguistic assimilation points to the eventual disappearance of Black English in…

Reviews bilingual television programing in Canada and the United States and concludes that television networks offer few alternative programs for bilingual children. (FL)

Demonstrates briefly the naturalness of dialect variation in American English, examines the implications for reading instruction of recognizing the naturalness of dialects, and provides a list of references for the professional development of teachers of children who speak dialects other than standard English. (ET)

Presents research findings that demonstrate that Black English does not interfere with Black children's reading performance in standard English. Outlines the limitations of studies reviewed and raises questions for further research. (MJL)