This study investigates how quantifiers are used strategically to serve different argumentative goals. We report two experiments on how English speakers describe the results of school exams when being instructed to frame their descriptions either as a good or bad outcome. Experiment 1 shows that participants have clear preferences for specific…

Blind adults display language-specificity in their packaging and ordering of events in speech. These differences affect the representation of events in "co-speech gesture"--gesturing with speech--but not in "silent gesture"--gesturing without speech. Here we examine when in development blind children begin to show adult-like…

Associative anaphora refers to a discourse operation that links a definite determiner phrase (DP) to an antecedent that acts as an indirect referent of the definite DP. For example, in the sequence 'I bought a laptop. The keyboard was black', the definite DP 'the keyboard' is linked to 'a laptop', meaning 'the keyboard of the laptop'. The…

How does the relation between two words create humor? In this article, we investigated the effect of global and local contrast on the humor of word pairs. We capitalized on the existence of psycholinguistic lexical norms by examining violations of expectations set up by typical patterns of English usage (global contrast) and within the local…

To secure mutual understanding in interaction, speakers sometimes explain or negotiate expressions. Adopting a conversation analytic and interaction linguistic approach, I examine how participants explain which kinds of expressions in different sequential environments, using the format "x heißt y" ("x means y"). When speakers…

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…

Previous studies emphasized that there is a close connection between speech and thinking. The paper analyses the peripheral semantics of the German language's active vocabulary units to define how they represent the features of the national, linguistic picture of the world, namely, the mental traits of the German ethnos. Semantic methods and the…

People learn language variation through exposure to linguistic interactions. The way we take part in these interactions is shaped by our lexical representations, the mechanisms of language processing, and the social context. Existing work has looked at how we learn and store variation in the ambient language. How this is mediated by the social…

In the age when environmental sustainability is among the chief concerns and goals of communities around the world, a number of linguistic studies have been conducted to illuminate the roles of language in protection and destruction of ecological systems. Most of the studies, however, focus on written and/or formal discourses. The present study…

In order to facilitate the instruction and acquisition of EFL writing, this paper compares the uses of the light verb "get" in English writing by Chinese and L1 undergraduates by drawing on insights from the theory of norms and exploitations (TNE). Corpus pattern analysis (CPA) is conducted to analyze the data taken from two comparable…

Background: Bilingual assessment is particularly difficult in the very first period of children's second language (L2) exposure. This exploratory, longitudinal study examined L2 learning after 1 and 2 years of L2 exposure by young immigrants and how it is affected by their age at first exposure to the L2 (AoE). Method: Participants were 18…

The present study aims to reveal the use of high-frequency verbs "make" and "do" when they occur in a verb+noun combination in the argumentative essays of Turkish learners of English. In this context, the present study investigated the grammatical and semantic patterns and erroneous productions in the learner corpus. The…

One of the reasons why EFL learners have difficulties with the English present perfect tense is that little attention has been paid to the relationship between patterns and meanings of the tense (Yoshimura et al., 2014). To fill this gap, the present study takes a corpus-driven approach to the pattern-meaning interface of the present perfect,…

Evaluating creativity of verbal responses or texts is a challenging task due to psychometric issues associated with subjective ratings and the peculiarities of textual data. We explore an approach to objectively assess the creativity of responses in a sentence generation task to (1) better understand what language-related aspects are valued by…

Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…