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…

Purpose: This study examines the effect of age on language use with an automated analysis of digitized speech obtained from semistructured, narrative speech samples. Method: We examined the Cookie Theft picture descriptions produced by 37 older and 76 young healthy participants. Using modern natural language processing and automatic speech…

The current study aims to investigate the discursive construction and navigation of agency in oral narratives of English learning by Chinese college English majors. Based on the theoretical framework integrating Bamberg et. al.'s theory of identity dilemma and Hallidayan systemic functional linguistics, the study has addressed two research…

A comparison across spontaneous speech collected in the 1980s and the 2000s reveals a dramatic flip between the use of "said" versus "like" as enquoting devices. The greater use of "like" is reflected in a wide variety of quotation types including reported speech, thoughts, exclamations, and sounds. There is no…

A study investigated the way in which monolingual English-speaking college students developed new concepts for the linguistic structures and sociocultural symbolic meanings of gender that are unique to the Spanish language. Subjects were seven students of first-year intensive Spanish. They were asked to perform two problem-solving tasks: defining,…

Tests whether nominal compounds, the juxtaposition of three or more nouns, retain sufficient semantic information to justify their use for brevity. Finds that respondents often misidentified at least one out of five given headwords. Recommends reminding students of headwords' importance and employing nominal compounds only after their fuller…