This paper examines recent lexical expansion in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) in the context of change in the status of the language and ongoing contact with other (spoken and signed) languages. We categorised 917 new signs documented in the past five years according to their source, semantic field, and sign formation mechanism(s), both…

This dissertation examines whether and how psycholinguistic priming, and social knowledge are integrated in the identification of sociolinguistic variants. Using the English variable (ING), the alternation between -ing and -in' (e.g. thinking vs. thinkin') as a testing ground, this dissertation probes whether and how individuals utilize…

Linguistic landscaping (LL) is an emerging field of Sociolinguistics exploring the language in its textual form in public sphere. This paper investigates the visibility and prominence of languages in the public space of Patna, the capital city of Bihar, India. A total of 10 city neighborhoods are chosen for the study. The corpus of the study is…

In this essay, I challenge unreflective linguistic indexation of Latino academia; specifically, the suppression of the inflexion "o" in generic nouns (as in Latinx) and appropriation of Nahuatl nouns. To do so, I analyze these two linguistic features in terms of historical macro- and micro-linguistic levels and, for the case of Latinx, I…

Standards of academic writing are documented in style guides adopted by academic disciplines, style guides such as the "Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association and Scientific Style and Format." Some of the standards in these style guides are expressed as prescriptive or proscriptive rules that provide academic…

This paper attempts to shed some light on the problem of correlation of such ontological categories as quality, quantity and relation in similes. The matter in question is significant since it relates to the problem of anthropocentrism in language. It shows the speaker's attitude to the information encoded in a simile by consciously choosing a…

Loanwords in Japanese that share form and meaning with English words are referred to as "Japanese-English cognates" (e.g., [Japanese symbol omitted] "radio") and are of fundamental concern for researchers concerned with vocabulary learning and instruction. This concern is reflected in the growing body of research into…

This paper examines the usage frequency of phonetically reduced modals (i.e. "gonna," "wanna," "gotta") in Present-day English. It is assumed that in distinct sociolinguistic and discourse contexts, the use of reduced modals is dynamic. To collect the data, there are five corpora used in this study, "Corpus of…

In recent years, linguists have increasingly turned to the cognitive sciences to broaden their investigation into the roots and development of language. With the advent of cognitive-linguistic, usage-based and complex-adaptive models of language, linguists today are utilizing approaches and insights from cognitive psychology, neuropsychology,…

This article posits that "passing" is a manipulation of ambiguously embodied characteristics, linguistic practice, and ratification by other speakers. I explore discourses and practices of "passing" by post-migrant generation, diasporically-resident Moroccans who seek to be unmarked by migration when bargaining in Moroccan…

This paper reflects on the state of educational language policy two decades into a post-Apartheid South Africa caught between official multilingualism and English. The focus is on the national language-in-education policy (LiEP) that advocates additive bi/multilingualism, and a provincial counterpart, the language transformation plan (LTP). Using…

The relationship between family language policy (FLP) and language choice, language use, proficiency in Russian and Hebrew, codeswitching (CS) and linguistic performance was studied in Russian-speaking immigrant parents and their Russian-Hebrew bilingual preschool children. By means of Glaser's Grounded Theory, the content of sociolinguistic…

In order to improve instruction in introductory astronomy, we are investigating students' preinstructional ideas about a number of cosmology topics. This article describes one aspect of this large research study in which 1270 students responded to a subset of three questions each from a larger set of questions about the following areas: definition…

This study assesses the extent to which situational authenticity has been implemented in three commercial ELT textbook series in Hong Kong, which are designed to reflect the local sociolinguistic setting. The analysis involved the quantification and categorization of both written and spoken texts in the textbooks. The results of this analysis were…

This dissertation presents an empirical analysis of Korean hedges in contemporary spoken discourse. The data analyzed was drawn from my corpus based on approximately 17 hours of unplanned, naturally occurring conversations. This study classified lexical and syntactic hedges in my corpus and investigated the frequency of individual hedge items. It…