Theories of language processing differ with respect to the role of abstract syntax and semantics vs surface-level lexical co-occurrence (n-gram) frequency. The contribution of each of these factors has been demonstrated in previous studies of children and adults, but none have investigated them jointly. This study evaluated the role of all three…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

Idioms are highly conventionalized expressions that allow users to express beyond literal meanings. Despite the language difference, counterparts of idioms may overlap cross-culturally due to similar origin, social habits, and experiences. It is therefore interesting to probe whether L2 learners may benefit from deliberate instructions built on…

This commentary critiques Ambridge's radical exemplar model of language acquisition using research from the Longitudinal Study of Early Language, which has tracked the language development of 30+ children with Autism Spectrum Disorders (ASD) since 2002. This research has demonstrated that the children's capacity for abstraction at the grammatical…

Ambridge reviews and augments an impressive body of research demonstrating both the advantages and the necessity of an exemplar-based model of knowledge of one's language. He cites three computational models that have been applied successfully to issues of phonology and morphology. Focusing on Ambridge's discussion of sentence-level constructions,…

Collocations make it possible to use and understand the language in an effective way. In this context, understanding collocation issues is important for both native speakers and language learners. This study aims at revealing certain determinations and problems with regard to the classification of word combinations in Turkish. For this purpose,…

Literature occupies unique position in the society and it has high status in the civilized community. Each ethnic group has unique culture and the culture presents a variety of literary works. Literary works deliver social messages to build harmony in the society. One of the genres of literary works that has vital role in our society is poetry.…

Son and daughter metaphorical expressions are common in general as well as technical languages. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic ibn (son) and bint (daughter) expressions, and the difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic general ibn (son) and bint (daughter)…

The goal of this article is to make the case for a radical exemplar account of child language acquisition, under which unwitnessed forms are produced and comprehended by on-the-fly analogy across multiple stored exemplars, weighted by their degree of similarity to the target with regard to the task at hand. Across the domains of (1) word meanings,…

This study investigates chiasmus as a stylistic device in ten metaphysical poems (five for John Donne and five for Henry Vaughan). It aims at showing how both, Donne and Vaughan, utilize chiasmus at the different linguistic levels as a stylistic device in their poetry. Thus, to achieve this aim, it is hypothesized that chiasmus as used by Donne…

Introduction: Many ESL college students have reading comprehension problems in English, such as difficulty understanding ideas explicitly or implicitly stated in a text, making inferences, and inferring meanings of difficult words from context. Aims: The article proposes the integration of inspirational quotes in the teaching of English to EFL…

This study aims to analyze positive remarks linguistically manifested through English intensifiers, i.e. very and so, and their collocates in café reviews. The appraisal framework primarily focuses on the feelings or attitudes of speakers or writers. It plays a part in providing communicative resources whereby speech functions are performed…

This dissertation concerns the distribution of negative polarity items (henceforth, NPIs) in conditionals and conditional-like constructions. NPIs include words such as any and ever and idioms such as "give a damn" and "lift a finger"; these expressions have only a limited distribution. In this dissertation, the distribution of…

The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) is crucially has been found to be involved in syntactic processing of various kinds. This study investigates the cortical effects of two types of syntactic processes: (i) Reconstruction in ellipsis (recovery of left-out material given by context, "More people have been to Paris than" [...] "to…

This dissertation uses syntactic, semantic and morphological evidence from English nominalization to probe the interaction of event-structure and syntax, develop a typology of structural complexity within nominalization, and test hypotheses about the strict ordering of functional items. I focus on the widely assumed typology of nominalization…