Classifier systems constitute one of the most prominent features of East and South-East Asian languages (Li, 2013). Classifiers categorize referent nouns based on salient semantic features such as humanness, animacy, shape, or others (Aikhenvald and Mihas, 2019). The work described in this dissertation constitutes a thorough quantitative…

Items in the mental lexicon have three storage and processing strata, the concept, lemma, and lexeme, which equate to semantic, syntactic and phonological information. Lexical items relate to each other at each stratum. Bilingual lexicons, which contain items from all languages, may contain cognates, items sharing concepts and with overlapping…

Pragmatic competence and its development has been a pivotal issue in ELT in the last two decades. This paper explored pragmatic knowledge incorporation into Iranian EFL textbooks. Three high school English books named "English Book 2," "English Book 3" and "Learning to Read English for Pre-University Students" were…

This chapter takes a critical look at complexity in L2 research. We demonstrate several problems in the L2 literature in terms of how complexity has been defined and operationalised as a construct. In the first part of the chapter we try to unravel its highly complex, multidimensional nature by presenting a taxonomic model that identifies major…

This study investigates intergroup homogeneity within high intermediate and advanced L2 writers of English from Czech, Finnish, German, and Spanish first language backgrounds. A variety of linguistic features related to lexical sophistication, syntactic complexity, and cohesion were used to compare texts written by L1 speakers of English to L2…

Reviews the research that led to the development of a hierarchic scheme of terms with vocabulary control features, called Classaurus, and describes a project aimed at writing software that could be used for the automatic generation of an online alphabetic Classaurus. The problems encountered are discussed and suggestions for further research are…

The orthographic compounds (two or more words written as one word) in M. Rhode and B. Cronnell's lexicon of words used by elementary school children are categorized in this paper, primarily in terms of related semantic/syntactic structures. Following a discussion of orthographic compounds, the paper mentions procedures used by Rhode and Cronnell…

The distinction between formal and casual English as reflected in the lexicon, in phonology, and in syntax is studied. Formality is treated as separate from other categorizations of language such as geographical origin of the speaker, social class of the participants, or specific context of discourse. The study was restricted mainly to the use of…

A study analyzed the distribution of words in a three-million-word corpus of text from the "Wall Street Journal," in order to test a theory of the acquisition of word categories. The theory, an alternative to the semantic bootstrapping hypothesis, proposes that the child exploits multiple sources of cues (distributional, semantic, or…

Over the years the Navajo language has received more attention than any other American Indian language. The grammatical work represents all traditions in American Indian linguistic research, from the earliest descriptivism to the latest generative grammar. In addition, there exists a large amount of material written in Navajo and a plethora of…

Reports a study that identified elements of surface grammar essential for English-as-a-second-language (ESL) learners' use of communication strategies (CS) in survival situations. The taxonomy developed provided a basis for identifying the semantic components and syntactic structures required to implement the CS. An appropriate sequence is…

The Kuku-Yalanji language is spoken by 500-600 Australian Aboriginal people on the coast of southeastern Cape York and inland to Chillagoe. The dictionary is of the northern dialects of Kuku-Nyungkul, the Rossville/Shipton's Flats dialect, Kuku-Yalanji, the China Camp/Daintree dialect, and Kuku-Jalunji, the Bloomfield dialect. It has three…

Research on reading has tried, and failed, to account for wide disparities in reading skill even among children taught by the same method. Why do some children learn to read easily and quickly while others, in the same classroom and taught by the same teacher, don't learn to read at all? In "Language Development and Learning to Read", Diane…