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…

Among the Altaic languages, Turkic and Mongolian have a lot of similarities due to their prolonged contact and a common lineage. The two languages share several parallels in vocabulary, sound correspondence, phonotactic rules, and grammar. This study aimed to explore the comparative-historical aspects of Turkic-Mongolian language parallels in…

This study investigates how task complexity affects native speakers' and second language (L2) learners', and experts' perceptions of task difficulty in writing tasks. It also explores how task complexity influences English native speakers' and L2 learners' linguistic complexity in their writing. Ninety participants performed one simple and one…

This volume includes two sections of the 2019 NORDSCI international conference proceedings: (1) Education and Educational Research; and (2) Language and Linguistics. Education and Educational Research includes 11 papers covering scientific topics in the full spectrum of education, including history, sociology and economy of education, educational…

Linguistic complexity of test items is one test format element that has been studied in the context of struggling readers and their participation in paper-and-pencil tests. The present article presents findings from an exploratory study on the potential relationship between linguistic complexity and test performance for deaf readers. A total of 64…

This linguistic and ethnographic project examines register formation among a community of Sri Lankan university youth. The Raggers group at the University of Peradeniya (Kandy, Sri Lanka) has strict rules forbidding the use of English and supporting a register of Sinhala made up of linguistic features from different Sinhala varieties. Detailing…

In this column, the term "pragmatics", a part of linguistic analysis, is explained. The study of pragmatics concerns language usage in natural context. The item of analysis is not the sentence, but the utterance of the sentence in a particular well-defined set of contexts. (SW)

Special issue on French dialects. (RL)

THE WAY IN WHICH WE CONCEIVE OF REALITY IS DEPENDENT UPON THE LANGUAGE SYSTEM WE USE. EACH LANGUAGE SYSTEM, WHETHER THAT OF A WHOLE CULTURE, A SUBCULTURE, OR AN INDIVIDUAL, EMBODIES IN ITS VOCABULARY AND SYNTAX AND RULES OF "GRAMMAR" A SET OF ASSUMPTIONS ABOUT THE NATURE OF REALITY AND THE CORRECT WAYS TO MAKE SENSE OF THINGS. THUS, UNDERSTANDING…

Just as a reader must bring an experiential conceptual background to the printed page, so must he bring an ability to recognize the graphic cues that signal meaning. The graphic cues or structural meaning works as a system the description of which can be outlined in three parts as the vocabulary, the structure, and the sound. What has been…

Expanded version of a lecture held at a Teacher Education Conference, Mainz, West Germany, June 7, 1972. (DD)

An attempt to predict reading difficulty with various grammatical measures showed that the relatively crude measure of sentence length is still the most indicative. Yngve's phrase structure measurement and Allen's "sector analysis" were used on 80 selected passages and were compared to the Lorge Readability Formula in terms of tests based on the…