Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…

This study is based on a broad research question: How does the translation into Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) capture and convey the meanings embedded within languages belonging both inside and outside the sphere of the Arab world? To answer this question, a translation and literary study of borrowings, combining the methods of etymology and…

Opportunities for incidental vocabulary acquisition were explored in a 121,000-word corpus of teacher talk addressed to advanced adult learners of English as a second language (ESL) in a communicatively-oriented conversation class. In contrast to previous studies that relied on short excerpts, the corpus contained all of the teacher speech the…

Subtechnical vocabulary includes items that are neither highly technical nor obviously general, and rhetorical/organizational items are in this category. They serve to signal the writer's intentions or his/her evaluation of the material presented. A technique for identifying subtechnical items is explained. Three identified items are analyzed, and…