This paper investigates how boosters are used by qualitative and quantitative research article writers to express certainty. Boosters are words such as "definitely," "sure," "demonstrate" which signal writers' assurance in what they say. Drawing on a corpus of 200 research articles in Applied Linguistics, this study…

This article documents how second language (L2) Spanish learners in an American high school formulated explicit grammar rules during three inductive lessons on the pronominal clitic "se." Following Adair-Hauck "et al." (2010), each lesson first presented a property of "se" within a narrative text, and then had learners inductively "Co-construct"…

This paper explores how referent honorifics contribute to identity construction on a Japanese TV shopping channel program. Drawing on Ochs' twostep model of indexicality (1993, 1996) and Agah's proposal (1993) that honorifics are not directly linked to social status but index a "relative position within events of discursive interaction"…

This paper examines discursive features of engagement (Hyland, 2009) demonstrated by native English- and Russian-speaking academics in their research articles. Pronoun choice, formation of directives, references to shared information, and use of rhetorical questions are identified in written academic discourse and analyzed quantitatively and…

This study examines the frequency effect of two-word collocations involving "para" "to," "for" (e.g. "fui para," "para que") on the reduction of "para" to "pa" (in Spanish) and "pra" (in Portuguese). Collocation frequency effects demonstrate that language speakers…

Speakers must command different linguistic registers to index various social-discourse elements, including the identity of the addressee. Previous work found that English-learning children could link registers to appropriate addressees by 5 years. Two experiments found that better cues to the linguistic form or to the social meaning of register…

Speakers of gender-agreement languages use gender-marked elements of the noun phrase in spoken-word recognition: A congruent marking on a determiner or adjective facilitates the recognition of a subsequent noun, while an incongruent marking inhibits its recognition. However, while monolinguals and early language learners evidence this…

Young children typically do not use order-of-mention to resolve ambiguous pronouns, but may do so if given additional cues, such as gestures. Additionally, this ability to utilize gestures may be enhanced in bilingual children, who may be more sensitive to such cues due to their unique language experience. We asked monolingual and bilingual…

Discourse connectives are important indicators of textual coherence, and mastering them is an essential part of acquiring a language. In this article, we compare advanced learners' sensitivity to the meaning conveyed by connectives in an off-line grammaticality judgment task and an on-line reading experiment using eye-tracking. We also assess the…

This study examines the efficacy of a multimodal online bilingual dictionary based on cognitive linguistics in order to explore the advantages and limitations of explicit multimodal L2 vocabulary learning. Previous studies have examined the efficacy of the verbal and visual representation of words while reading L2 texts, concluding that it…

Russian legal-administrative documents from the early fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth century (Middle Russian) show extensive variation in expressing possessivity within the noun phrase. Possessor expressions can be conveyed by morphologically derived possessive adjectives, adnominal genitives, or by combinations of those constructions…

This article deals with the issue of using punctuation marks correctly. The misuse of punctuation marks affects meaning; therefore, it affects translation. As a result, the writer should pay more attention to punctuation marks and not to use them randomly. Simultaneously, the reader has to take care of the punctuation marks when interpreting a…

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…

We developed an English Collocations On Demand system offering on-line corpus and concordance information to help Japanese researchers acquire a better command of English collocation patterns. The Life Science Dictionary Corpus consists of approximately 90,000,000 words collected from life science related research papers published in academic…

Function words support many aspects of language acquisition. This study investigated whether toddlers understand the number feature of determiners and use it for noun comprehension. French offers an ideal "test case" as number is phonetically marked in determiners but not in nouns. Twenty French-learning 24-month-olds completed a split-screen…