This paper is an attempt to study empirically a sample of spoken narratives of Hindi, Telugu and Dakkhini speakers in the multilingual setting of Hyderabad. After a brief account of multilingualism and variation within a language as commonly occurring phenomena, the paper examines the spoken narratives of the three languages mentioned above with a…

For a variety of reasons, learning English prepositions is notoriously difficult and a slow, gradual process for English as a Second Language (ESL) students. To begin, English prepositions typically are short, single-syllable or two-syllable words that are seldom stressed when speaking and therefore often not articulated clearly or heard…

The present study aims at investigating the learning strategies on which Thai EFL learners rely in learning English relative clauses (ERCs). Not only do these strategies facilitate their ERC acquisition, but they are also found to lead them to certain kinds of problems. Such problems related to the learning strategies are first language transfer,…

Discourse particles are ubiquitous in spoken discourse. Yet despite their pervasiveness very few studies attempt to look at their use in the pedagogical setting. Drawing on data from an intercultural corpus of speech and a textbook database, the present study compares the use of discourse particles by expert users of English in Hong Kong with…

Formulaic language is widely recognized to be of central importance to fluent and idiomatic language use. However, the mechanics of how formulaic language is acquired are not well understood. Some researchers (e.g. Nick Ellis) believe that the chunking inherent in formulaic language drives the language learning process. Others (e.g. Wray) claim…

A substantial number of studies have examined the effects of grammar correction on second language (L2) written errors. However, most of the existing research has involved unidirectional written feedback. This classroom-based study examined the effects of oral negotiation in addressing L2 written errors. Data were collected in two intermediate…

The finding that speakers of aspect languages encode event endpoints to a lesser extent than do speakers of non-aspect languages has led to the hypothesis that there is a relationship between grammatical aspect and event conceptualization (e.g., von Stutterheim and Nuse, 2003). The present study concerns L1 event conceptualization in 40 L1…

Studies testing the knowledge of syntactic properties have resulted in two potentially contrasting proposals in relation to third language acquisition (TLA); the Cumulative Enhancement Model (Flynn et al., 2004), which proposes that previously learned languages will positively affect the acquisition of a third language (L3); and the "second…

This paper presents an empirical study of move structures and personal pronouns of fifty English RA (research article) abstracts based on the model of Bhatia (1990). It revealed that three other move patterns were ascertained besides ten out of the analyzed abstracts following his move order. The analysis of personal pronouns showed that…

In the construal of self and others, highly diverse, idiosyncratic, and evocative adjectival terms were manifested as contrasting, opposite terms for a set of supplied constructs rather than conventional antonyms. These "personal contrasts" are seen as a neglected companion to George Kelly's (The Psychology of Personal Constructs, 1955) conception…

According to the conjunction rule, the probability of A "and" B cannot exceed the probability of either single event. This rule reads "and" in terms of the logical operator [inverted v], interpreting A and B as an intersection of two events. As linguists have long argued, in natural language "and" can convey a wide range of relationships between…

Three eye-tracking experiments investigated the role of pitch accents during online discourse comprehension. Participants faced a grid with ornaments, and followed prerecorded instructions such as "Next, hang the blue ball" to decorate holiday trees. Experiment 1 demonstrated a processing advantage for felicitous as compared to infelicitous uses…

This study investigates the acquisition of post-verbal (temporal) adverbials and post-verbal negation in L2 Dutch. It is based on previous findings for L2 French that post-verbal negation poses less of a problem for L2 learners than post-verbal adverbial placement (Hawkins, Towell, Bazergui, Second Language Research 9: 189-233, 1993; Herschensohn,…

This study tested the production of tensed finite verbs and participles referring to the past and future in agrammatic speakers of Turkish. The agrammatic speakers did not make more time reference errors in tensed verbs than in participles. This is interesting because tense in general cannot therefore be the main problem, since time reference for…

The article presents a usage-based analysis of color attribution, i.e. the construal of the relation between color property and an entity to which it is attributed in painting descriptions. The study is based on the corpus of 100 catalog entries written for American art museums. It focuses on the two most frequent morpho-syntactic patterns in the…