Based on a report on Dr. Li Wenliang in the British mainstream BBC media under the epidemic of COVID-2019, this paper analyzes from three perspectives guided by Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar: transitivity, mood and personal pronoun. It is found that the material process appears most frequently which shows that the news reports mainly…

In her thoughtful examination of the complexities of identity in the article "Political and Metaphysical: Reflections on Identity, Education, and Justice" (EJ1277341), Lauren Bialystok provides a full and incisive vocabulary for thinking through the tensions among authentic, political, and social recognition-requiring aspects of…

Usage of definite and indefinite articles is known to vary across different varieties of English, especially in the outer circle. As a semantic/pragmatic category, definiteness is notoriously slippery to define -- is it uniqueness, familiarity, inclusiveness or identifiability? Literature has shown that the lack of an agreed definition can…

The present study investigates the usage of speech like expressions in written works of Turkish learners of English. It also aims to find out the differences between C1 and B1 level learners in terms of the frequency and types of speech like expressions. The participants in this study were 21 B1 and 33 C1 level students at a state university in…

The present study investigates whether second language (L2) speakers are sensitive to the information-structural constraints and frequency distributions at the syntax-discourse interface in the L2. L1-German--L2-English and L1-English--L2-German speakers completed a speeded naturalness judgment task. For sentences presented in broad or…

The syntactic complexities of English sentence structures induced the Indonesian students' sentence-level accuracies blurred. Reciprocally, the meanings conveyed are left hanging. The readers are increasingly at sixes and sevens. The Sentence Crimes were, therefore, the major essences of diagnosing the students' sentence-level inaccuracies in this…

Adjectives are essential for describing and differentiating concepts. However, they have a protracted development relative to other word classes. Here we measure three- and four-year-olds' exposure to adjectives across a range of interactive and socioeconomic contexts to: (i) measure the syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variability of adjectives…

While there is overall consensus that narratives obtained by means of visual stimuli contain less natural language than free narratives, it has been less clear how the naturalness of a narrative can be measured in a crosslinguistically meaningful way. Here this question is addressed by studying the differences between free narratives and…

This study explored pronominal resolution as a measure of reading comprehension beyond single sentences. Specifically, it was hypothesized that the ability to specify the referents of pronouns like "this" and "these" that have variable antecedents would be a good probe of the quality of the reader's mental model. This idea was…

While there have been attempts to develop written systems for signed languages, none have been widely used or adopted. In his article in an "American Annals of the Deaf" special issue that also includes the present article, Grushkin (EJ1174123) makes a case not only for why, but how efforts should be renewed to develop a written signed…

Spanish generally shows a Sequence of Tense (SOT) phenomenon in subjunctive clauses: the tense of the embedded clause (present or past) must agree with the tense of the matrix clause. It has been reported, however, that one kind of violation sometimes occurs, in which a present tense subjunctive clause is embedded under a past tense matrix clause…

Source-based writing is a complex and frequently occurring task type in postsecondary education. While a large body of research now exists investigating source-based student writing, few studies have used corpus-based methods to investigate L1 student performance on source-based writing tasks and to connect this performance to the holistic quality…

This study investigates how implicit and explicit learning and knowledge are associated, by focusing on the salience of target form--meaning connections. The participants were engaged in incidental learning of artificial determiner systems that included grammatical rules of [± plural] (a taught rule), [± actor] (a more salient hidden rule), and [±…

Objective: First, to examine general health care attitudes and health care utilization of a University Health Service (UHS) at a large university. Second, to identify differences between LGBT and non-LBGT students. Participants: 2,943 university students were surveyed in Spring 2013; 7.8% LGBT, 67% undergraduate and 65% female. Methods: A…

The present study investigates native (L1) and second language (L2) processing of scope ambiguities in English sentences containing the universal quantifier every in subject NP and negation. Previous studies in L1 and L2 processing of scope ambiguities have found speakers to generally employ a 'minimal effort' principle that highly prefers the…