This study investigates the use of a popular online expression 'skr' by Chinese micro-blogging users on Weibo. Used originally as a hip-hop term for the sound of cars drifting tires, 'skr' was exploited by Chinese micro-blogging users for other meanings and functions. Data were collected from Weibo users' postings over a month. Using the Search…

Learning to use prepositions in English as a second language (L2) has been widely acknowledged to pose significant difficulties to learners, especially within metaphorical contexts. Difficulties relate to the complex distributional patterns of prepositions in discourse, namely, the variety of collocations requiring their use, as well as…

This study investigates the role of typed synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC) on learners' foreign language anxiety and output quantity. Sixty-one beginner French learners participated in the study. In the first session (group 1: SCMC, group 2: face-to-face [FTF]), participants learned new vocabulary and the present tense forms of…

Negation is a universal component of human language; polarity sensitivity (i.e., lexical distributional constraints in relation to negation) is arguably so while being pervasive across languages. Negation has long been a field of inquiry in psychological theories and experiments of reasoning, which inspired many follow-up studies of negation and…

Prepositions form a hurdle for several EFL learners, Arabs in particular. One major catalyst is that the preposition systems in English and Arabic rarely correspond to one another. Most scholars who researched this area concentrated on the problem itself, rather than finding a successful remedy that can empower these students to masterfully handle…

The study explored the inflectional morphological awareness of Greek-speaking poor comprehenders identified in grade 3. The sample consisted of 13 poor comprehenders and 27 good comprehenders. The poor comprehenders were selected from 126 children attended 19 primary schools in metropolitan area of Athens using a cut-off-based approach. All the…

It has long been considered that the Mandarin possessive reflexive "zijide" can be either locally bound or long distance bound, leading to ambiguity where it fails to exclusively refer back to either long distance binding NP or the local NP. In addition to syntactic factors such as the local versus long distance division, the present…

Vagueness is semantic indecision, David Lewis said. This dissertation vindicates this insight by applying social choice theory, the branch of economics concerning collective decision making, to account for linguistic vagueness. Vagueness effects are analogues to cycles that sometimes arise in collective decisions. Cycles (e.g. A is preferred to B…

Just as pronouns like "she" and "he" make anaphoric reference to individuals, English words like "that" and so can be used to refer anaphorically to a proposition introduced in a discourse: "That's true; She told me so". Much has been written about individual anaphora, but less attention has been paid to…

Reduplication as a word-formation process in Mandarin, which is one of the most difficult knowledge to comprehend for scholar and student. Theoretically this research offers an approach that is different from what has been made by previous researchers. Using the M.D.S Simatupang free context approach this research contrasts the reduplicative forms…

The usage of hedges in trial discourse context is interested to be explored. This paper presents a description of phenomena related to the use of hedges by witnesses and experts in Indonesian court trial. It focuses on the usage of hedges in the form of words, phrases, clauses, and utterances in court trial context. Conversation among participants…

Do the cognitive benefits of "interleaving"--the method of alternating between two or more skills or concepts during training--extend to foreign language learning? In four experiments, we investigated the efficacy of interleaved versus conventional blocked practice for teaching adult learners to conjugate Spanish verbs in the…

Even in this digital age, as educational technologies are increasingly integrated into teaching and learning, textbooks continue to play a significant role within language classrooms. Many textbooks maintain a traditional approach to presenting grammar, including using grammatical terminology. However, students seem to have little knowledge of…

To investigate cross-linguistic lexical and syntactic influences in grammatical gender in early bilingualism, we tested 12 simultaneous, 12 early successive bilingual Russian-German children, and 15 monolingual German children aged 8-9 years. An elicited production task in German shows that all bilingual children assign target gender to nouns,…

Speaking fluently is characterized not only by the speed of oral delivery but also by the absence of non-fluent pauses. This paper aims at investigating the pausing phenomena in the speech of the Yemeni learners of English. It investigated three aspects of silent pauses, the frequency, the placement and the length. The data were collected from 20…