The interaction between input frequency and constructional interference receives little attention in second language (L2) research. Two studies were conducted to test the effect of this interaction. Study 1 examined effects of both Zipfian frequency (ZF) and balanced frequency (BF) on L2 learning of English subject-extracted relative clauses…

This study examined the acquisition of preposition placement in English as a second language from a usage-based perspective. German and Chinese learners of English and English native speakers rated the acceptability of English oblique "wh" relative clauses in a magnitude estimation task. Results indicated that acceptability depended on…

Purpose: The article strives for the enhancement of the efficiency of translation competence assessment in philologists' university training with the help of the triangulation method. It is deemed in the concurrent involvement of different assessment agents (teacher, peer and self) into integrated and collaborative translation performance…

This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair "damage" and "destroy" commonly…

The patterns of paragraph writing as commonly used in the international journal are deemed necessary to be studied by scholars of non-English background wishing to write an article for publication in the international journals. Scholars of non-English speaking background, according to a number of research reports on rhetoric contrastive, have a…

Natural languages make prolific use of conventional constituent-ordering patterns to indicate "who did what to whom," yet the mechanisms through which these regularities arise are not well understood. A series of recent experiments demonstrates that, when prompted to express meanings through silent gesture, people bypass native language…

This paper draws from comparative rhetoric and contrastive stylistics and, by resorting to corpus linguistics methodologies, looks into possible quantitative descriptions of rhetorical deviations that are present in source texts within different language pairs and genres, in an attempt to map patterns of deviation, actual or expected, in…

By employing Chen and Kuo's (2012) framework, this study comparatively investigated the rhetorical differences/similarities existing in the Literature Review chapters of Master of Arts (MA) theses authored by international and Iraqi MA students in the field of applied linguistics. The results showed that almost half of the international LR…

Exploring interaction among Kurdish speaking family members, this paper investigates the use of discourse particles in Kurmanjî-Kurdish in relation to the contact phenomenon between the Kurdish and Turkish languages. Corpus analysis of data obtained from audio and video recordings of family talk on the phone was carried out to examine…

Metaphor research has always been conducted with various purposes in mind, among which the diachronic analysis of metaphor variation in discourse is outstanding. The current work followed a qualitative research mould to analyze the use of conceptual metaphors within the two novels "Persuasion" and "The Fault in Our Stars,"…

Lexical items that are encountered more frequently and in varying contexts have important effects on second language (L2) development because frequent and contextually diverse words are learned faster and become more entrenched in a learner's lexicon (Ellis 2002a, b). Despite evidence that L2 learners are generally exposed to non-native input,…

The diversity of vulnerability conditions, that have prevented children and adolescents from exercising their right to school education, also produces a diversity of cultural references of the public that comes to Basic Education programs for Youth and Adults in developing countries. This diversity often forges appropriation processes of numeracy…

Cross-cultural study of rhetorical traditions as they exist or have existed in different societies around the world has been the focus of contrastive rhetoric. Studies in contrastive rhetoric in the past years confirm that culture is reflected in rhetorical patterns. Using the argumentative essays of 55 students from a state university in Central…

The mass media are blamed for constructing a negative image of Islam through the use of Islam-related terms in reporting terrorism. It is presumed that when Islam-related terms are used without regard to their original connotations, they are likely to lose their original meanings and begin to take on altered meanings created by the media.…

Linguistic category learning has been shown to be highly sensitive to linear order, and depending on the task, differentially sensitive to the information provided by preceding category markers ("premarkers," e.g., gendered articles) or succeeding category markers ("postmarkers," e.g., gendered suffixes). Given that numerous…