By reviewing the evolution of contrastive rhetoric, and the development of ESL writing teaching, this thesis presents the close relationship between the two and the positive influence of contrastive rhetoric on the teaching of ESL writing. This thesis also explores the new directions of contrastive rhetoric studies from two aspects: expansion and…

The papers in this volume all articulate a keen awareness of the shift in sociolinguistic economies caused by online technologies. We now live in an online-offline nexus of communication, and realizing this invites changes in the ways in which we traditionally view and imagine the foundations of our disciplinary approaches. In reviewing the…

This paper calls for the replication of two task-based language teaching (TBLT) studies, Kim (2012) and Shintani (2012). Kim contributes to the large body of TBLT research on output-based tasks, whereas Shintani initiates research into input-based tasks, a less well researched domain. These studies deserve to be replicated for several reasons.…

Before the social turn in applied linguistics, English language teaching (ELT) was a presumably monosexual world. One where all its participants were presumed to be straight until, and even if, proven otherwise. The social turn brought with it a small but growing body of queer applied linguistics literature that has led to the troubling of the…

The aim of the present academic discussion note is to generate feedback on a recent project that revisits the nature of speech acts as analytic constructs for politeness theory. While speech act has been largely discredited in the field, we believe that they need to be kept in the core of politeness inquiries, in particular if we approach them in…

Learning the unique linguistic forms and structures that construct and communicate scientific principles, knowledge, and beliefs is important for developing students' disciplinary literacy. The use of scientific language is apparent in the texts that scientists produce to communicate their findings to other scientists--the research articles. Texts…

This paper analyzes some of the ambiguities that arise among statements with the copular verb "is" in the mathematical language of textbooks as compared to day-to-day English language. We identify patterns in the construction and meaning of "is" statements using randomly selected examples from corpora representing the two…

This paper introduces "Kwaras" and "Namuti," two new tools for building, managing, accessing, and mobilizing ELAN-based language documentation corpora. Kwaras integrates WAV files, ELAN annotations, and document metadata into a web-based corpus, allowing immediate access to annotations and recordings. Namuti builds from Kwaras…

We frame multilingualisms through a growing interest in a linguistics and sociology of the 'south' and acknowledge earlier contributions of linguists in Africa, the Américas and Asia who have engaged with human mobility, linguistic contact and consequential ecologies that alter over time and space. Recently, conversations of multilingualism have…

With increased availability of information in modern societies, individuals are often faced with complex decisions regarding how to integrate and judge the veracity of available information. Generally, these issues have been approached using computational techniques to "detect" and "reduce" the spread of information across…

This paper presents results of a study aiming at identifying unique features in the system of morphological markers of the noun in four idioms of Eastern Khanty (Vakh, Vasyugan, Surgut and Salym). The analysis focuses on the paradigms of three nominal categories: number, possession, and case. It draws on the linguistic data obtained from various…

This paper undertakes a sociolinguistic analysis of slangy expressions in Nigerian Pidgin. The corpus for this study was gotten systematically through participant observation of conversational discourses in everyday contexts amongst Nigerians living in the Warri-Ughelli-Sapele axes of Delta State. These linguistic data were then recorded and…

This article aims to investigate how Dutch children may eventually converge on a targetlike distribution of "hoeven" 'need,' a modal verbal NPI (Negative Polarity Item), based on its appearance in the scope of merely some but not all of its possible licensers in the language input (i.e., the induction problem). Imitation performance was…

Ever since the wars of the Yugoslav secession in the nineties, linguistic nationalism has proven to have been among the more relevant instances in the discursive construction of national identity and new languages, dubbed by Ranko Bugarski as 'administrative successors' of Serbo-Croatian. Even though contemporary linguistics still classifies…

What determines human ratings of association? We planned this paper as a test for association strength (AS) that is derived from the log likelihood that two words co-occur significantly more often together in sentences than is expected from their single word frequencies. We also investigated the moderately correlated interactions of word…