Semantic word representation changes over different ages of childhood until it reaches its adult form. One method to formally model this change is the word maturity paradigm. This method uses a text sample for each age, including adult age, and transforms the samples into a semantic space by means of Latent Semantic Analysis. The representation of…

Given the importance of disciplinary specificity in terms of the potential differences in the functionality of nominalizations in scientific textbooks and the dearth of studies of this type, the current study explores the extent to which nominalization is realized across two disciplines. To this aim, eight academic textbooks from Physics and…

Employing the analytical framework of a discourse-driven social change, this paper unpacks the neoliberal concept of "educational quality" in the course of Russian education modernisation reform from 1991 to 2013. Since the early 1990s, the global neoliberal discourse has served as the backbone for post-Soviet educational ideology.…

When "again" modifies an English goal-PP construction, the sentence is ambiguous between a repetitive and a restitutive reading. Interestingly, languages vary in whether their counterpart to English "again" permits a restitutive reading with goal-PP constructions (Beck 2005; Beck & Snyder 2001). This article explores how…

The growing number of multilingual speakers poses an interesting question as to the way in which three or more languages are represented in the memory of a language user. The Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll and Stewart in "J Mem Lang" 33: 149-174, 1994) or the Sense Model (Finkbeiner et al. in "J Mem Lang" 51(1), 1-22, 2004)…

Trends in development of folklore studies in the research and education space at Ukrainian and foreign universities have been analyzed. They are fundamentalization, synthesis of academic science and educational practice, professionalization, institutionalization, humanitarization, anthropoligization, interdisciplinarity. It has been defined that…

Since the public's awareness and interest in the usage of biotechnology in agriculture has increased drastically, this study seeks to discover the macro and micro discursive strategies in corporate image building by Monsanto, which is not only the leader but also happens to be the most criticized company of the agribusiness market (Mitchell,…

Back translation--the 're-translation' of a translated questionnaire back into the original language and the subsequent comparison of the original version and the back translation--is a controversial assessment method for questionnaire translations. Recently, cross-cultural survey methodologists have followed the call for more empirical research…

An increasing focus on academic language across content areas, including science, prompted this study of the ways in which preservice teachers integrate academic language in middle grades science. Academic language is part of the discourse that students need for success in school, and it includes both what words are used and how those words are…

This semester-long study was designed to benefit developing Second Language Acquisition (SLA) instructional methods, specifically honing French language instruction, creating a foundation on which to explore the connection between input frequency during instruction and aural comprehension of difficultly acquired forms. Concurrently, five current…

This dissertation analyzes attitudes and perceptions of regiolects regarding the Magdeburg, Berlin, Leipzig and Standard German. Consultants listened to four recordings--one in each linguistic variety--and answered questions. The questions opened with the consultants' personal connection to each variety and opinions of the variety itself before…

Child language data are notoriously noisy. Children may produce several phonetic variants for a given word or use the same forms for several different words. As such, child data are characterized by little apparent systematicity. Competing theories have arisen to account for a range of problematic phenomena, but each has struggled to relate child…

This study investigated the pragmatic comprehension and production of the speech act of refusals in English by a group of Spanish-English bilinguals (SEB) in comparison with native English speakers (NES), taking into account variables such as length of residency in the L2 environment, type of refusals and level of politeness. Other variables…

Across the Germanic language family, we find a type of movement traditionally termed "topicalization," which may be realized in Germanic languages which possess the so-called Verb-Second (V2) constraint, as well as those without it. I will henceforward call this phenomenon "fronting" to avoid theoretical assumptions. This…

The study examines whether English and Indonesian research articles written by their respective native speaker scholars are significantly different from each other in terms of the number of hedges used. Hedges are rhetorical features (e.g. "may", "perhaps", "suggest") used to withhold complete commitment to the…