Many languages have processes which lengthen or shorten a vowel or consonant. In this dissertation, I concentrate on Open Syllable Lengthening, Closed Syllable Shortening, Monosyllabic Lengthening and Trochaic Lengthening, and present a formal model which captures these lengthenings and shortening as the insertion, deletion or reassignment of a…

The works of many scholars on Germanic and Slavic Languages do not really try to contrast the two biggest Indo-European language families, but analyse them seperately, as any close comparison seem to be unconvincible. In many works, we find some parts that usually would deal with loan words/borrowings/barbarisms. And, yet, we noticed that there…

To understand the interactions between production patterns common to children regardless of language environment and the early appearance of production effects based on perceptual learning from the ambient language requires the study of languages with diverse phonological properties. Few studies have evaluated early phonological acquisition…

The present article addresses the issue of second language accuracy developmental trajectories and shows how they can be captured via an error-tagged version of an English as a Foreign Language (EFL) learner corpus. The data used in this study were extracted from the International Corpus of Learner English (Granger et al., 2009) and consist of a…

The thesis of this dissertation is that, in the New Testament Pauline letters, the article is used with a noun only if the writer assumes identifiability on the part of the reader, and does not wish to give prominence to the constituent concerned. Otherwise, the anarthrousness of a constituent that is assumed by the author to be known and…

In this dissertation, the robustness of the relationship between the lexical frequency of phonotactic patterns and word-acceptability is examined for words of Amharic, an understudied Semitic language. The patterns under investigation span the whole verb root and include both under-represented and over-represented consonant distributions in the…

There is significant variation in the literature on how demonstratives are characterized semantically, leading to divergent syntactic analyses of demonstratives. A major source of this disagreement regards how distance specifications relate to the demonstrative: whether [+/- speaker] is an integral property of the demonstrative or not. I argue…

This article critically discusses the paradigmatic shift in applied linguistics, resulting in a claim that countless real-world language problems fall within its scope, but in reality they weaken the discipline and make it lack a focus. Then it takes a closer look at the nature of these language problems, and picks out, for analysis, real examples…

Although politeness markers are frequently used in written and spoken communication, pragmatic studies have not sufficiently explored the instruction of such markers to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners who lack sufficient opportunity to communicate with native speakers to acquire them in the context of use. Ignoring politeness as a…

Griffith University is set across five campuses in south-east Queensland, Australia, and has a student population of 43,000. The School of Languages and Linguistics (LAL) offers programs in linguistics, international English, Chinese, Italian, Japanese and Spanish, as well as English language enhancement courses. Research strands reflect the…

Until 1989, the American Association for Applied Linguistics (AAAL) could have been viewed as an interest group of the Linguistics Society of America (LSA); AAAL met in two designated meeting rooms as a subsection of the LSA conference. In 1991, I was asked to organize the first independent meeting of AAAL in New York City, with the help of…

In the popular mind, constructing a language has always been seen as an odd activity, one that seems to fly in the face of "natural" language dynamics. It is, nonetheless, a very old activity, and attention to its various stages is an important part of the study of linguistic history--and, indeed, of modern scientific development. The…

The use of collocation has always been considered as a good yardstick by which the idiomaticity of second language (L2) use is reliably judged. Hence, this study aims at investigating the relationship between optimizing the lexical approach and improving the collocational accuracy and the ability to operate on the idiom principle in the writing of…

This paper reports on the cognitive and affective benefits of data-driven learning (DDL), in which Korean EFL learners at the secondary level notice and unlearn their "overgenerated 'be'" by comparing native English-speaker and learner corpora with guided induction. To select the target language item and compile learner-corpus-based…

While more Chinese students are going abroad to persue their further academic study, how to help them improve academic writing competence has received wide attention. Modality, as one of the complex areas of English grammar, reflects the writer's attitude and is extremely important in academic written discourse. Therefore, it is necessary to…