This dissertation is focused on analyzing phonological contact between Slavic and non-Slavic languages in southeastern and northeastern Europe, with the particular goal of describing how the social context of language contact interacts with linguistic factors to shape the outcome of contact-induced change. On the basis of case studies drawn from…

In this study, we examine explicit information and aptitude within processing instruction. Forty-six learners of German in their third semester of study were divided into two groups: those who received explicit information prior to treatment (+EI) and those who did not (-EI). Participants also took the grammatical sensitivity portion of the Modern…

This article presents selective findings from an ongoing study that investigates rhetorical differences in business letter writing between Vietnamese students taking an English for Specific Purposes course in Vietnam and business professionals. Rhetorical analyses are based on two corpora, namely, scenario (N = 20) and authentic business letters…

This primarily methodological article makes a proposition for linguistic exploration of textual resources available through the "Google Scholar" search engine. These resources ("Google Scholar virtual corpus") are significantly larger than any existing corpus of academic writing. "Google Scholar", however, was not designed for linguistic searches…

This combined paper will focus on the description of two selected lexical patterns in Saudi Arabian Sign Language (SASL): metaphor and metonymy in emotion-related signs (Young) and lexicalization patterns of objects and their derivational roots (Palmer and Reynolds). The over-arcing methodology used by both studies is detailed in Stephen and…

This dissertation addresses a significant gap in the historiography of science: the nature of the language sciences as "science." Focusing on disciplinary and intellectual developments in the context of Imperial Germany (1871-1918), the project anticipates, complicates, and helps to explain a widely recognized theoretical shift, namely,…

This dissertation investigates the syntax of Spanish complementizers, with special attention to double-complementizer constructions and non-high "que" "that" complementizers. The goal is to explore the consequences of the behavior and distribution of such complementizers for the mapping of the Spanish left periphery, the…

The CEFR French profiles have been widely used to teach and evaluate language instruction over the past decade. The profiles were specifications of vocabulary that have been largely untested from a corpus-based, empirical perspective. The purpose of this dissertation was to evaluate the CEFR profiles by comparing their content with two sizable…

Our understanding of the history and development of Arabic is greatly challenged by the dearth of sources. Most scholars who have undertaken this task in the past have relied almost exclusively on data from the Arabic grammatical tradition. These sources claimed that Arabic originated as the language of the Bedouin of the central and southern…

Dependency structures represent a sentence as a set of dependency relations. Normally the dependency structures from a tree connect all the words in a sentence. One of the most defining characters of dependency structures is the ability to bring long distance dependency between words to local dependency structures. Another the main attraction of…

Dewey proposed a new theory of language, in which the form (such as symbols) and content of language are not separated. The content of language includes the physical aspects of the world, which are purely quantitative: the life process, which involves functional responses to qualities, and the human life process, which involves the conscious…

Background: Language treatment for children with specific language impairment (SLI) often takes months to achieve moderate results. Interventions often do not incorporate the principles that are known to affect learning in unimpaired learners. Aims: To outline some key findings about learning in typical populations and to suggest a model of how…

Recent research has demonstrated that knowledge of real-world events plays an important role in guiding online language comprehension. The present study addresses the scope of event knowledge activation during the course of comprehension, specifically investigating whether activation is limited to those knowledge elements that align with the local…

Theories of spoken production have not specifically addressed whether the phonemes of a word compete with each other for selection during phonological encoding (e.g., whether /t/ competes with /k/ in cat). Spoken production theories were evaluated and found to fall into three classes, theories positing (1) no competition, (2) competition among…

This article explores the viability of the analytic distinction between "turn-constructional unit (TCU) continuation" (i.e., continuing a turn beyond a point of possible completion with grammatically dependent material) and "new TCU" (i.e., continuing a turn with grammatically independent material) when hypotactic clause combinations are involved.…