Increasing use of the Internet has led to a proliferation of online communication and information sharing media. These media, each with its own set of affordances and limitations, are thought to encourage new ways to communicate. Interlocutors refashion general English into abbreviated and often pictographic representations of existing concepts.…

In the first case study, a piece of recent BBC news reported on Chinese netizens leaving random but funny comments on a Western website attracted people's attention. A closer look at those comments reveals that understanding the Chinese netizens' comments requires metaphorical and cultural knowledge. This study starts with theoretical explanations…

This interpretive case study investigated how a fifth-grade teacher's social practices with visual and linguistic signs positioned her students (10- and 11-year-olds) to take up particular modes as they constructed digital compositions. The context of the study was a suburban public school in the northeastern United States. Analysis was threefold.…

Collocational competence is recognized to be integral to native-like L2 performance, and concordancing can be of assistance in gaining this competence. This study reports on an investigation into the effect of symmetrical and asymmetrical scaffolding on the collocational competence of Iranian intermediate learners of English in the context of…

This paper considers whether the sources of linguistic complexity presented within texts targeted at 1st-grade readers have increased, decreased, or held steady over the 52-year period from 1962 to 2013. A collection of more than 450 texts is examined. All texts were selected from Grade 1 textbooks published by Scott Foresman during the targeted…

This article focuses on the ways of researching the process of designing, developing, and using telecollaboration (also known as online intercultural exchange) to facilitate the learning of both linguistic and "intercultural communicative competence" (ICC) in higher education courses in different educational contexts in the United…

We report on an exploratory study comparing the performance as online tutors of two groups of beginner eleven-year-old students of English in Colombia and Spanish in New Zealand. The native speaker students of the foreign language the others were learning corrected paragraphs written by their peers. The feedback provided by each group of tutors…

This research investigates cross-linguistic influence in the comprehension of L3 French past tense. A close examination was made on the L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) transfer patterns among 20 English majors in their early acquisition of L3 French passé compose (PC). Data were collected through introspective think-aloud protocol in a comprehension…

Mostly learners and even teachers of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) are still not able to speak grammatically and fluently just because they lack of the Indonesian language proficiency and comprehension. This research was done to investigate how the Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) can assist the teachers and learners of EFL in improving their…

In many languages there are words that behave like lexical verbs and on the one hand and like functional categories expressing distinctions of tense, aspect, modality, etc. on the other. The grammatical status of such words is frequently controversial; while some authors treat them as belonging to one and the same grammatical category, others…

This study deals with unplanned terminology development in the subject field of economics within media discourse. It examines how economic terms in Turkish newspapers emerge, are used, and cease. This developmental process is also analyzed through productivity of economic terms and the factors affect them. The subject terms are also analyzed as a…

How do new words become established in a speech community? This dissertation documents linguistic, cognitive, and social factors that are hypothesized to affect "lexical entrenchment," the extent to which a new word becomes part of the lexicon of a speech community. First, in a longitudinal corpus study, I find that linguistic properties such as…

The present paper introduces and evaluates a readability measurement method designed for learners of EFL (English as a foreign language). The proposed readability measurement method (a regression model) estimates the text readability based on linguistic features, such as lexical, syntactic and discourse features. Text readability refers to the…

This work is an attempt to give a unified theory in response to two questions. The first question arises in the philosophy of mind: what is the mechanism by which we think of objects in the world? The second is a question in the philosophy of language: what is the mechanism by which we speak of them? These are questions that some have treated…

This dissertation takes up the issue of transparency and opacity in vowel harmony--that is, when a segment is unable to undergo a harmony process, will it be skipped over by harmony (transparent) or will it prevent harmony from propagating further (opaque)? I argue that the choice between transparency and opacity is best understood as a…