This study formalizes and compares two major hypotheses in speakers' choices of referring expressions: the topicality model that chooses a form based on the topicality of the referent, and the rational model that chooses a form based on the informativity of the form and its speech cost. Simulations suggest that both the topicality of the referent…

The paper is an in-depth study of how the principles and rules of the metrical theory of phonology have found their way to apply to Iraqi Arabic words and expressions. Iraqi lexical items have amassed evidence illustrating that both foot and stress are the hub of phonological designs of parametric prominence entailed in mapping and building up…

The motif of the folktale is essentially the smallest and striking elements of narrative content with the ability to endure in tradition. It is divided into three categories: actor, item and single incident. These categories become the foundation that supports the built of the original motif-index of folk literature by Stith Thompson.…

Rating scale development in the field of language assessment is often considered in dichotomous ways: It is assumed to be guided either by expert intuition or by drawing on performance data. Even though quite a few authors have argued that rating scale development is rarely so easily classifiable, this dyadic view has dominated language testing…

The disambiguation of a syntactically ambiguous sentence in favor of a less preferred parse can lead to slower reading at the disambiguation point. This phenomenon, referred to as a garden-path effect, has motivated models in which readers initially maintain only a subset of the possible parses of the sentence, and subsequently require…

This paper explores youths' language activism at a Swedish senior high school. Following Cameron (Verbal hygiene, Routledge, Florence, 1995), this paper investigates language activism as 'verbal hygiene', with a focus on the social dimension of students' attempts to change how language is used at the school. To capture how the politically…

In this study, we use temporally aligned word embeddings and a large diachronic corpus of English to quantify language change in a data-driven, scalable way, which is grounded in language use. We show a unique and reliable relation between measures of language change and age of acquisition ("AoA") while controlling for frequency,…

This study aims to investigate the acquisition of vocabulary recognition and vocabulary production in the short- and long-term via listening and reading comprehension activities using Voice® software. Sixty participants were invited to read or listen to two passages in different sessions, that is, three sessions in listening inputs and one session…

This state-of-the-art review focuses on translanguaging in education. In recent years, scholars have engaged in the conceptualisation of 'translanguaging' (e.g. García, 2009; García & Wei, 2014a; Wei, 2018) as well as in conducting a vast and ever-increasing number of empirical studies, in educational contexts in particular. This article aims…

The works collated here provide evidence of the benefits of viewing communication with people with aphasia (PWA) as a joint interactional process and of applying linguistic methodologies to the study of discourse and interaction in aphasia. They specifically point to the need to reconceptualize familiarization and speaking for behaviors in…

The present study has investigated the occurrence of the English anaphoric expressions, he/she, in L2 grammars. Adult Chinese learners of English were evaluated on whether they were able to provide a correct semantic interpretation of these pronouns when they appeared in complex sentences (subordinate + matrix) and correlative structures. Results…

Ambridge argues that there is widespread agreement among child language researchers that learners store linguistic abstractions. In this commentary the authors first argue that this assumption is incorrect; anti-representationalist/exemplar views are pervasive in theories of child language. Next, the authors outline what has been learned from this…

The aim of conducting this study came from a need to explore contrastive study in using metadiscourse features between English and Hausa in research article genre. This study investigated what metadiscourse features are frequently used across two languages in research article genre. A sub-corpus of ten research articles was compiled from each…

This meta-analysis evaluated the effectiveness of data-driven learning (DDL) among low-proficiency L2 English learners, addressing the mixed results found in previous meta-analyses. The study incorporated 38 studies involving 2085 participants, yielding 37 effect sizes from control-experimental (C/E) studies and 42 from pre- and post-test (P/P)…

We present a new corpus design for multi-lingual corpora that involve intra-speaker variation in different situational-functional contexts, including primarily spoken but also the written mode, with the aim towards enhancing language documentation efforts and resources. We illustrate how this comparative design and the resulting cross-culturally…