The traditional division of conditionals into four main types (zero, first, second, and third) has long been called into question. Unfortunately, the awareness that this description does not reflect conditional patterns in actual usage has not generally been reflected in EFL coursebooks. This article re-examines the arguments for a description of…

An informal organisation that is becoming quite influential in the spread of Italian in Italy, as well as abroad, is the "Accademia della Crusca" which began its activities during the Renaissance, under quite different auspices. Founded in Florence in 1582-1583, this Academy was inspired by the theories of Pietro Bembo (1470-1547), a…

Presented at the American Association for Applied Linguistics Annual Conference, Denver, Colorado; 21 March 2009.

The current study provided cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary analyses of the distribution of directives in discussion and conclusion sections of English and Persian research articles (RAs) in disciplines of physics, chemistry, counseling, and sociology, representing hard and soft sciences, respectively. To that aim, 80 RAs from both English…

This study reports the dominant linguistic errors that occur in the written productions of Arba Minch University (hereafter AMU) students. A sample of paragraphs was collected for two years from students ranging from freshmen to graduating level. The sampled compositions were then coded, described, and explained using error analysis method. Both…

The paper discusses the infinitive errors made by Chinese college students. From the CLEC, all infinitive errors tagged as [vp5] are collected, and then the general distribution of the errors among 4 groups of college students is shown. Moreover, these errors are classified into 12 categories according to the characteristics of the usage. After…

English-speaking children exhibit difficulty in their comprehension of raising patterns, such as (1), in which the NP the boy is semantically linked to the VP in the embedded clause, but is syntactically realized as the subject of the matrix clause. (1) Raising pattern: [s "The boy" seems to the girl [s _ to be happy]]. This dissertation…

Research that examines diachronic change and modality posit that modal verbs follow certain universal paths of development (e.g. Cornillie, 2007; Bybee & Fleischman, 1995; Bybee, Perkins & Pagliuca, 1994). The present study examines the development of Spanish modality in Mexico through the use of multivariate analyses, relative…

This book provides the first comprehensive overview of theoretical issues, historical developments and current trends in ICALL (Intelligent Computer-Assisted Language Learning). It assumes a basic familiarity with Second Language Acquisition (SLA) theory and teaching, CALL and linguistics. It is of interest to upper undergraduate and/or graduate…

This dissertation uses quantitative and geographic analysis techniques to examine the historical and geographical processes that have shaped California's linguistic diversity. Many questions in California historical linguistics have received diminishing attention in recent years, remaining unanswered despite their continued relevance. The studies…

This thesis describes new approaches to the formal modeling of narrative discourse. Although narratives of all kinds are ubiquitous in daily life, contemporary text processing techniques typically do not leverage the aspects that separate narrative from expository discourse. We describe two approaches to the problem. The first approach considers…

This paper illustrates how a freely available online corpus has been exploited in a module on teaching business letters covering the following four speech acts (functions) commonly found in business letters: invitations, requests, complaints and refusals. It is proposed that different strategies are required for teaching potentially…

This study offers a Minimalist analysis of the L2 acquisition of binding properties whereby cross-linguistic differences arise from the interaction of anaphoric feature specifications and operations of the computational system (Reuland 2001, 2011; Hicks 2009). This analysis attributes difficulties in the L2 acquisition of locality and orientation…

This research paper aims to explore the usage of the English Auxiliary "Be" Present Tense Verb, using corpus based method among Malaysian form 4 and form 5 students. This study is conducted by identifying and classifying the types of errors in the Auxiliary "Be" Present Tense verb in students' compositions from the MCSAW corpus…

This article aims to explore whether well-attested findings in the fields of World Englishes (WE) and of English as a lingua franca (ELF) have determined a shift in perspective in the overall approach to English language teaching (ELT), and how far this shift has permeated teaching materials and coursebooks. The research study was carried out in…