In noun compounds in English, the modifying noun may be singular ("mouse-eater") or an irregularly inflected plural ("mice-eater"), but regularly inflected plurals are dispreferred (*"rats-eater"). This phenomenon has been taken as strong evidence for dual-mechanism theories of lexical representations, which hold that regular (rule-governed) and…

This paper studies the reliability and validity of naturalistic speech errors as a tool for language production research. Possible biases when collecting naturalistic speech errors are identified and specific predictions derived. These patterns are then contrasted with published reports from Germanic languages (English, German and Dutch) and one…

The current electronic text format is inherent to the problem of text integration, or, alternatively, cohesion deficit, which greatly affects reading comprehension. The question remains as to whether well structured hypertext would enable L2 readers, particularly ESL readers, to overcome potential difficulties in integrating information and…

Based on a corpus of ca. 18 1/2 hours of dyadic interactions between near-strangers, this paper investigates the use of general extenders (GEs) by native speakers of New Zealand English (NSNZE) and German (NSG) in terms of their forms and frequencies. The results are compared with the use of GEs produced by German non-native speakers of English…

Self-repetition is commonly found in spoken discourse, and it could be argued that it is an interactional necessity. Self-repetition in spontaneous talk is pervasive and performs a variety of functions. Some regard it as signalling redundancy, disfluency, or both, in spoken language, whereas others consider it to be facilitating the production of…

Previous work in the literature reveals that EFL learners were deficient in collocations that are a hallmark of near native fluency in learner's writing. Among different types of collocations, the verb-noun (V-N) one was found to be particularly difficult to master, and learners' first language was also found to heavily influence their collocation…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is twofold: first the paper aims to sketch the theoretical basis for the use of electronic portfolios for prior learning assessment; second it endeavours to introduce latent semantic analysis (LSA) as a powerful method for the computation of semantic similarity between texts and a basis for a new observation link…

Recent research in semantics and pragmatics has revived the debate about whether there are two cognitively distinct categories of conversational implicatures: generalised and particularised. Generalised conversational implicatures are so-called because they seem to arise more or less independently of contextual support. Particularised implicatures…

This paper examines the semantic associations of words found in the business lexical environment by using a one-million word corpus of both spoken and written Business English. The key method of analysis is that of semantic prosody or semantic association; the notion that words associate with collocates that are themselves related, often either…

The article compares evidence from an electronic corpus of texts written for a child audience with specifications in the National Literacy Strategy. The concepts and terminology associated with corpus linguistics are introduced and explained, and the research study from which the findings derive is summarised. Results of the analysis are presented…

Studies on classroom interaction have typically focused on relationships between turn-taking patterns and some larger unit of analysis of varying length and nature. However, two questions still left unanswered are how teachers talk differently from students in general and how linguistic variation between two participants might relate to…

Background: The computational grammatical complexity (CGC) hypothesis claims that children with G(rammatical)-specific language impairment (SLI) have a domain-specific deficit in the computational system affecting syntactic dependencies involving 'movement'. One type of such syntactic dependencies is filler-gap dependencies. In contrast, the…

This is a report on the activities of the survey of spoken English at the University of Lund (Sweden), during the period 1975-81. The aim of the survey has been to make available in machine-readable form a corpus of material with its origin in speech. The corpus was built in conjunction with the survey of English usage project at the University of…

This paper describes a computational approach to certain problems of anaphora in natural language and argues in favor of formal meaning representation languages (MRLs) for natural language. After presenting arguments in favor of formal meaning representation languages, appropriate MRLs are discussed. Minimal requirements include provisions for…

A model of natural language generation based on an underlying language-free representation of meaning is described. A computer implementation of this model, called BABEL, has been developed at Stanford University. It is able to produce sentence paraphrases which demonstrate understanding with respect to a given context. Available from Association…