This study seeks to investigate the relationship between text formality and writing quality by quantifying text formality in EFL English writing. In order to conduct the research, 548 English argumentation compositions were evaluated in terms of the five Coh-Metrix text formality dimensions: narrativity, syntactic simplicity, word concreteness,…

We conducted a broad-coverage investigation of the effects of syntactic distance and word order on language processing against a dependency-annotated reading time corpus of English. A combined method of quantitative syntax and psycholinguistic analyses was adopted to yield converging evidence. It was found that (i) head-initial structures allow…

Over the past decade, sociologists have become increasingly interested in the formal study of semantic relations within text. Most contemporary studies focus either on mapping concept co-occurrences or on measuring semantic associations via word embeddings. Although conducive to many research goals, these approaches share an important limitation:…

How do children learn the meaning of words like "pretty" and "tall," which are not only gradable and context dependent (Kennedy & McNally 2005), but encode speaker subjectivity? Despite their complex semantics (Stephenson 2007; Lasersohn 2009; Bylinina 2014), these and other adjectives like them, are some of the most…

Since the emergence of online live text commentaries on football games in the late 1990s, the genre has undergone continuous change. While linguistic research on the genre of live text commentaries emphasizes its novelty, the genre has existed in football for at least 20 years. However, diachronic studies still lack. This paper presents a corpus…

In this article, a tripartite interpersonal model is proposed to analyze academic lectures delivered in English. The model combines two approaches to metadiscourse: the reflexive or narrow approach (Mauranen 1993; Ädel 2006), and the interpersonal or broad approach (Hyland 2005, 2019). The criteria adopted by the reflexive approach were exploited…

Through a structured examination of four English causal discourse connectives, our article tackles a gap in the existing research, which focuses mainly on written language production, and entirely lacks attests on English spoken discourse. Given the alleged general nature of English connectives commonly emphasized in the literature, the underlying…

Conversational interactants rely on each other to cooperate with ongoing actions and activities both structurally (alignment) and affectively (affiliation). They monitor one another's cooperative behaviors to detect any (potential) problems in alignment and affiliation. The present study describes one interactional strategy Japanese speakers use…

Recently there has been some debate about the appropriacy of different lexical units in pedagogy and research (e.g., Brown et al., 2020; Dang & Webb, 2016a; Kremmel, 2016; Laufer & Cobb, 2020; McLean, 2018; Nation, 2016; Nation & Webb, 2011; Vilkaite-Lozdiene & Schmitt, 2020). The lexical unit (word types, lemmas, flemmas, word…

This dissertation investigates the wide-ranging implications of a simple fact: language unfolds over time. Whether as cognitive symbols in our minds, or as their physical realization in the world, if linguistic computations are not made over transient and shifting information as it occurs, they cannot be made at all. This dissertation explores the…

To date, there have been relatively few studies of semantic prosody in languages other than English. This study primarily aims to implement the two major approaches to semantic prosody in the literature on the Thai language for the first time in order to set out the parameters for subsequent research in this area. Three Thai words were selected…

Hands-off data-driven learning is a data-based, student-oriented learning model characterized by inquiry and discovery. English context vocabulary teaching is the key to English teaching in colleges and an important indicator to evaluate the quality and level of college English teaching, which is a language teaching paradigm focusing on the…

Ethical awareness is arguably becoming ever more relevant with the increasing digitalisation of professional practice. Ethical dilemmas are changing in nature, becoming more diverse and more difficult to tackle, also as technologically infused realities give rise to more blurry boundaries. Language professionals, in training for the roles of the…

The use of machine translation has become a topic of debate in language learning, which highlights the need to thoroughly examine the appropriateness and role of machine translation in educational settings. Under the theoretical framework of task-technology fit, this explanatory case study set out to investigate the predictive role of machine…

Purpose: This study sought to 1) identify linguistic features important for Chinese text complexity with a theory-based and systematic approach, and 2) address how feature sets and algorithms affect the performance of Chinese text complexity models. Method: Texts from Chinese language arts textbooks from Grades 1 to 6 (N = 1,478) in Mainland China…