This dissertation sheds light on some of the representations used in human language production. Language production consists of several distinct stages; in particular, we focus on the stages of lexical retrieval and grammatical encoding. Lexical retrieval involves retrieving the words required to express the intended meaning; grammatical encoding…

Metaphors are recognized as bridging scientists' challenges in communication with the public. In mathematics, however, which often involves abstract concepts and relations, less attention has been paid to the role of metaphors in public communication. In this article we examine the metaphors appearing in the discourse of 10 mathematicians in five…

In this commentary, we begin with the discussion on a brief history of academic wordlists. Adopting a comparative perspective, then, the merits and demerits of the Academic Word List (AWL) (Coxhead, 2000) and its competing counterpart the Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) (Gardner & Davies, 2014) are presented. We also explore whether the AWL can…

Machine translation (MT) platforms have gained increasing attention in the educational linguistics community. The current article extends past research on instructor beliefs about MT by way of an ecological theoretical framework. The study reports on a large-scale survey (n=165) of FL university-level instructors in the U.S. Findings indicate…

Despite the unquestionable academic interest on corpus-based approaches to language education, the use of corpora by teachers in their everyday practice is still not very widespread. One way to promote usage of corpora in language teaching is by making pedagogically appropriate corpora, labelled with different types of problems (for instance,…

This study analyzes the length and readability of admissions and financial aid application instructions at a random sample of 341 four-year higher education institutions in the United States. Linguistic analyses indicate that financial aid application instructions are longer and more difficult to read than are admissions materials at the same…

The objective of this research is to build automated models that emulate VerbNet, a semantic resource for English verbs. VerbNet has been built and expanded by linguists, forming a hierarchical clustering of verbs with common semantic and syntactic expressions, and is useful in semantic tasks. A major drawback is the difficulty of extending a…

The dependency grammars for such languages as Russian usually treat the prepositions in combination with subordinate nouns as major elements as if the case form in the prepositional construction had some self-contained meaning subjected to the regular transformation. This scheme may be valid for languages with restricted declensional paradigms,…

The New General Service List (NGSL; Browne, Culligan, & Phillips, 2013b) was published on an interim basis in 2013 as a modern replacement for West's (1953) original General Service List (GSL). This study compared GSL and NGSL coverage of a 6-year, 114-million word section of the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and used COCA…

The syntactic behaviour of human beings cannot be explained by analogical generalization on the basis of concrete exemplars: analogies in surface form are insufficient to account for human grammatical knowledge, because they fail to hold in situations where they should, and fail to extend in situations where they need to. [For Ben Ambridge's…

This study aims at contributing to the discussion on the role of the early printers in the regularisation and standardisation of the English spelling. It assesses the degree of early printers' (in)consistency concerning morphological spelling, in particular the spelling of third person singular present tense (indicative) inflectional endings of…

English as a Second Language (ESL) students are often expected to read and use English translations of the Bible for academic and worship purposes. The purpose of this study was to explore the writing style of the King James Version and the New International Version in terms of each translation's formality, readability, and sentiment using…

This article argues that a new form of globalizing multilingualism, which I call 'supralingualism', has been afoot since 1990, when the rise of algorithmic translation and cross-linguistic information retrieval (CLIR) practices set in in earnest in the supply-side logistics industries. A political landscape characterized by international consensus…

Users of digital language archives face a number of barriers when trying to discover and reuse the materials preserved in the digital collections created by current language documentation projects. These barriers include sparse descriptive metadata throughout many collections and the prevalence of audio-video materials that are impervious to…

Students who take an online course, such as a MOOC, use the course's discussion forum to ask questions or reach out to instructors when encountering an issue. However, reading and responding to students' questions is difficult to scale because of the time needed to consider each message. As a result, critical issues may be left unresolved, and…