This dissertation is a description of Xinaliq, a Northeast (Nakh-Daghestanian) Caucasian language spoken primarily in the village also called Xinaliq, which lies at an elevation of 7,000 feet in the Kuba district of Azerbaijan, near the border with Daghestan. Currently there are approximately 1,500 residents in the village. Most of them are…

A quantitative, coordinate-based meta-analysis combined data from 354 participants across 22 fMRI studies and one positron emission tomography (PET) study to identify the differences in neural correlates of figurative and literal language processing, and to investigate the role of the right hemisphere (RH) in figurative language processing.…

The variety of English spoken by about half a million people in the Canadian province of Quebec is a minority language in intensive contact with French, the local majority language. This unusual contact situation has produced a unique variety of English which displays many instances of French influence that distinguish it from other types of…

Using the academic writing sub-corpora of the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus as data and building on previous research, this study strives to identify the most frequently-used multi-word constructions (MWCs) of various types (e.g., idioms, lexical bundles, and phrasal/prepositional verbs) in general…

The growth of English into a lingua franca has inevitably created linguistic deviations and innovations in the use of English. These emerging uses that result from the needs and preferences of speakers whose mother tongues are all different can be broadly identified as lexico-grammatical and pronunciation features and they compose one of the main…

In the current study we investigate whether 2- and 3-year-old German children use intonation productively to mark the informational status of referents. Using a story-telling task, we compared children's and adults' intonational realization via pitch accent (H*, L* and de-accentuation) of New, Given, and Contrastive referents. Both children and…

This dissertation describes and analyzes voice and valence-altering operations in Falam Chin, a Tibeto-Burman language of Burma. The data is explained within the framework of Role and Reference Grammar (RRG), which supplies several key concepts particularly useful for generalizing the behavior of the Falam Chin operations. The first is RRG's…

The present thesis investigates the role of semantic alternatives and logical strength in a number of empirical domains. Firstly, the thesis deals with the semantic contribution of focus on (bound) pronouns (chapters 2-3). The main results are as follows: First, focus on bound pronouns is interpreted by an operator (Rooth 1992b) in the scope of…

This study investigates the coherence properties of non-finite complements in Russian, Serbian/Croatian, and Macedonian. I demonstrate that Slavic non-finite complements do not project a uniform syntactic structure. The maximal projection of non-finite complements is not fixed but depends on the selectional properties of the matrix verb. I present…

Recent work on the occurrence of "uh" and "uhm" in ordinary talk-in-interaction is concerned almost exclusively with its relation to trouble in the speech production process. After touching briefly on this environment of occurrence, this conversation-analytic article focuses attention on several interactional environments in which "uh(m)" figures…

Recent fMRI and TMS studies on idiom comprehension have shown that the prefrontal cortex is involved in idiom processing. Since schizophrenic patients exhibit prefrontal "structural" changes and dysexecutive "behavioural" deficits, we hypothesised an impairment in idiom comprehension, correlating with performance on executive…

The introduction of (Talmy, 1985), (Talmy, 1985) and (Talmy, 2000) typology sparked significant interest in linguistic relativity in the arena of motion language. Through careful analysis of the conflation patterns evident in the language of motion events, Talmy noted that one class of languages, V-languages, tends to encode path along with the…

This article focuses on the connection between the visual arts and language arts with the many teaching and learning possibilities that may arise from an art curriculum infused with language arts. As a K-5 art specialist in a rural Georgia public school, the author feels passionately about the importance of interdisciplinary art education for…

This paper reports on an action research study using iPads during the teaching of Chinese idioms to heritage learners. A class of 12 second-year Chinese learners were engaged in a self-generated learning process focused on learning abstract and concrete idioms using iPads. Students' short-term and long-term learning was measured; feedback from a…

In this article, we focus on instructional support for 91 students who speak African American Vernacular English and who are at high risk for not passing the required state exams. We profile the instruction that was provided and the results from that instruction, providing examples of how students' language was scaffolded such that they could code…