The modern workplace is international and multilingual. Both white and blue collar employees are expected to be mobile, work increasingly in (virtual) teams (Gee et al. 1996) and to address complex organisational issues in a language that, often, is not their first language (L1). This results in a number of languages forming the ecosystem of…

This article presents several empirical studies of syntactically encoded evidentiality in English. The first part of our study consists of an adult online experiment that confirms claims in Asudeh & Toivonen (2012) that raised Perception Verb Similatives (PVSs; e.g. "John looks like he is sick") encode direct evidentiality. We then…

Dominant notions of what constitutes a "language" and what a "dialect" within a continuum are entirely based on sociopolitical factors (i.e. the "languages by 'Ausbau'" of Kloss), totally disregarding structural and communicative aspects. This paper argues that such stance is no longer tenable in view of the modern…

The history of research into dictionary use tends to be characterised by small-scale studies undertaken in a variety of different contexts, rather than larger-scale, longer-term funded projects. The research conducted by dictionary publishers is not generally made public, because of its commercial sensitivity, yet because dictionary production is…

This paper draws on two research activities to discuss the role of research at the Centre for Language Learning (CLL) at The University of the West Indies St. Augustine Campus in Trinidad and Tobago. Established in 1997, the CLL introduced languages for all into this Caribbean higher education (HE) context. The CLL also introduced an expanded…

This article explores the second language acquisition of motion events, with particular regard to cross-linguistic influence between first and second languages. Oral narratives in Spanish as a second language by native speakers of French, German and Italian are compared, together with narratives by native Spanish speakers. Previous analysis on the…

The present study aims to investigate how trilinguals process their two non-dominant languages and how those languages influence one another, as well as the relative importance of the dominant language on their processing. With this in mind, 24 French (L1)- English (L2)- and Spanish (L3)-unbalanced trilinguals, deemed equivalent in their L2 and L3…

In line with what Hull and Stornaiuolo (2010) describe as a cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences and given the growing interest in cosmopolitanism as a result of neoliberalism (Bernstein et al., 2015) and the global rise in the use of English (Seargeant, 2012), this article investigates the ideology of cosmopolitanism by drawing on the…

Infants have remarkable abilities to learn several languages. However, phonological acquisition in bilingual infants appears to vary depending on the phonetic similarities or differences of their two native languages. Many studies suggest that learning contrasts with different realizations in the two languages (e.g., the /p/, /t/, /k/ stops have…

Linguistic landscape (LL) research seeks to account for the visible displays of multilingualism on public signage. While surveys of signage in the LL produce quantitative descriptions of language contact in a given area, such analyses shed little light on people's interpretations of multilingual signs. Moreover, even within more qualitative…

The study investigated the influence of universal and language-specific morpho-syntactic properties (i.e., flexible word order, case) on the acquisition of verb argument structures in German compared with English. To this end, 65 three- to nine-year-old German learning children and adults were asked to act out grammatical ("The sheep…

Recent studies in the acquisition of a second language (L2) phonology have revealed that orthography can influence the way in which L2 learners come to establish target-like lexical representations (Escudero et al., 2008, 2014; Escudero and Wanrooij, 2010; Showalter, 2012; Showalter and Hayes-Harb, 2013). Most of these studies, however, involve…

The present investigation seeks to determine whether and under what circumstances can adult bilinguals deploy segmentation strategies characteristic of their two languages, or of their dominant language. To that end, we inquired whether the context language employed during the segmentation experiment (i.e., the language in which participants…

Request for information (RfI) is believed to be the universally dominant function of young children's questioning, whereas request for action (RfA) has been reported to be the leading interrogative form used in early child Cantonese. The possibility of crosslinguistic variability prompts further research and comparison with additional languages.…

This position paper brings youth perspectives to the forefront of academic discourse about language shift and linguistic identity, framed in the larger intersecting conversations about language endangerment, maintenance and revitalization, the breakdown and rebuilding of intergenerational transmission, and the changing late modern landscapes in…