Children's knowledge of referential dependency involved in the interpretation of reflexives has been investigated mainly from a purely syntactic perspective. However, syntax alone is insufficient to account for various kinds of referential dependencies, as many of them require discourse interpretations. To fill this gap, the present study…

This study explores the opening sequences of Mandarin text messages on WeChat, focusing on the role of the phrase "zaima," meaning "are you there?" in English, in digital communication. While conversation openings have been widely studied in face-to-face and telephonic interactions, research on text message openings, especially…

This study explores lexical bundles in vehicular accident news with the goal to provide a lexical bundle list for students learning to write this genre of news in English. A corpus of accident news is constructed from vehicular news articles from four English news sources over a period of one year. The lexical bundles are extracted from using the…

Friday sermons portray patterns of lexical cohesion which can demonstrate how effective communication is achieved. This study proposes a model of lexical cohesion that fits the spoken discourse of Friday sermons in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To that end, a corpus of 25 sermons was analyzed to identify patterns of cohesion and show the impact…

This study investigates the grammatical patterns prevalent in conversational discourse as presented in selected Ethiopian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks. It aims to identify and analyze the features of spoken conversational discourse that shape the structure of dialogues and spoken interactions within these educational materials.…

This study examines how LGBT people are represented in Thai political online news discourse by analyzing the use of the term "gender." Utilizing a corpus of English-language articles from Prachathai and Bangkok Post published between 2020 and 2024, the research employed corpus-assisted discourse analysis, combining quantitative keyword…

Multi-word expressions are formulaic language universals with arbitrary and idiosyncratic collocations. Their usage and mastery are required of learners of a second language in achieving naturalness. However, despite the importance of multi-word expressions to mastering a second language, their syntactic architecture and colligational…

The purpose of this study is to analyze the grammatical complexity features of international teaching assistants' (ITAs) mock-teaching presentations and to compare the distributions of these features to those found in the Oral English Proficiency Test (a local ITA assessment), university classroom teaching, conversation, and academic writing. The…

Virtually all researchers understand the requirement of presenting their studies in peer-reviewed English-medium journals. Russian scientific writers understand this necessity too; however, evidence suggests that these particular researchers are under-performing relative to similar non-native English speakers. The considerable challenge Russians…