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…

Hollywood blockbuster films have long attracted not only mass audiences but also scholarly attention. In line with contemporary applied linguistics interests in telecinematic discourse, the present study draws upon concepts and techniques in corpus linguistics to describe the language of American mainstream film scripts. The concept of lexical…

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…

Lexical bundles (LBs) are frequent groups of words that appear repeatedly in different academic texts. A plethora of research has explored their distribution and usage in general, particularly in academic texts. However, to our knowledge, the extent of research investigating LBs in the discussion sections of Medical Research Articles (MRAs) is…

The current study explored two levels of formulaic sequences, general and discipline specific, in a corpus of 200 applied linguistics research articles and examined the functions they serve. Using Antconc software, in total, 2563 sequences were identified including 593 general and 1370 discipline-specific sequences. These numbers account for 30%…

This study draws on the strengths of both corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis approaches to investigate the issues of power and ideology of teachers evident in their language use in the discussions on Ajarn.com. Data collection involved constructing a corpus from the discussions on the website, with the discussion threads dated from…

Power distance (PD), a cultural value denoting acceptance of asymmetrical power relationships, influences the force of rhetoric used by a writer to address their reader. However, AI technologies such as ChatGPT lack an explicit awareness of PD, which could affect the quality of AI-generated persuasive texts used for language learning. To…

Although data collection has been used in language learning settings for some time, it is only in recent decades that large corpora have become available, along with efficient tools for their use. Advances in natural language processing (NLP) have enabled rich tagging and annotation of corpus data, essential for their effective use in language…

In this article, I provide a typology of transition words/phrases. This typology comprises 12 dimensions of link words/phrases that capture 277 link words/phrases. Using QDA Miner, WordStat, and SPSS--a computer-assisted mixed methods data analysis software, content analysis software, and statistical software, respectively--I analyzed 74…

As an important yet intricate linguistic feature in English language, synonymy poses a great challenge for second language learners. Using the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as data and the software Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool, this article compares the usage of "learn" and "acquire" used in natural…

Lexical bundles such as "on the other hand" and "as a result of" are extremely common and important in academic discourse. The appropriate use of lexical bundles typical of a specific academic discipline is important for writers and the absence of such bundles may not sound fluent and native-like. Recent studies (e.g. Adel…

As stated by Valero-Garcés (2006, p. 38), the new scenario including public service providers and users who are not fluent in the language used by the former has opened up new ways of linguistic and cultural mediation in current multicultural and multilingual societies. As a consequence, there is an ever increasing need for translators and…

A computerized grammar checker was developed to assist teachers of English as a Second Language in editing student compositions. The first stage of development consisted of an error analysis of 125 writing samples collected from students. The 1,659 errors found were classified into 14 main types and 93 subtypes. This analysis served as the basis…

A computer program for classifying elements of a language corpus for large-scale analysis is discussed. The approach is based on the assumption that there is a natural unit in speech processing and production, called a tone unit. The program "tags" the five grammatical phrase types (verb, adverb, adjective, noun, and prepositional) to…

This document consists of the four 1989 issues of the quarterly journal "Notes on Linguistics." These issues include the following significant articles: "The Production of a Linguistic Bibliography" (Pete Unseth); "How to Write a Grammatical Sketch (Without Putting Your Readers to Sleep)" (Thomas E. Payne); "The…