Many sentences of modal discourse are "inconstant": "Paris Hilton could have been a politician", for example, seems to be true in some contexts, false in others. In this dissertation, I explore this topic, which we can call the "inconstancy of de re modal attributions". My goal is to develop, motivate, and defend a…

The ways in which the language of reformers intersects with and informs reform implementation is important to our understanding of how education policy impacts practice. To explore this issue, we employed critical discourse analysis (CDA) to analyze the language used by a 21st century skills-focused reform organization to promote its program…

Theoretical ambiguities in curriculum studies result in conceptual mayhem. Accordingly, they hinder the development of the complicated conversation on curriculum as a verb. This article aims to contribute to reconceptualizing curriculum studies as a dynamic social practice that aspires to thinking and acting with intelligences and sensitivity so…

Evidentiality has usually been defined as the grammaticalized expression of a speaker's evidence source for a proposition, where "evidence" is conceptualized as a speaker's source-type for a particular proposition (Aikhenvald 2004). How this evidence source-type and the evidential are related has yet to be formally modeled in…

Background: Preschool physical education has been largely unexplored by researchers. This article examines the meaning of the term "physical education", in relation to preschool contexts, to 14 practitioners working at three preschool settings in Scotland. Our focus on preschool physical education reflects a change in the language…

Since modal auxiliary verbs have been proved to be one of the most troublesome grammatical structures in English, the researchers of this study decided to do an analysis on the ways in which advanced EFL Iranian students use modal auxiliaries focusing specially on nine modals' semantic functions. Consequently, was conducted based on the following…

This paper takes as point of departure the register variable field, and explores its application to the discourse of History and Biology in secondary school classrooms from the perspective of systemic functional linguistics. In particular it considers the functions of technicality and abstraction in these subject specific discourses, and their…

Background: It is known that dysarthria arising from Parkinson's disease may affect intelligibility in conversational interaction. Research has also shown that Parkinson's disease may affect cognition and cause word-retrieval difficulties and pragmatic problems in the use of language. However, it is not known whether or how these…

This study examines the frequency and usage patterns of linking adverbials in Korean students' essay writing in comparison with native English writing. The learner corpus used in the present study is composed of 105 essays that were produced by first-year university students in Korea. The control corpus was taken from the American LOCNESS…

Recent studies illustrate cases of turn continuations that are not necessarily criterially dependent on clausal syntax (Couper-Kuhlen & Ono, 2007; Ford, Fox, & Thompson, 2002), advancing a more multidimensional construal of turn expansions, in general, which, as Auer (2007) put it, "is not a syntactic issue alone" (p. 651). This study further…

The aim of this paper is to challenge the generally accepted claim in descriptive and theoretical linguistics that English anaphoric proforms replace constituents (semantic or syntactic units) in underlying representation. On the basis of authentic examples, it is shown that the anaphoric use of the predicative proforms "one" and "do so", the…

A Korean particle "-(n)un" is widely known as a topic and/or contrast marker. Despite this seemingly well-established view on the meaning/function of "-(n)un," however, its exact nature is far from clearly understood. The main purpose of this dissertation is to shed light on the meaning of "-(n)un," by looking at it…

The paper begins by arguing that knowledge-blindness in educational research represents a serious obstacle to understanding knowledge-building. It then offers sociological concepts from Legitimation Code Theory--"semantic gravity" and "semantic density"--that systematically conceptualize one set of organizing principles underlying knowledge…

When learning their first language, children develop strategies for assigning semantic roles to sentence structures, depending on morphosyntactic cues such as case and word order. Traditionally, comprehension experiments have presented transitive clauses in isolation, and cross-linguistically children have been found to misinterpret object-first…

This research was conducted to investigate how frequently Turkish advanced learners of English use the logical connector "thus" in their academic prose and to investigate whether it was overused, underused or misused semantically in comparison to English native speakers. The data were collected from three corpora; Corpus of Contemporary…