We analysed both structural and functional aspects of sentences containing the four adverbials "after", "before", "because", and "if" in two dense corpora of parent-child interactions from two British English-acquiring children (2;00-4;07). In comparing mothers' and children's usage we separate out the…

This corpus-based study explores the expression of gratitude in the acknowledgement section of doctoral dissertations in both English and Arabic. The objective is to analyse how gratitude in academic discourse is structured in these languages and to explore any differences related to gender. The study examines 80 dissertations (40 in English and…

English contains a considerable number of lexical combinations with various forms and labels, making it an interesting field of inquiry for researchers. The significance and popularity of support verb constructions (SVC) is that they are used largely by native speakers and include some of the most common words in English but seem to be problematic…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

This article will focus on sociolinguistic aspects in Terry Pratchett's "The Wee Free Men." In particular we will deal with the interplay of standard and non-standard British English by which the writer highlights cultural stereotypes as well as narrative ones; creating a children's tale with a distinctively adult-like character set.…

In much previous research, language listeners were found to perform differently when listening to a second language (L2) spoken in foreign/native accents. Influential factors have not been ascertained. This study aimed to gain new insights into this issue. 82 Mandarin speakers of different L2 (English) proficiency and different degrees of…

Analyzes numerous examples of English and German verbs with respect to alternations they undergo and concludes that the semantic classes of verbs that undergo a particular alternation differ between these two languages but that there are some semantic constraints on this variation. The article stresses the limited nature of the study. (Seven…

Tests claims regarding "get"-passives in English via interrogation of a set of written and spoken corpora. The data suggest that "get"-passives are often associated with two types of pragmatic implicature. Finally, the corpus provides evidence of three types of variation with 'get'-passives: regional, stylistic, and diachronic.…

Discusses "end-weight," long, complex phrases that tend to come at the end of clauses. Corpus data on heavy noun phrase shift, the dative alternation, and particle movement indicate that there are several structural measures of weight highly correlated with constituent ordering. (38 references) (Author/CK)

Six papers on Irish English are presented. "The Study of Hiberno-English" (Jeffrey L. Kallen) surveys some aspects of research on the language and offers a historical context for the subsequent papers. "A Tape-Recorded Survey of Hiberno-English in Its Context" (T. M. Tilling) reports on the early stages of an island-wide survey…

This paper discusses the details of existential sentences constructed with the Portuguese verbs "ter" and "haver" in the interpersonal form. The uses of these verbs are discussed and analyzed in detail. The history and evolution of linguistic changes in Brazilian Portuguese are discussed in an attempt to detect historical…

The encyclopedia is designed as a reference work on the history, structure, and use of English. The first section outlines five phases in the development of the English language (origins, Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, Modern English) and then proceeds to the varieties of world English and perceptions of English and its future.…

An analysis of the structure of possessive-adjective phrases (e.g., "women's new suitcases, new women's suitcases") in English looks at some data that appear to conflict with the intuitive order of S-structure possessives preceding adjectives. A solution to this apparent anomaly is proposed: it is not the compounding of possessive-noun…

This issue of the journal includes these papers on contrastive linguistics: "The Impersonal Sentence in Russian and Romanian" (Suzanne Whalen); "Differential Identity Between Languages--A Study of Assertion and Interrogation in French and English" (William A. Bennett); "The Use of the Article in English and Hungarian: A Contrastive Analysis" (Eva…

Chicano English, spoken by many Chicanos and some Anglos, is an ethnic variety of English that serves as a marker of social identity, and it has specific linguistic parameters. It is similar to standard English, and often exists alongside interference English, spoken by Spanish-speakers beginning to learn English. Research supports the argument…