Grammatical compression and implicitness have been proven as characteristics of academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010, 2016), but they are an underexplored area of research particularly in academic ESL (English as a second language) writing. In this study, we explored the dependent phrases that most and least characterize academic ESL writing…

Containment and support have traditionally been assumed to represent universal conceptual foundations for spatial terms. This assumption can be challenged, however: English "in" and "on" are applied across a surprisingly broad range of exemplars, and comparable terms in other languages show significant variation in their…

This study presents the first investigation of the development of possessive constructions in Northern East Cree, a polysynthetic language indigenous to Canada. It examines transcripts from naturalistic recording sessions involving one adult and one child, from age 2;01.12 to 3;08.24. Findings reveal that, despite the frequency of possessive…

Complex nominal groups are common in technical English (i.e., English for Specific Purposes, ESP) since they allow lexical items to be tightly packed into a clause which consequently leads to increased lexical density and syntactic ambiguity. In this paper, we analyse (complex) nominal groups in technical English. We propose that, in addition to…

Previous research indicates that the development of mood selection in Spanish spans several years and ends in the mastery of mood selection with sentential complements to express complex semantic meanings. The present study investigates this underexplored late stage by examining how Spanish-speaking children acquire adultlike mood selection in…

Self-translation of academic texts has received little attention thus far in literature, particularly in terms of how cross-linguistic features are rendered into target language. This study undertakes to examine the various linguistic strategies of rendering English passive structures by Arab academics when they translate their research articles'…

English articles are thought to be complex, ambiguous and not salient in spoken language, which is why second language (L2) learners of English exhibit usage variability. Much of the L2 acquisition literature seems to agree that L2 learners are affected, one way or another, by their first language (L1). However, the debatable and controversial…

We report here on a series of elicited production experiments that investigate the production of indirect object and oblique relative clauses by monolingual child learners of English and Korean. Taken together, the results from the two languages point toward a pair of robust asymmetries: children manifest a preference for subject relative clauses…

This thesis is about strong island effects and intervention effects. Strong island effects are contexts where operator-variable dependencies cannot be established. The paradigmatic cases of strong island violations in Chinese occur in "why"-questions. This thesis explores a basic contrast: "why"-questions fail to be interpreted…

In 3 ERP experiments, we investigated how experienced L2 speakers process natural and correct syntactic input that deviates from their own, sometimes incorrect, syntactic representations. Our previous study (Lemhöfer, Schriefers, & Indefrey, 2014) had shown that L2 speakers do engage in native-like syntactic processing of gender agreement but…

The paper titled "Nominal Group as Qualifier to 'Someone'" investigated types of qualifiers which are embedded to the head "someone" in a nominal group. This research was conducted in the light of Systemic Functional Linguistics analysis. The data was analyzed, classified then described using descriptive qualitative method.…

The current study examined the occurrence and benefits of linguistic alignment in two modalities, face-to-face (FTF) and synchronous computer-mediated communication (SCMC), focusing on stranded prepositions in relative clauses. It further examined how learner characteristics (i.e., working memory, language proficiency, previous knowledge of the…

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how the Ewe language realizes cohesion by means of conjunctions in comparison with English as well as the similarities and differences in the way the two languages realize cohesion in this regard. The findings revealed that both English and Ewe realize cohesion by conjunction almost the same way. The…

This study investigates how newcomers to the university setting integrate lexical bundles (LBs)--frequently recurring word sequences--into their writing by analyzing the bundles' "syntactic roles" (i.e., relations to larger structures). Previous studies have considered phrases and clauses as the main internal structures of LBs; however,…

We report on an eye-tracking study that investigated four-year-old Cantonese-speaking children's online processing of subject and object relative clauses (RCs). Children's eye-movements were recorded as they listened to RC structures identifying a unique referent (e.g. "Can you pick up the horse that pushed the pig?"). Two RC types,…