Near-synonyms in English often cause considerable confusion among EFL students. This study aims to clarify this confusion through a corpus-based investigation of the target synonymous verbs "persist" and "persevere" with focus on distribution across genres, collocations, and semantic preference/prosody. The results, based on…

In terms of their directness and modification strategies, this study investigated how undergraduate speakers of Turkish formulate their naturally occurring requests in an academic context, in which they request things from an academic in his office. After a 4-year data collection period, the researcher analyzed 395 of the requests (hand-recorded…

The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

Previous research has shown that talker identity and speaking style affect the processing of morphosyntactic violations. The present study examined whether speaking style modulates comprehension and subsequent production of case variants in German prepositional phrases across the life span. To this end, we conducted a sentence repetition and…

This study is based on the results of the research which aimed (1) to identify the cohesive devices used by Leo Tolstoy in "A grain as Big as a Hen's Egg as proposed by Halliday & Hasan and (2) to find whether substitution and ellipsis from the same story could be identified by the seven English Major students doing the Discourse Analysis…

Institutions are known through the names-cum-titles shown on their signboards, internet websites, letterheads, etc. However, it seems that such cultures could not satisfy the yearning of most organizations. So, they further propagate their core values and traits by constructing short linguistic bursts-cum-contents that can expatiate on what the…

In the present study, we take a longitudinal, corpus-based perspective to investigate short-term (over 9 months) linguistic change in the language produced for the spoken and written sections of the "TOEFL iBT"® test by a group of English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) learners in China. The goal of the study is to identify patterns that…

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of…

The stereotypical view of professional academic writing is that it is grammatically complex, with elaborated structures, and with meaning relations expressed explicitly. In contrast, spoken registers, especially conversation, are believed to have the opposite characteristics. Our goal in the present paper is to challenge these stereotypes, based…

Presents data that suggest that three factors--social variables, speech register, and linguistic variables--influence the choice of grammatical structure in Brazilian Portuguese where options exist to express the same idea. Examines the range of options used in responses that indicate general patterns of linguistic structures related to particular…

The extensive use of clausal embedding in legal language is examined. The extent and depth of left-branching, nested, and right- branching clauses in the 1972 British Road Traffic Act are also studied. The complexity of the resulting constructions, and the problems created for comprehension are described. The analysis reveals complex sequences of…

Any theory of stylistics sets itself the task of accounting for choices made by a speaker/writer among theoretically available and more-or-less equivalent linguistic structures. This task is a stumbling-block in the way of most attempts to construct a theory of style because there is no consistent method of defining 'available structures' and…