The impact of text length on the estimation of lexical diversity has captured the attention of the scientific community for more than a century. Numerous indices have been proposed, and many studies have been conducted to evaluate them, but the problem remains. This methodological review provides a critical analysis not only of the most commonly…

People use different communication patterns based on the context and who they are addressing. These differences, known as linguistic register, are common across human speech and recognized early in development. Here, we examine 4-11-year-old American children's (N = 227) ability to use linguistic registers to determine a speaker's addressee as…

General principles of human cognition can help to explain why languages are more likely to have certain characteristics than others: structures that are difficult to process or produce will tend to be lost over time. One aspect of cognition that is implicated in language use is working memory--the component of short-term memory used for temporary…

Measuring lexical diversity in texts that have different lengths is problematic because length has a significant effect on the number of types a text contains, thus hampering any comparison. Treffers-Daller et al. (2018) recommended a simple solution, namely counting the number of types in a section of a given length that was extracted from the…

One key tenet of Global Englishes for Language Teaching (GELT) is that the native English speaker should no longer serve as the role model for second language (L2) English users. Such a view does not discount that some degree of linguistic knowledge is necessary for successful global communication. However, GELT scholarship has remained relatively…

American Norwegian (AmNo), a moribund heritage variety of Norwegian spoken predominantly in the Upper Midwest of the US, licenses "wh"-infinitives (i.e. indirect questions), which are structures that are not acceptable in either standard Norwegian Bokmål or Norwegian dialects. Adopting a spanning-account of syntax (Blix, 2021; Julien,…

Given the need to explore the nature of language teacher educator (LTE) identities, this duoethnography centers the identity journeys of three language teacher educators--Lu, Yuseva, and Zhenjie--as they evolved together and in dialogue with their advisor, Francis. To this end, they began with the central identity task, the Language Use…

While language dominance has been crucial in the study of bilingualism, recent research has called for more detailed measures to systematically account for the observation that bilinguals use different languages in different domains, a phenomenon formalized in the Complementary Principle. Few studies have systematically measured these…

That a certain class of verb commonly known as 'statives' is undergoing change in terms of the way in which certain verbs of this type are being used in everyday speech is nothing new to the field of linguistics. Much has been written about it, and the author of this paper alone has been preoccupied with the subject for many years now. However,…

The present study takes a variationist perspective to explore the varietal repertoires of adult learners of German as a second language (L2), that is, their variable use of standard German, Austro-Bavarian dialect, and mixture varieties. Forty L2 learners completed a virtual reality task involving interactions with dialect-speaking and…

In this paper we analyze the semantic and pragmatic properties of a colloquial interrogative construction attested in European Spanish, which we label invariable "qué" questions (IQQs). In doing so, we contribute to the better understanding of a relatively understudied phenomenon in Spanish, given that IQQs have been mainly approached…

In countries such as Australia, the bi/multilingual student demographic is increasing. Bi/multilingual students are commonly learning alongside monolingual students and also Indigenous and first- and second-generation immigrant students who have a great range of exposure to heritage languages. In this article, we explore how literacies and…

Studies on Brunei Malay have made inconsistent findings: while some have asserted that this variety is thriving and is in no way endangered, others have found that its use is now waning. As the dynamics of family speech can inform what is happening linguistically at the community level, this study seeks to investigate the family language policies…

Due to the typological differences between Korean's aspect system and English's aspect system in terms of progressive construction "-ko iss," learners can no doubt have difficulty acquiring and using the "-ko iss" construction in learner Korean. This dissertation investigates two main points: (i) how is the "-ko iss"…

Past research of rhetoric has relied on simple binary comparisons between groups that either do, or do not, possess a cultural trait. While countries like Korea and the UAE may share cultural values such as an acceptance of unequal power relationships (power distance) and a preference for group action (collectivism), these traits vary in degrees…