Children's knowledge of referential dependency involved in the interpretation of reflexives has been investigated mainly from a purely syntactic perspective. However, syntax alone is insufficient to account for various kinds of referential dependencies, as many of them require discourse interpretations. To fill this gap, the present study…

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are spectacular narratives, widely spread, that pose societal threats. We test whether CTs might be linguistically creative products, which would facilitate their transmission and thereby account for their widespread popularity. We analyzed nominal compounds (e.g., "mind control," "carbon dioxide"; N =…

While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive…

This study explores the opening sequences of Mandarin text messages on WeChat, focusing on the role of the phrase "zaima," meaning "are you there?" in English, in digital communication. While conversation openings have been widely studied in face-to-face and telephonic interactions, research on text message openings, especially…

Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

This study explores lexical bundles in vehicular accident news with the goal to provide a lexical bundle list for students learning to write this genre of news in English. A corpus of accident news is constructed from vehicular news articles from four English news sources over a period of one year. The lexical bundles are extracted from using the…

There is extensive evidence that people are sensitive to the statistical patterns of linguistic elements at the phonological, lexical, and syntactic levels. However, much less is known about how people classify referential events and whether they adapt to the most frequent types of references. Reference is particularly complex because referential…

Friday sermons portray patterns of lexical cohesion which can demonstrate how effective communication is achieved. This study proposes a model of lexical cohesion that fits the spoken discourse of Friday sermons in the United Arab Emirates (UAE). To that end, a corpus of 25 sermons was analyzed to identify patterns of cohesion and show the impact…

This study is aimed to understand the connections between didacticians' meta-didactical praxeologies for the design and implementation of a teacher professional development program and their documentation work for the program itself. Didacticians are mathematics education researchers with the role of teacher educators. Data presents a case study,…

Research on academic stance and evaluation has been prolific over the past few decades. Few studies, however, have focused on exploring the evaluative potential of that-constructions in shaping the structure of academic arguments. To address this lacuna, the current study aimed at exploring the potential impact of the distinct communicative…

This study investigates the grammatical patterns prevalent in conversational discourse as presented in selected Ethiopian English as a Foreign Language (EFL) textbooks. It aims to identify and analyze the features of spoken conversational discourse that shape the structure of dialogues and spoken interactions within these educational materials.…

Hollywood blockbuster films have long attracted not only mass audiences but also scholarly attention. In line with contemporary applied linguistics interests in telecinematic discourse, the present study draws upon concepts and techniques in corpus linguistics to describe the language of American mainstream film scripts. The concept of lexical…

This study examines how LGBT people are represented in Thai political online news discourse by analyzing the use of the term "gender." Utilizing a corpus of English-language articles from Prachathai and Bangkok Post published between 2020 and 2024, the research employed corpus-assisted discourse analysis, combining quantitative keyword…

This research investigated the discursive construction of COVID-19 in WHO director general's discourse through the lens of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. 255 speeches of the WHO director general were collected, forming a 234,149-words corpus. Collocations of 'COVID-19' were generated and analyzed in terms of the semantic…

The study deals with emphatic constructions in English and Arabic scientific texts. To the researcher's best knowledge, this topic received little attention from linguistic researchers, exceptionally in functional grammar analysis. The importance of this study arises from the fact that some syntactic forms are effective linguistic choices for…