While there is ample evidence that study abroad (SA) enhances oral fluency in a foreign language, the effects of different types of learning context on other aspects of oral skills, such as vocabulary use, have not received much attention in academic research and are less clear. The present study tries to fill this void by investigating lexical…

This study describes the thematic roles of Somali; a language that manifests unorthodox grammatical structures due to the use of the focus particle. A mapping of some language features related to the semantic-syntactic interface is carried out. The effect of the meaning of the lexical items is tested to whether it affects the syntactic structures…

Background: Capturing evidence of the effects of therapy within everyday communication is the holy grail of aphasia treatment design and evaluation. Whilst impaired sentence production is a predominant symptom of Broca's-type aphasia, the effects of sentence production therapy on everyday conversation have not been investigated. Given the…

This article investigates near-native grammars at the syntax--discourse interface by examining the second language (L2) acquisition of two different domains of object movement in Dutch, which exhibit syntax-discourse or syntax-semantics level properties. English and German near-native speakers of Dutch, where German but not English allows the same…

This study aims to analyze positive remarks linguistically manifested through English intensifiers, i.e. very and so, and their collocates in café reviews. The appraisal framework primarily focuses on the feelings or attitudes of speakers or writers. It plays a part in providing communicative resources whereby speech functions are performed…

This volume sheds empirical light on Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) by providing five sets of analyses of two longitudinal, interactional datasets, involving two dyads exchanging emails over one academic semester. The collective study on CDST is the first of its kind, in that it delves into multiple subsystems of learner language,…

Previous research has shown L1 attrition to be restricted to structures at the interfaces between syntax and pragmatics, but not to occur with syntactic properties that do not involve such interfaces ("Interface Hypothesis", Sorace and Filiaci in "Anaphora resolution in near-native speakers of Italian." "Second Lang…

A re-emergence in language documentation has brought with it a recent recognition of the potential contributions which collaboration with other disciplines has to offer linguistics. For example, ten chapters of the recently published Oxford Handbook of Linguistic Fieldwork (Thieberger 2012) were explicitly devoted to cross-discipline…

We investigated the production of subject relative clauses (SRc) in Italian pre-school children with Specific Language Impairment (SLI) and age-matched typically-developing children (TD) controls. In a structural priming paradigm, children described pictures after hearing the experimenter produce a bare noun or an SRc description, as part of a…

Different genres of writing entail various levels of syntactic and lexical complexity, and how this complexity influences the results of Automatic Writing Evaluation (AWE) programs like Grammarly in second language (L2) writing is unknown. This study explored the use of Grammarly in the L2 writing context by comparing error frequency, error types…

This study investigates the relationship between three linguistic functions: thetics, miratives and exclamatives. Thetics are an information structure configuration that conveys that the information is new to the addressee. The thetic subtypes selected for this study are the following: existentials (e.g. "There are apples in the…

Purpose: The inclusion of an increasing number of high-functioning ASD children in mainstream classrooms demands for adequate awareness of autism and effective teaching methods from teachers to ensure that learning takes places efficiently. Hence, this study investigated the atypical language performance of a high-functioning Malay girl with…

Acquiring the correct meanings of words expressing quantities ("seven, most") and qualities ("red, spotty") present a challenge to learners. Understanding how children succeed at this requires understanding, not only of what kinds of data are available to them, but also the biases and expectations they bring to the learning…

This study investigates the challenges faced by Arab adult learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) in acquiring English restrictive relative clauses (RRCs), as well as the factors that affect the process of acquisition. This issue has received considerable attention in second language (L2) research. The present study discusses the…

Language processing heuristics are one of the possible sources of divergence between first and second language systems. The Shallow Structure Hypothesis (SSH) (Clahsen and Felser, 2006) proposes that non-native language processing relies primarily on semantic, and not syntactic, information, and that second language (L2) processing is therefore…