While the emergence of the plural forms of English widely acknowledges the sociolinguistic realities in many countries and regions, it might also have an equally profound impact on English teaching and learning in those areas. The trend is for pedagogical models no longer to privilege so-called Standard English based on native varieties but to be…

This paper analyses the discourse of science through the study of collocational patterns of high frequency noun keywords in science textbooks used by upper secondary students in Malaysia. Research has shown that one of the areas of difficulty in science discourse concerns lexis, especially that of collocations. This paper describes a corpus-based…

Following a year of study of Saudi Arabian Sign Language (SASL), we are documenting our findings to provide a grammatical sketch of the language. This paper represents one part of that endeavor and focuses on a description of selected morphemes, both manual and non-manual, that have appeared in the course of data collection. While some of the…

Brazilian Portuguese (henceforth BP) has for long been considered as a Null-subject language due to its variability in regards to subject expression (e.g. "Era bom porque eu diminuia de peso...era muito gordinha" "That was good because then I could lose some weight...(I) was a bit chubby." C33:179). Such variability has been…

While attentional models of SLA postulate attention as crucial for learning to take place (e.g., Robinson, 1995b; Schmidt, 1990, 2001; Tomlin & Villa, 1994), the role that awareness or lack thereof plays remains debatable. Indeed, the studies that have empirically addressed the construct of unawareness reveal conflicting results (e.g.,…

The primary concern of this thesis is how we can achieve rigorous testability when we set the properties of the Computational System (hypothesized to be at the center of the language faculty) as our object of inquiry and informant judgments as a tool to construct and/or evaluate our hypotheses concerning the properties of the Computational System.…

This article queries whether consonant sonority (sonorant vs. obstruent) and status (coda vs. onset) within intervocalic clusters influence syllable-based segmentation strategies. We used a modified version of the illusory conjunction paradigm to test whether French beginning, intermediate, and advanced readers were sensitive to an optimal…

This article reports on a study examining the language practice opportunities that occurred during a range of paired and small group interactive tasks in an intensive English as a Second Language (ESL) class of francophone Grade 6 students. The analysis focussed on the opportunities the tasks provided for the use of two complex and challenging…

Johns reports in his text "Kibbitzing one-to-ones" (1997) that corpus-informed metatalk with a foreign language expert helps apprentice writers to make progress in independent text revision. Expecting this progress to be based on the development of expert-like ways to observe language features, I integrated Johns' so-called kibbitzing…

Translation is the process to transfer written or spoken source language (SL) texts to equivalent written or spoken target language (TL) texts. Translation studies (TS) relies so heavily on a concept of meaning, that one may claim that there is no TS without any reference to meanings. People's understanding of the meaning of sentences is far more…

This dissertation investigates how discourse-pragmatics informs children's choice of referential forms. Three studies utilizing naturalistic data examine the role that six discourse-pragmatic features play in the acquisition of referential forms in a non-null subject language, English. The influence of child-directed speech on development is also…

Grammar in natural interaction is an emergent, dynamic and adaptive system that is consistently subject to change. It is understood as a collection of open multiple subsystems, each of which is activated as the language users recurrently participate in a particular linguistic, interactional and social activity. When a certain linguistic form or…

This study examines French-learning infants' sensitivity to grammatical non-adjacent dependencies involving subject-verb agreement (e.g., "le/les garcons lit/lisent" "the boy(s) read(s)") where number is audible on both the determiner of the subject DP and the agreeing verb, and the dependency is spanning across two syntactic phrases. A further…

We show that comprehenders' expectations about upcoming discourse coherence relations influence the resolution of local structural ambiguity. We employ cases in which two clauses share both a syntactic relationship and a discourse relationship, and hence in which syntactic and discourse processing might be expected to interact. An off-line…

Purpose: Prior work (Guo, Owen, & Tomblin, 2010) has shown that at the group level, auxiliary "is" production by young English-speaking children was symmetrical across lexical noun and pronominal subjects. Individual data did not uniformly reflect these patterns. On the basis of the framework of the gradual morphosyntactic learning (GML)…