This article begins by clarifying the notion of what Stanley Cavell has called "Emersonian moral perfectionism." It goes on to explore this through close analysis of aspects of Emerson's essay "Experience," in which ideas of trying or attempting or experimenting bring out the intimate relation between perfectionism and styles…

This study examined the acquisition of preposition placement in English as a second language from a usage-based perspective. German and Chinese learners of English and English native speakers rated the acceptability of English oblique "wh" relative clauses in a magnitude estimation task. Results indicated that acceptability depended on…

Translingualism advocates for the appreciation of multilingual speakers' fluid, flexible, and creative deployment of semiotic resources without regard to the ideological constructs of named languages. While this scholarship has been developed primarily in the contexts of world Englishes, English as a lingua franca, and bilingual education in…

This article investigates how immigrant children's acculturation experiences are characterized through the symbolic literary feature of name in children's literature and how the language of the text functions to communicate these messages. We draw on the theoretical frameworks of Critical Literacy (CL) and Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to…

Drawing on the case of Russia's post-Soviet education reform, the paper explores the interaction between borrowed reformatory solutions and culture codes in the process of neoliberal educational modernisation. Through the examination of the concept of 'commercial service' the article shows how bottom-up societal resistance is maintained and…

Asking children to clarify themselves promotes their ability to uniquely identify objects in referential communication tasks. However, little is known about whether parents ask preschoolers for clarification during interactions and, if so, how. Study 1 explored how mothers clarify their preschoolers' ambiguous descriptions of the characters in…

This study investigates whether the earliest words children choose to say are mainly words containing sounds they can produce (cf. 'phonological dominance' hypotheses), or whether children choose words without regard to their phonological characteristics (cf. 'lexical dominance' hypotheses). Phonological properties of words in spontaneous speech…

Emotion (positive and negative) words are typically recognized faster than neutral words. Recent research suggests that emotional valence, while often treated as a unitary semantic property, may be differentially represented in concrete and abstract words. Studies that have explicitly examined the interaction of emotion and concreteness, however,…

While accepting that the concept of restricted code has a troubled history that resulted in Bernstein being associated with deficit models of working-class life, it is argued that the concept should be re-imagined rather than abandoned. Bernstein's early work refers to restricted code as a form of condensed, shorthand established through…

With millions of non-native English language users, English has gained the position of 'global language' in the last century. English literature also has a significant number of non-native writers from around the world. While grasping their own cultures in English, these non-native writers have been transforming English language to a remarkable…

This essay aims to map uses and attributions of the word "appropriate" as they occur in various disciplines related to children's literature. Three competing interest areas--publishing, education, and societal ideologies--provide insight as to how "appropriate" developed into an abstract cover-word for a variety of outside…

This study used a multiple-probe design across three participants to test the effectiveness of a handwriting intervention for fifth graders (age 10-11) displaying less handwriting fluency than their peers, but without spelling disorders. The 5-h handwriting intervention provided students with explicit instruction and intensive practice in writing…

The current article approaches the issue of the persuasiveness of metaphors in The Prophet Muhammad's Tradition. The main concern of the article is to show that the Prophetic metaphors are discursively practiced by the Prophet for the function of persuading his audience to accept Islamic laws, and introduce rites and rituals, and to prohibit the…

Discussion on sexism regarding language focuses on how women are discriminated against in our daily language and in academic writing. Although we are against any kind of discrimination, when it comes to dealing with this phenomenon in language and language use, we should be more careful. Language is not only a symbolic means whereby humans…

Nicolaus Listenius's "Musica" (1537) proved to be one of the two most successful music textbooks in the Lutheran Latin Schools of the sixteenth century, issued in at least forty-six editions and surviving in use into the next century. Yet, a casual inspection of the book today does not readily yield to modern expectations of a successful…