This study analyzed the lexical devices used by undergraduate students in their argumentative text using Halliday and Hasan (1976) and Halliday's (2004) taxonomy. One hundred forty-eight argumentative essays were analyzed. The essays underwent interrating by three independent raters using a 20-point rubric and were grouped according to rating.…

This study investigated the influence of frequency effects on the processing of congruent (i.e., having an equivalent first language [L1] construction) collocations and incongruent (i.e., not having an equivalent L1 construction) collocations in a second language (L2). An acceptability judgment task was administered to native and advanced…

This study aims to establish whether connectives can create referential expectations in discourse, and, if so, what these expectations are based on: connective semantics or frequency distributions in language use. This was tested by comparing the processing of the connectives "and" and "but" in Dutch and Russian by means of an…

This article focuses on the concept of diversity in educational decision making. It is noted that the differences that distinguish the needs, interests and abilities are identified by educators. It lists misconceptions resulting from not attending to within-group diversity, and states that a "loss of self" for individual members of…

This study looks at the discursive construction and negotiation of hybrid identities within binational couples. I analyze conversations produced by Anglophones married to German-speaking Swiss residing in central Switzerland. I employ Bucholtz & Hall's sociocultural linguistic model (2004, 2005, 2010), which views identity as emergent in…

Drawing on a case study of newswriting, this article presents media linguistics as a subdiscipline of applied linguistics (AL), dealing with a distinctive field of language use. Language in the media is characterized by specific environments, functions, and structures. Medialinguistic research, however, tends to overcome disciplinary boundaries.…

This study examined how children and adolescents with Williams syndrome (WS; ages 8 years, 0 months [8;0]-14;5) used referential devices (determiners and pronouns), tense, and connectives to create cohesion in oral narratives based on a storybook compared to typically developing mentally and chronologically age-matched children. WS children used…

In the current study, storytelling and story retelling by children with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) were analyzed to explore ambiguous third-person pronoun use in narratives. Twenty-three children diagnosed with ASD aged 6;1 to 14;3 and 17 typically-developing (TD) children aged 5;11 to 14;4 participated in the study. In the retelling task, no…

This study illustrates the presence of Mock Spanish in some English-based picture books and the ways this usage misrepresents Latino people, language, and culture. The author conducted a critical content analysis of five Skippyjon Jones books. Her guiding question was, How is language used, particularly Spanish, in these English texts, and what…

The recent "TESOL Quarterly" article by Biber, Gray, and Poonpon (2011) raises important considerations with respect to the use of syntactic complexity (SC) measures in second language (L2) studies. The article draws the field's attention to one particular measure--complexity of noun phrases (NP) (i.e., noun phrases with modifiers, such as…

This dissertation examines the use and linguistic behavior of the "al-raqs ala ru'oos al-tha'abeen" "dancing on the heads of snakes" metaphor and metaphors about unity in pro-government and anti-government discourse in Yemen. It adopts an intertextual, discourse-based approach that, following Oakley and Coulson (2008),…

In Contemporary Standard Russian (CSR) and Contemporary Standard Polish (CSP) nominal possession is conveyed by means of the adnominal genitive. In this construction the dependent follows the noun it modifies and is marked morphologically for possession in the genitive case. The head noun is marked morphologically for any one of the six…

In this dissertation, I address the ways in which food manufacturers can exploit the often vague and ambiguous nature of FDA policies concerning language and images used on food labels. Employing qualitative analysis methods (Strauss, 1987; Denzin and Lincoln, 2003; Mackey and Gass, 2005) that drew upon critical discourse analysis (Fairclough,…

Indirect metaphors are pervasive in everyday language: People talk about "long" vacations, "short" tempers, and "colorful" language. But, why do we use concrete lexical items that are associated with the physical world when we talk about abstract, or non-physical, concepts? A potential answer is provided by proponents…

This case outlines a dilemma encountered by an assistant professor and graduate teaching assistant teaching within an educational leadership preparation program. The case offers a detailed illustration of a race-related conflict occurring in a course focused on preparing school leaders to address issues of social justice within diverse settings.…