Analyzes the rightward movement of noun and prepositional phrases in the Early Old English poem "Beowulf." Evidence is provided for heavy noun phrase shift, with a characteristic major intonational boundary between the main verb and the postponed noun phrase, and preposition phrase extraposition, where the intonational boundary was much…

States that the study of world literacy experience illuminate literacy issues that are often sidelined or ignored in the United Kingdom. Discusses literacy and oral language, literacy and religion, and literacy and gender. (JOW)

Briefly characterizes the view of context most widely used in applied linguistics and language teaching. Research about some of the parameters that contribute to greater or lesser conceptual difficulty is outlined. Research about the role of intentionality and causality in narrative is also described. (Author/CB)

Studies the distraction potential of 45 written usage elements, traditionally considered errors, for 2 different educated reading audiences: postsecondary business communication teachers, and executive vice presidents in large firms. Finds that the usage errors least distracting to both audiences were lexical elements and the use of an adverbial…

Examines American Sign Language (ASL) in the context of the orality/literacy debate and issues of language and cognition. Posits that ASL is a natural language independent of English, and asserts that examining other modes of language use can illuminate the nature of discourse in both oral and written forms. (MM)

Describes the International Corpus of Learner English (ICLE), a project at the University of Louvain in Belgium that collects written work from, and analyzes the usage of, advanced adult English as a Foreign Language learners. Recurring combinations and concordances in ICLE are examined. (Contains five references.) (MDM)

Reviews the evolution of semicolon use in English, examining the frequency of semicolons, colons, and dashes in grammar, language, and linguistic books from the mid-16th century to the present. Concludes that after flourishing in the 17th and 18th centuries, the semicolon may have become a marginal component of the English punctuation system. (42…

Examines a computer-based corpus that provides the data for a comprehensive investigation of clitic climbing in written and spoken modern Spanish. The results are based on nearly 15,000 tokens with 32 different main verbs from a computer corpus of 3.5 million words from ten countries. Clitic climbing is more common in spoken than in written…

This study proposes a new measure of lexical richness, the Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP), which looks at the proportion of high-frequency general service and academic words in learners' writing. The results of a study involving 65 second-language students indicated that LFP scores were comparable to scores on other vocabulary measures. (14…

Investigates the factors that constrain and promote the selection of noun compound types in spoken and written Hebrew. Three types of data were examined, one spoken and two written. Lexical, semantic, syntactic, and pragmatic analyses revealed that construct-state compounds are the default form for expressing relations. (55 references) (Author)

This article describes "language" use in a religious domain where the very notion of 'language' must be defined in a qualitatively special way. It is suggested that within the traditional Islamic educational system, Arabic among the Kanuri of northeast Nigeria is first acquired as a "graphic," an invisible whole that, by its…

Examines the pragmatic uses of narrative structures in the written stories of native-English speaking and native-Spanish speaking college students. It is shown that there are subtle differences in the way that the two groups use structures, suggesting that native-English and native-Spanish narrators have differing perceptions of themselves and…

Research articles from the oldest continuing medical journal in English were studied in terms of rhetorical analysis of broad genre characteristics and linguistic analysis of registral features using Biber's system of text analysis. Results suggest evolution influenced can be accounted for by changing epistemological norms of medical knowledge,…

After a discussion of the limitations of early contrastive rhetoric theory and the need for a richer view that considers different cultures, this article reports on a survey of Japanese and Arabic English-as-a-Second-Language students to examine how writing is taught in different cultures. Differing emphases on expressive and transactional…

This paper offers an endorsement of mainstream placements for adolescents with severe and profound hearing impairments, describes successful mainstreaming at Clarke School for the Deaf (Massachusetts) in classrooms using spoken and written English, points out roadblocks that must be negotiated for successful mainstream education, and outlines…