When accounting for the usage of some linguistic form, one can refer to its discourse profile, all concomitant features frequently co-occurring with that form in discourse, or abstract a more general claim about its discourse function, referring only to the necessary and sufficient conditions for the proper occurrence of the form. This article…

Examines why some sayings and catchphrases stick in people's minds, while others are unrecognized and unused. Offers an answer to this question from an evolutionary standpoint. (Author/VWL)

This paper aims to contribute to elucidating the notion of congruence in code-switching with particular reference to Welsh-English data. It has been suggested that a sufficient degree of congruence or equivalence between the constituents of one language and another is necessary in order for code-switching to take place. We shall distinguish…

This research proposes a new theory of direct causation and examines how this concept plays a key role in the linguistic coding and individuation of causal events. According to the "no-intervening-cause hypothesis," a causal chain can be described by a single-clause sentence and construed as a single event if there are no intervening causers…

Course designs for Basic English Writing classes vary from one course to another. The objective of this study was to investigate the semantic misinterpretation of English words found in the English compositions written by native-Chinese-speaking undergraduate students and to overcome if such a barrier occurred in the process of writing. First,…

Microelectrode recordings of human sensori-motor subthalamic neuronal activity during spoken sentence and syllable-repetition tasks provided an opportunity to evaluate the relationship between changes in neuronal activities and specific aspects of these vocal behaviors. Observed patterns of neuronal activity included a build up of activity in…

The potential of online language learning has received much attention recently. This paper reports the design of an online writing system featuring learning support for non-native students during their writing process. The central premise is that in the online writing situation, students are in great need of writing aids. The proposed system…

The interactions among demonstrative adjectives in certain genitive phrases and WH-words in Japanese are investigated in this report on a work in progress. It is argued that certain demonstrative adjectives in Japanese, such as "ano" ("that"), occupy the highest Spec position in DP and that they block A-bar movement out of DP; genitive phrases,…

A survey of the history of linguistic theory concerning grammar in the United States traces the development of theory since 1910. It begins with a general historical review of American linguistics. The subsequent three chapters focus on grammar. The first of these deals with morphology, beginning with Leonard Bloomfield's ideas in both his early…

This paper describes the organization and characteristics of Tache Papahagi's "Dictionarul dialectului aroman, general si etimologic" (DAA), a bilingual Aromanian (Vlach)-Romanian dictionary published in 1974. It also describes an ongoing project to produce an English-Aromanian dictionary based on the DAA, which should serve as a…

Idiomatic or complex prepositions, phrases that perform the same functions as simple prepositions, are examined in Italian. The analysis is of only one subgroup of idiomatic prepositional phrases, preposition + noun, and looks for classification criteria of theoretical rather than descriptive value. It is concluded that the idiosyncratic behavior…

An analysis of English sentences containing noun phrases (NPs) with extraposed complements argues that the extraposition (EX) is base-generated and not derived by any applications of the Move-alpha principle. A Move-alpha analysis is subject to substantial technical difficulties, and there exist cases of EX for which there is no plausible source…