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In this paper, we have developed manually annotated Telugu corpora by following DS guidelines (2009) and experimented our Telugu dependency treebank data on the data-driven parsers like Malt (Nivre et al., 2007a) and MST (McDonald et al. 2006) for parsing Telugu sentences. In the dependency, we link the head and dependents with their dependency relations (drels) by giving kāraka and non-kāraka relations to them. Telugu annotated data contains token with their morph information, pos, chunk and the drels. We have used our final Telugu treebank data in CONLL format for parsing in malt and MST parsers. We evaluated the labeled attachment score (LAS), unlabeled attachment score (UAS) and labeled accuracy (LA) for both the parsers and also compared their score in case of dependency relation too. Finally, we evaluated the most frequent errors which occurred after parsing the sentences and explained them with relevant examples with appropriate linguistic analysis, so that we can improve the accuracy of parsers in our future research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores how the interpersonal constructs (i.e., appraisal system, speech function) of Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) afford the analysis of one novice Chinese English-as-a-foreign-language (EFL) teacher's writing beliefs and practices. Specifically, by analyzing the Chinese EFL teacher's writing belief discourse and teaching discourse (obtained, respectively, through interviews and observations), the study shows how the Chinese EFL teacher's beliefs about the importance of linguistic form and text flow in writing were mapped to his writing instruction. The discourse analysis also demonstrates that the EFL teacher's writing-belief discourse and classroom discourse are both contextually shaped by his schooling exposure and self-agency, while his teaching practices were further conditioned by his students' English proficiency and shyness. The study concludes, that, firstly, the Chinese EFL teacher's writing practices arise (albeit indirectly) through his beliefs, and that, secondly, SFL offers a useful framework for discursive exploration of teachers' beliefs and practices. The study suggests the role of effective self-agency and teacher education in reshaping teachers' beliefs so that they can better act upon their beliefs when offering writing instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Writing cohesively remains a challenging task for many ESL and EFL learners and users of English, even at advanced levels. Despite its importance in academic writing, elements of cohesion have rarely been researched especially among Persian EFL writers. This study is aimed at filling the gap in the literature through an investigation of referential ties as one of the most explicit cohesion markers (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). Papers by Persian scholars in the engineering field who attended a Nanotech conference in Malaysia, were reviewed for referential ties based on Systemic Functional Grammar (Halliday 1994; Halliday and Matthiessen 2004). The distribution and categorization of such ties were described using both descriptive and inferential statistics. Subsequently the reference usage by Persians who performed research in Malaysian and Iranian universities were compared. A discussion is presented to examine any improvements due to the environment for the group of Persians studying in Malaysian universities using English language as the medium of instruction. The results confirm that Persians studying in Malaysian universities produce and repeat some components of referential ties more frequently in their academic writing when compared with their peers studying in Iranian universities. In addition, the results of this study are compared with the findings of some other studies among ESL/EFL learners of different nationalities to explain the cases of overuse, underuse, and misuse of referential cohesion which has implications for pedagogical objectives. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper continues research into Larkin's poetry started in Milojkovic (2011b), where computational collocation-based analysis proves Philip Larkin's reputation as a depressive, but disproves his alleged atheism. In Milojkovic (2011b) a complete corpus of Larkin's poetry is analysed for key symbols and compared with the famous passage from 1 Corinthians 13 describing the transition from an incomplete human state to that of maturity, self-knowledge and perfection. Both Larkin's corpus and the biblical passage are checked against a reference corpus (a complete edition of the Times newspaper of the year 1995, created by Tim Johns and consisting of 44.5 million words, referred to in this paper as the Times corpus). After stating the findings of Milojkovic (2011b), this paper offers further research into Larkin's poetry on the same premises, but this time employing semantic prosody of the grammatical strings found in the biblical passage. It is shown that grammatical strings carry specific semantic prosodies (e.g. 'and now a' versus 'and now I') and thus may be used as means of interpretation (e.g. 'but when did'). Lexical collocation and semantic prosodies of grammatical strings show that in Larkin's poetry transitions repeat themselves, time in most cases stands still, and that Philip Larkin's view of love does not change over time. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The goal of this corpus study is to trace developmental language patterns of (L1 and L2) primary school children's stories from Primary three to Primary five. The study focuses on genre-specific, interpersonal language resources chosen by the students to construe an evaluative stance. The L2 student texts are the first results of an ongoing genre-based pedagogic project involving explicit teaching of genre. The L1 student texts represent a control group whose pedagogic background is unknown to the researcher. The study applies analysis of story phases (Rose 2006; Martin and Rose 2008) and the annotation software UAM CORPUS TOOL, based on a systemic functional linguistic framework (Halliday and Matthiessen 2004; O'Donnell 2008). The analysis implies that the students seem to develop resources to construe stories that involve some distinct linguistic choices essential to fulfil the socio-cultural purpose of the story genre. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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In this paper we report on outcomes from recent research in which we have worked with the metaphor of 'scaffolding' to address questions about the nature of English as a Second Language (ESL) education. This work has involved a cyclical process: first, of drawing on developments in sociocultural theories of learning and on systemic linguistics in order to analyse and articulate the kinds of pedagogical practices that support ESL learners in their engagement with mainstream curricula and, second, in analysing pedagogical practices to build a more robust and enriched model of scaffolding as a way of further informing pedagogical practices. Our major purpose in this paper is to present the model of scaffolding that was developed from the research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study examines tenor in electronic media discourse in BBC News texts. Tenor is one of the register variables identified by Systemic linguistics. The study looks at how translators use their social role to relate with their audience in such media discourses as the Internet. The translator is usually the dominant writer so he determines how his imaginary audience will respond to his message. Being the sole translator, this increases his power to control the political discourse. He uses mainly direct and narrative texts to elicit responses from his imaginary reader. Whichever electronic media used, the personal tenor of the discourse is that of the translator as the knower/expert, while it has the pragmatic force of persuasion, exhortation and challenge for the reader. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]