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The present study uses private correspondence to investigate the use of embedded inversion on both sides of the Atlantic as an illustration of the spread of spoken/conversational features through writing. The paper discusses the use of embedded inversion in Irish English (IrE) and briefly compares its occurrence in other varieties of English during the 19th century. The data come from CORIECOR, the Corpus of Irish English Correspondence, which contains emigrant letters written to and by Irish emigrants from 1760 to 1940. The letters were sent mainly between Ireland and other countries such as the United States, Canada, Great Britain, New Zealand, Australia, and Argentina, and therefore provide an empirical base for studies of historical change. By using corpus linguistics techniques, we analyze possible connections between American English and IrE. The occurrence of embedded inversion in CORIECOR is compared with other historical corpora such as the Corpus of Historical American English, which provides data from one of the main destinations of Irish emigrants. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the use of zero and that as connectors for object clauses in eighteenth-century English. Previous approaches have shown that the use of zero increased in late Middle English and became well-established in the second half of the sixteenth century, especially in speech-based text-types. Our own research, based on the evidence of The Parsed Corpus of Early English Correspondence, has shown that in the mid-seventeenth century zero was well beyond the mid-range stage of lexical diffusion (73%) with the five high frequency verbs to know, to think, to say, to tell and to hope. Chronologically, it has been shown that progress of the zero innovation was thwarted in the eighteenth century, which has been attributed to the effect of prescriptivism. In this paper, we intend to throw light on this issue by tracking the courses of zero and that during the eighteenth century in both usage and precept. With this purpose we rely on two sources of information. On the one hand, a precept corpus containing a selection of grammars published in Britain in 1681–1800. Usage, on the other, has been surveyed in light of the evidence of The Corpus of Early English Correspondence Extension Sampler. Our aim is to assess the existence of a correlation between usage and precept in the expression of object clauses in this period with the following objectives: i) to analyse the use and distribution of zero and that clauses among grammarians; ii) to evaluate the incidence of the phenomenon in correspondence, as an input mirroring the vernacular; and iii) to assess the role of the grammarians’ statements in the propagation of the marked conjunction over the period. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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Large language models (LLMs) have recently exhibited significant capabilities in various English NLP tasks. However, their performance in Chinese grammatical error correction (CGEC) remains unexplored. This study evaluates the abilities of state-of-the-art LLMs in correcting learner Chinese errors from a corpus linguistic perspective. The performance of LLMs is assessed using standard evaluation metrics of MaxMatch score. Keyword and key n-gram analyses are conducted to quantitatively explore linguistic features that differentiate LLM outputs from those of human annotators. LLMs' performance in syntactic and semantic dimensions is further qualitatively analyzed based on these probes of keywords and key n-grams. Results show that LLMs achieve a relatively higher performance in test datasets with multiple annotators and low performance in those with a single annotator. LLMs tend to overcorrect wrong sentences, under the explicit prompt of the "minimal edit" strategy, by using more linguistic devices to generate fluent and grammatical sentences. Furthermore, they struggle with under-correction and hallucination in reasoning-dependent situations. These findings highlight the strengths and limitations of LLMs in CGEC, suggesting that future efforts should focus on refining overcorrection tendencies and improving the handling of complex semantic contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geoparsers aim to find place names in unstructured texts and locate them geographically. This process produces georeferenced data usable for spatial analyses or visualisations. Much geoparsing research and development has thus far focused on the English language, yet languages are not alike. Geoparsing them may necessitate language-specific processing steps or data for training geoparsing systems. In this article, we applied generic language and GIS resources to geoparsing Finnish texts. We argue that using generic resources can ease the development of geoparsers, and free up resources to other tasks, such as annotating evaluation corpora. A quantitative evaluation on new human-annotated news and tweet corpora indicates robust overall performance. A systematic analysis of the geoparser output reveals errors and their causes at each processing step. Some of the causes are specific to Finnish, and offer insights to geoparsing other morphologically complex languages as well. Our results highlight how the language of the input text affects geoparsing. Additionally, we argue that toponym resolution metrics based on error distance have limitations, and proposed metrics based on spatial intersection with ground-truth polygons. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Aviation English (AE), a specialized register of English, prioritizes precision, brevity and clarity to maximize aviation safety. While there has been a growing focus within the linguistics community on AE training and assessment since the release of a set of standards and recommended practices, its linguistic properties remain comparatively underexplored. Drawing upon Biber's (1988) multi-dimensional (MD) analysis framework, the present study conducted a corpus-based comparative MD analysis to investigate the multi-dimensional linguistic profile of AE vs. casual conversational English (CE) and exploratory factor analysis (EFA) to extract and interpret the co-occurring linguistic features of routine AE and non-routine AE. The comparative MD analysis shows that AE exhibits more information condensation, less authorial stance and technicality, and fewer features of online information elaboration compared to CE. The EFA shows variations in the linguistic and textual composition of the two sub-registers of AE across two dimensions. Non-routine AE demonstrates a present-focused, viewpoint/intention-oriented approach, involving higher levels of integrative information flow compared to routine AE. Routine AE is characterized by a higher degree of information condensation and is marked by a planned, procedural, and intensive use of standard phraseology. Some pedagogical implications are then proposed for enhancing AE training to cultivate pilots' and air traffic controllers' language competence for precise, unambiguous communication tailored to both routine and non-routine operational contexts. • AE: Dense information, less authorial stance and technicality, limit online elaboration. • Linguistic variations in routine and non-routine AE composition. • Non-routine AE: Present-focused, intention-oriented, integrated information flow. • Routine AE: Information condensed, planned, procedural, SP intensive. • Pedagogical implications for enhancing AE training. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There are idiomatic pairs in both English and Vietnamese. While idiomatic pairs in Vietnamese have been extensively researched from different views, it seems that there have been few thorough studies of idiomatic pairs across English and Vietnamese. This paper looks into the structural and semantic properties of idiomatic pairs in English and Vietnamese using the framework of idiom analysability (Langlotz, 2006). This is a contrastive analysis that presents the similarities and differences between English and Vietnamese idiomatic pairs in terms of structural and semantic properties, including grammatical and componential patterns, semantic compositions, and transparent-opaque components. A manual search of Giang's (2018) idiom collection yielded a corpus of 231 English and 2374 Vietnamese idiomatic pairs, which served as the data for the study. The findings of this study indicate that the biggest difference between English and Vietnamese idiomatic pairs lies in their distribution in each language. There are much more idiomatic idioms in Vietnamese than in English. Grammatically, idiomatic pairs in both languages are formed by two syntactically equivalent component parts. In Vietnamese, the components that create idiomatic pairs are even, and in English, they are odd. Semantically, the majority of English and Vietnamese idiomatic pairs are able to be analysable, and their meanings are at least motivated in some way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The challenges that are posed to interpreters by false friends in European languages, such as English, French, Spanish and Portuguese, have been reported on extensively. Although the same challenges may be experienced in African languages, no such report is available for Tshivenḓa and Xitsonga. False friends may cause much confusion and create errors for interpreters. For example, although they share a similar form, the Tshivenḓa word ṱhangu 'divine bones' and the Xitsonga word tintanghu 'shoes' have different meanings. This study therefore analysed the challenges to Tshivenḓa and Xitsonga interpreters that may be brought about by false friends and proposes possible solutions to dealing with such challenges. The study was conducted following the theoretical assumptions expressed by O'Neill and Casanovas (1997) on the classification of false friends and the set theory of Sabino (2016). Set theory was used to understand the relationship between sets; in this case, Tshivenḓa words that look similar to Xitsonga words. The data for the study was collected from an existing corpora. The result was that some words that looked similar in both languages had totally different meanings or shared partial meaning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The phenomenon of the 'complaint tradition', expressing the belief that language standards are deteriorating in some way, has had a long and vibrant existence in discussions of English in Hong Kong. The contribution of a Cultural Linguistics perspective here highlights the nature and significance of the cultural conceptualisations of language, for example, those that are revealed by the use of metaphor. The article begins with an overview of the discourse in Hong Kong, based on a corpus of media articles. The discourse structure and content of the articles, including their metaphorical aspects, are then analysed in more detail. To help understand the persistence of the discourse I draw on the insight that metaphors constitute 'mini‐narratives' which construct identities and identity boundaries. The discussion considers how the prevailing conceptualisations of English—some general, and others more culturally specific—serve to reproduce dominant, standardising views and inhibit the acceptance of local variation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Grounding language in vision is an active field of research seeking to construct cognitively plausible word and sentence representations by incorporating perceptual knowledge from vision into text-based representations. Despite many attempts at language grounding, achieving an optimal equilibrium between textual representations of the language and our embodied experiences remains an open field. Some common concerns are the following. Is visual grounding advantageous for abstract words, or is its effectiveness restricted to concrete words? What is the optimal way of bridging the gap between text and vision? To what extent is perceptual knowledge from images advantageous for acquiring high-quality embeddings? Leveraging the current advances in machine learning and natural language processing, the present study addresses these questions by proposing a simple yet very effective computational grounding model for pre-trained word embeddings. Our model effectively balances the interplay between language and vision by aligning textual embeddings with visual information while simultaneously preserving the distributional statistics that characterize word usage in text corpora. By applying a learned alignment, we are able to indirectly ground unseen words including abstract words. A series of evaluations on a range of behavioral datasets shows that visual grounding is beneficial not only for concrete words but also for abstract words, lending support to the indirect theory of abstract concepts. Moreover, our approach offers advantages for contextualized embeddings, such as those generated by BERT (Devlin et al, 2018), but only when trained on corpora of modest, cognitively plausible sizes. Code and grounded embeddings for English are available at (https://github.com/Hazel1994/Visually_Grounded_Word_Embeddings_2). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces readers to the TESOL Quarterly special topic issue: Assessing the effectiveness of corpus‐based approaches to English language teaching. The authors open by briefly defining and outlining data‐driven learning (DDL) research on second language (English) teaching. This is followed by an extended discussion of four themes, which pertain to recent developments and future directions in DDL. These themes include: (1) selecting corpora for corpus‐based language teaching; (2) pushing the boundaries of DDL; (3) preparing language educators for corpus‐based language teaching; and (4) reflecting on theory and methods. Throughout the piece, readers are also introduced to those contributions within the special issue, which include a diverse range of pieces that focus on aspects of theory, research, and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Learner corpora have been used extensively in corpus research to identify gaps and errors within learner writing but have rarely been directly used in corpus‐informed instruction (CII). Importantly, scholars in CII have pointed out that "it is as important to see what learners can do as well as what they can't" when using learner corpora (Boulton & Thomas, 2012; p. 13). Learner corpora can also offer greater alignment with the genres students are writing (Seidlhofer, 2002). In our Brief Report, we take up Lu, Casal, and Liu's (2021) call for greater synergy of genre and corpus pedagogy by examining the impact of using a learner corpus to enhance students' language awareness and genre‐specific knowledge within an English as an Additional Language (EAL) first‐year writing classroom. We also move beyond error analysis to encourage an asset‐based model to learner CII (Staples, 2022). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper discusses the development and implementation of a locally‐sourced corpus to address the specific needs of an ESL writing program. The paper begins with a description of the motivation and development of the Corpus of Ohio Learner and Teacher English (COLTE), a large in‐house corpus consisting of assessed ESL student writing and teacher feedback from first‐year writing courses. The paper illustrates research conducted within the local context using the COLTE and discusses how the program's corpus‐based approach influenced curricular revisions and instructional practice. It addresses the evaluation of these efforts, challenges encountered, and considerations for building and using corpora at the program level. The paper concludes by arguing that stakeholders within programs can work collaboratively to build and use locally‐sourced corpora grounded in their specific setting to explore local practices and address the English language learning and teaching needs of their own particular context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Although there has been a plethora of research on formulaic language in contemporary English, conducted with various purposes in mind (descriptive, applied and otherwise), studies of formulaic phrasings in Old English texts are rare. In this paper, we employ selected corpus linguistic methods to identify and explore the use and discoursal functions of recurrent multi-word items that contribute the most to the formulaicity of homilies, chronicles and biblical translations, which are the Old English text types under scrutiny. The findings of this primarily descriptive and exploratory research provide new insights into the pragmatic functions of Old English recurrent phraseological units as well as into the structure and communicative functions of the analysed text varieties. Finally, the results of the study cast some new light on the role those formulaic phrasings play in Old English prose. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, I show how pragmatics and syntax are interconnected in Old English by examining the left-dislocation system in Wulfstan's homilies. Syntactically, this article argues that left-dislocation fits in nicely with the system found in other Old English texts, despite certain superficial structural differences. The unexpected high number of demonstrative resumptives is accounted for by the accumulation of formulaic structures in one homily. Pragmatically, LFD performs a number of discourse functions. The main function is a generalizing one, as LFD introduces new topics in the discourse. This case study also shows that other functions traditionally linked with LFD can be found in Wulfstan's texts. For instance, demonstrative resumptives show some degree of topic shifting and can be accompanied by the contrastive function. By contrast, personal pronoun resumptives can mark topic continuity with specific referents. Since the corpus data are necessarily limited because only one file from the YCOE is examined, some claims are not verifiable. A good example is the assumption found in the literature that personal pronoun resumptives in LFD tend to land low in the clause. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research article abstracts, the second most-read part of research papers after titles, generally follow disciplinary conventions, which are often manifested in their language use. This study analyzed lexical bundles or multi-word sequences in move texts of a one-million-word corpus of English-language medical research article abstracts, with particular attention to vocabulary levels. The most frequent lexical bundles, such as "the primary end point was", often occurred once per text and predominantly took part in realizing a move. The coverage of the first thousand New General Service List was 63.6% for the entire corpus but was around 80% for bundles in Move 3, describing principal results, and those in Move 4, evaluating the results. Many of the sequences were research-oriented bundles, used to express research contexts. The bundles were made up of relatively accessible word items, but the sequences occurred to realize highly specific research contexts. The findings suggest that becoming familiar with the bundle may need increasing awareness of disciplinary conventions such as guideline adherences and statistical procedures. This study may offer insights on the need for learners to familiarize themselves with these bundles. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study is a contrastive interlanguage analysis of propositional idea density in the written language of native English speakers and Asian learners of English. The study adopted a quantitative method to analyse the ICNALE written essays v2.4 using CPIDR v5.1 software. The study aimed to identify the level of propositional idea density in the writing of English native speakers and Asian learners of English and to examine the effect of the type of English, the theme type, the proficiency level and nationality on propositional idea density. The study is one of the very few studies about propositional idea density in ESL and EFL contexts. Many statistical analyses were performed on CPIDR results using jamovi v2.3 software, and the results of the tests revealed that the propositional idea density in native speakers' essays was higher than that in Asian learners' essays. Moreover, the results showed that there was a statistically significant difference among all the participants based on the theme types of part-time jobs and smoking, among native speakers based on occupation type (students, teachers, others) and among Asian learners of English based on the type of English proficiency level and nationality. The findings of the study showed that propositional idea density is a psycholinguistic index of the amount of presupposed knowledge language users have on a specific topic. In other words, propositional idea density is a window to language users' schemata. Additionally, the findings of the study can be considered an insightful contribution to contrastive interlanguage analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In order to facilitate the instruction and acquisition of EFL writing, this paper compares the uses of the light verb get in English writing by Chinese and L1 undergraduates by drawing on insights from the theory of norms and exploitations (TNE). Corpus pattern analysis (CPA) is conducted to analyze the data taken from two comparable corpora of Chinese EFL learners' and L1 undergraduates' writing, unveiling both similarities and disparities between the two groups in terms of the patterning of get. Regarding similarities, most of the prototypical patterns identified in the two target corpora are identical, and both corpora show innovative exploitations of norms. In terms of differences, Chinese undergraduates misuses get in their writing in a varied but recognizable way. In addition, Chinese undergraduates are more likely than L1 undergraduates to overuse high-frequency patterns and semantic roles but underuse low-frequency ones, which may result in a lack of diversity in the range of patterns and complements. Chinese undergraduates' uncertainty of registers is another notable feature in their writing. Based on the findings, the paper further discusses the implications for the teaching and learning of writing in EFL contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper, we investigate whether Mandarin short passives contain an implicit external argument (EA; such as an agent or experiencer). Syntactic tests yield inconclusive results in Mandarin. We employ intervention effects as a diagnostic tool and demonstrate that, unlike English, Mandarin short passives do not syntactically project an implicit EA. Our findings are based on spontaneous language data from the CHILDES corpora, encompassing 1182 children aged 2–6 years, and experimental data from 78 Mandarin-speaking children aged 3–6 years. This cross-linguistic structural difference explains the earlier acquisition of short passives in Mandarin compared to English and also raises a learnability question, which we briefly address: how do children know to project an implicit EA or not in their language? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study probes into a comparative study of metaphorical expressions of money in English and Chinese. By hiring corpus-based methodology, this article aims to gain insight into the universality and variation of money-related conceptual metaphors manifested in corresponding linguistic expressions in English and Chinese. Drawing on the Conceptual Metaphor Theory, the findings unravel a significant overlay in money-related conceptual metaphors between English and Chinese, upholding a notch of acclaim. Additionally, a small part of money-related conceptual metaphors is specific in a certain kind of language, either in English or Chinese. Meanwhile, the present study tends to explore metaphorical conceptualizations of money primarily based on common bodily experiences, and thus, most money-related conceptual metaphors are universal in English and Chinese, while the variations in English and Chinese can be explained by cultural experiences. Consequently, this research contributes to our understanding of the interplay between conceptual unit schematicity and embodiment hierarchy. Moreover, it bids valued insights for future comparative studies on conceptual metaphors spanning diverse languages and cultures. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of pronouns shows the author’s intention to address the reading public or the presence of the target readership in texts. This paper focuses on second-person pronouns, which are especially revealing of the author`s desire to engage the reader by endowing on them an active role in the negotiation and construction of knowledge. For the same reason, we will also analyse the use of the word reader. Science writing is thus understood as a dialogue between the two groups of participants involved in knowledge creation. Two usages of you have been detected in previous works using the Coruña Corpus of English Scientific Writing (CC): general and dialogic. The former might be interpreted as a generic “one,” “everybody;” the latter, considered as an in-group strategy that embraces both the writer and the reader. The detailed analysis of the pragmatics of the second-person pronouns and reader in Corpus of English Chemistry Texts (CEChET) and Late Modern English Medical Texts (LMEMT) will hopefully shed some light on the object-centred nature of scientific writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Phrasal verbs formed with forth spread within the linguistic system up to the Early Modern English (EModE) period when they started to decrease in use as a result of internal mechanisms of change and linguistic competition with other particles such as on and out (Brinton 1988; Hiltunen 1994; Akimoto 2006; Thim 2006; De Smet 2010). Despite widespread knowledge, no studies have examined quantitatively the single steps forth followed over the years or questioned the role performed by productivity and processes of semantic specialisation of single instances in the processes of replacement. The present study is a corpus-based investigation that aims to fill this gap. The study has been undertaken on the Corpus of English Dialogues (CED), which is a multi-genre corpus covering the EModE period and, specifically, the years 1560–1760 (Kytö & Walker 2006). The analysis proves that the particle forth shows limited productivity, which created the conditions for processes of interference and replacement. The lexical context favoured the semantic specialisation of the particles on and out which stimulated the retraction of forth. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper provides a comprehensive study of real-life uses of unbound reflexives (URs) in two syntactic structures, coordination and prepositional object structures, using a large amount of synchronic, diachronic, and dialectal corpus data from some Brigham Young University (BYU) corpora. Our findings show that 1) in contemporary American English, URs have different raw frequencies and proportion patterns in the two syntactic structures from anaphoric/cataphoric reflexives and also vary according to their person values; 2) the uses of URs in the two structures have shown decreasing tendencies for the past 200 years in American English; and 3) URs are more frequently used in Irish English than any other inner-circle variety of English in relation to anaphoric reflexives, which is more prominent in coordination structures than in prepositional object structures. Our findings also contribute to providing an empirical foundation for testing existing theories of URs and developing Binding Conditions in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article conducts a corpus linguistics analysis of the dative–genitive subconstruction within the broader context of Old English double object complementation. The ditransitive construction in Old English has traditionally been perceived as a network of alternating subconstructions, including dat-acc, acc-dat, acc-gen, dat-gen, and acc-acc, as the most productive variants. Recent literature has primarily focused on dat-accs and acc-dats because they are the most productive patterns across the history of English, giving also rise to the current ditransitive construction. However, the less productive case frames have received considerably less recent attention. This work, part of an ongoing investigation aimed at creating an OE dat-gen database, builds upon Visser's list, verified and implemented by findings obtained from a search conducted in the Dictionary of Old English Web Corpus. We obtain 88 verb types and 443 tokens, incorporating 19 new verb types and 260 tokens into the database. More significantly, we offer a detailed description of the conceptual domains and verb classes associated with OE dat-gens, which display a semantics characterized by the presence or absence of actual transfer, as well as transitions from literal to metaphorical transfer, with speech verbs playing a significant role. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes and compares the news values constructed in the English news reporting from Chinese and US mainstream media around events concerning maritime security, revealing how the related events have been packaged and sold differently in the two societies, uncovering the discrepancies in Chinese and US social visions on maritime security, and exploring the social attitudes underpinning the constant conflicts between the two countries in the marine sphere. Adopting corpus linguistic methods and the discursive news values analysis (DNVA) framework, this study examines news values through keywords, naming strategies, and images contained in Chinese and US mainstream English news outlets. The results show that Chinese media established the news values of Positivity and Proximity prominently through both textual and visual reporting, by emphasizing common international interests, advocating diplomatic joint cooperation and demonstrating optimistic attitudes towards the future of marine environment. By contrast, US media keenly construed Negativity and Eliteness, by highlighting the exclusive national interests/security of the US, dwelling on threats from other countries and distinctly demonstrating worries, fears, anger and violence. The differences in newsworthiness reflect that maritime security has been constructed in discrepant ways in Chinese and US society: as international joint security with optimistic perspective in China, and as exclusive national security with pessimistic perspective in US. This study has improved and supplemented the results of the previous China-US marine policy studies by the findings of the social emotions/cognition towards maritime policy revealed through newsworthiness analysis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The online public sphere has ushered in a new era of public discourse, where people can engage in discussion, debates, and exchange of ideas online. Twitter (now called X) has been a significant arena for such online public discourse, providing space for Australians to voice their opinions and engage with a wide range of topics. Online news websites also play a pivotal role in shaping public opinion and fostering discussions on current Australian issues. The comments sections of these news websites offer valuable insights into the perspectives, attitudes, and interactions of individuals engaging with news content. This paper introduces two large-scale, longitudinal, and expansive datasets capturing the dynamics of online public discourse in Australia: the Australian Twittersphere (AuTS) and NewsTalk. AuTS is a well-established, longitudinal dataset that collates a broad array of "Australian" tweets, while NewsTalk is a newer, multi-platform compilation of reader comments on Australian news stories sourced from news platforms including ABC, Guardian, News Corp, Nine Entertainment, MSN, along with regional newspapers and independent news outlets. The shifting focus from a single platform (i.e. Twitter/X) to multi-platform collection reflects the increasing complexities of real-world online public discourse. We invite readers to consider these two expansive corpora (AuTS and NewsTalk) as representations of large-scale online Australian public discourse that can be mined and analyzed for insights to answer various research questions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread use of metadiscourse is vital to the study of academic discourse and genre analysis. This article focuses on the concept of metadiscursive verb patterns (MVPs) and examines their variation in English research articles across four domains representing hard/soft‐pure and hard/soft‐applied disciplines. Based on a bottom‐up investigation of a self‐compiled corpus, three findings are highlighted: (1) the crucial rhetorical roles of MVPs were established by their distinct functions in knowledge construction; (2) significant interdisciplinary variations of MVPs reflected the typical written conventions shared by writers of different disciplinary communities; and (3) the association between (sub‐)categories of MVPs and disciplines foregrounded the most popular rhetorical strategies for using MVPs and salient disciplinary features. These findings are discussed in terms of the factors governing the use of MVPs and identification of disciplinary boundaries. Pedagogical considerations for understanding MVPs and proper rhetorical strategies for using these tools are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Expressions of impossibility refer to events that can never or rarely happen, tasks that are difficult or impossible to perform, people or things that are of no use and things that are impossible to find. This study explores the similarities and differences between English and Arabic expressions of impossibility, and the difficulties that student-translators have with them. A corpus of English and Arabic expressions of impossibility was collected, analyzed and compared. Data analysis showed that English and Arabic expressions of impossibility fall into 4 categories: (i) those that are identical in form and meaning in both languages (to look for a needle in a haystack, when salt blossoms, when heaven falls on earth); (ii) those that are similar in meaning but differ in wording (when pigs fly, on cloud nine, not in a million years); (iii) those used in English, but have no equivalents in Arabic (when hell freezes over, dance on a land mine); and (iv) those used in Arabic but have no equivalents in English (الظهر عز في النجوم يريه to show someone the stars at noon/in daylight). Responses to a translation test showed that student-translators could translate fewer than 35% of the test items correctly and left many blank. Expressions of impossibility that are similar in English and Arabic were easy to translate, whereas opaque ones (ghost of a chance, near the knuckle, dance on a land mine, تتغطى ما الشمس عين بغربال the sun cannot be covered with a sieve; العنب الشوك من تجنى لا إنك you cannot reap grapes from thorns; حلمة تشوف لما ودنك when you see your ear’s lobe; مخرز تقاوم ما العين the eye cannot defy a n awl). English expressions of impossibility were more difficult to translate than Arabic ones as they contained unfamiliar lexical items. Literal translation, explanation/paraphrase, partial translation, and extraneous translation were the most common strategies in that order. Detailed results and recommendations are given. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With the self-built corpus of Can Xue's translated novels and the Chinese English parallel corpus, the authors of this paper analyze the translation style of Can Xue's six English versions of novels from the lexical and syntactic levels. It is found that the translators of Can Xue's novels pay attention to the readability and reader's acceptability, and the translation presents obvious simplification characteristics; meanwhile, the English translation of Can Xue's novels tries to reproduce the unique language style of the original works and tends to be literal translation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores what I call Dissociative Syntactic Amalgam (DSA) constructions, observed in conversation parts of fictional varieties of English, such as film/TV scripts and novels. I provide 27 cases of DSAs, most of which come from Corpus of Contemporary American English and Movie Corpus. A paradigm example is I get off at ten past I'm never going out with you (as an answer to What time do you get off (work) tonight?), where I'm never going out with you is clausal but fills a nominal slot. In DSAs, the speaker initially lures the hearer to create a positive expectation (e.g., I can go out with her), but the speaker 'dissociates' herself from this expectation, that is, expresses her negative attitude (e.g., irritation) towards it. DSAs have received little (if any) analytic attention, and this paper aims to fill this gap in the literature. More specifically, I describe interpretive aspects of DSAs in comparison with the standard cases of syntactic amalgams (e.g., Ken sent you'll never guess how many letters to Naomi) and develop a cognitive–pragmatic account in relevance theory, explicating the interpretive path a hearer takes in comprehending a DSA utterance. • Identifying the Dissociative Syntactic Amalgam (DSA) construction. • Considering the ways in which a speaker conveys a variety of emotive meanings. • Presenting a theory-neutral description of interpretive aspects of DSAs. • Developing a cognitive–pragmatic account of DSAs in relevance theory. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explored the lexical coverage of corpus-based vocabulary lists (general, academic, and content-specific) across several million tokens gathered from digital science resources (DSR) for middle school (6-8 grade) students in the United States. The goal was to estimate the extent to which a combination of well-known word lists, mostly designed for the needs of L2 learners, might help students reach text coverage that could result in reasonable comprehension of science texts. The findings of this study show that: (a) the top 570 word families in the newer Academic Vocabulary List (AVL) provide 75% more lexical coverage in the corpus than the 570 word families in the older Academic Word List (AWL), (b) a series of lists designed for second language learners, such as General Service List (GSL), Academic Word List (AWL), and the English for Academic Purposes (EAP) Science List (about 2,900 word families) offer 88.33% coverage, and (c) the GSL and the Middle School Vocabulary List (MSVL) for Science (fewer than 2,500 word families) provide 87.77% coverage. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research introduces WCC-EC 2.0 (Web-Crawled Corpus—English and Chinese), a comprehensive parallel corpus designed for enhancing Neural Machine Translation (NMT), featuring over 1.6 million English-Chinese sentence pairs meticulously gathered via web crawling. This corpus, extracted through an advanced web crawler, showcases the vast linguistic diversity and richness of English and Chinese, uniquely spanning the rarely covered news and music domains. Our methodical approach in web crawling and corpus assembly, coupled with rigorous experiments and manual evaluations, demonstrated its superiority by achieving high BLEU scores, marking significant strides in translation accuracy and model resilience. Its inclusion of these specific areas adds significant value, providing a unique dataset that enriches the scope for NMT research and development. With the rise of NMT technology, WCC-EC 2.0 emerges not only as an invaluable resource for researchers and developers, but also as a pivotal tool for improving translation accuracy, training more resilient models, and promoting interlingual communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research explores the pos tag sequences that shape the transition from upper intermediate (B2 cefr) to near-native proficiency (C2 cefr) in a corpus of essays (n=32,410) from the Cambridge Learner Corpus. Gilquin (2018) and others have shown that pos tag sequences offer a holistic approach to extracting the most commonly used patterns without a starting point of an a priori set of words and word sequences. Using corpus linguistics informed by usage-based theories of language learning, this paper examines the frequency and distribution of 4-slot pos-tag sequences in L2 English writing, drawing on the taxonomy of pattern grammar (Francis et al., 1996, 1998; and Hunston and Francis, 2000). Findings point to the presence of both core and emergent pos-tag sequences in learner language in the two proficiency levels analysed. These sequences point to the presence of dynamic language restructuring processes as learners become more proficient and re-evaluate their understanding of frequency and distribution in English. This paper shows evidence of how language competence increases with proficiency. The research offers new evidence in our understanding of the development of L2 writing in efl contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes the rationale for and design of a new multimodal corpus of L2 academic English from a Sino-British university in China: the Corpus of Chinese Academic Written and Spoken English (cawse). The unique context for this corpus provides language samples from Chinese students who use English as a second language (L2) in a preliminary-year programme, which prepares students for academic studies at university level, at a campus where English is used as the Medium of Instruction (emi). Data were collected from a variety of settings, including written (i.e., exam scripts and essays) and spoken assessments (i.e., interviews and presentations), covering the full range of grades awarded to those language samples, as well as from student group interactions during teaching and learning activities. The multimodal nature of the corpus is realised through the availability of selected audio/video recordings accompanied by the orthographically transcribed text. This open-access corpus is designed to help shed light on Chinese students' academic L2 English language use in a variety of written, spoken and multimodal discourses. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Jordanian Educational Journal is the property of Association of Arab Universities and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

India is home to hundreds of languages. Each Indian language is unique and an identity marker for individuals, communities, and their culture. The English language, though not native to India, has a significant presence in this vast country. One hundred and ninety years of British colonial rule over India had established English as the 'dominant language' in the country long ago. Rapid urbanization; and the consequent proliferation of telecommunication networks have further increased its dominance over Indian languages in the last few decades. The heavy code-mixing of English words in the Indian languages is reducing the richness of the vocabulary of the Indian languages by replacing their words with English words, thereby initiating 'lexical depletion' based language change in the native languages. This paper is an empirical study to map the code-mixing of English words in the Hindi language and its impact on the Hindi language, as observed in Greater Noida, a town that has seen rapid urbanization since 1991. This paper attempts to explain the implications of code-mixing on the Hindi lexicon by analysing a corpus of spoken language data using corpus-linguistics and computational linguistics methodologies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The mastery of formulaic sequences by language learners is considered to be crucial since it enables them to accomplish the basic communicative requirements (Wray, 2002) of target language use. Of all the formulaic sequences, the mastery of collocations is known to have an enormous impact on learners’ ability to move beyond the intermediate level. This data-driven study explores the word combinations (both conventional and unconventional L2 strings) of L2 users of English. Specifically, the adjective-noun combinations in an L2 corpus (Turkish Undergraduate Writers of English) were explored to find the potential L2 strings functioning as unconventional collocations. Then, these L2 strings were compared with the adjective-noun collocations in the LOCNESS corpus to determine whether the choices made by L2 learners differed from those of L1 users. The findings show that the spectrum of the L2 word combinations was broader in comparison with LOCNESS. The results suggest that the L2 learners produced a higher number of unconventional collocations than conventional collocations matching with the L1. The L2 strings support that the use of collocations can be rather problematic for learners of English however advanced they are. Some pedagogical implications of the findings for explicit collocation and vocabulary teaching are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this study, we adopt a monolingual, comparable, and cross-modal approach to investigate the use of hedges in interpreted and non-interpreted English speeches. To achieve this, we compile a corpus comprising speech data sourced from the interpreter-mediated Chinese government press conferences and the White House press conferences, respectively. Two research questions are formulated to guide our examination of hedging-related features in the corpus: (1) How does the use of hedges differ between interpreted English produced in different modes of interpreting (i.e., consecutive and simultaneous)? (2) How does the use of hedges in interpreted English differ from non-interpreted English? The results of our study show that interpreters, regardless of the consecutive and simultaneous mode, tend to employ significantly fewer hedges than spontaneous speakers of English. In addition, a vast majority of hedges in interpreted English stem from a relatively narrow range of core hedging devices. We posit that the underuse of hedges in interpreted English may be linked to constraints such as high cognitive pressure, rigid interactive structure, and source-language-related speech rhetoric conventions. Preliminary findings also suggest that the interpreting mode appears to exert little influence on the hedging patterns in the interpreters' renditions. Potential factors underlying such a trend are briefly discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents the first large‐scale multivariate analysis of future‐time reference (FTR) variation in world Englishes. On the basis of 7,922 hand‐coded tokens from eight corpora of the International Corpus of English suite, the study probes the effect of eight predictor variables on the choice between will and BE going to (BGT) as FTR markers. Statistically significant effects for all conditioning variables except polarity are found, as well as two significant interaction terms involving modality. By contrast, the predictor variety enters the model only as a main effect, but is not involved in any interactions. This is interpreted as a sign of strong unity in the system of FTR variation in English world‐wide. At the theoretical level, the paper argues for a stronger focus on such tendencies towards unity among global varieties of English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research has indicated that lexical richness is an important indicator of second language (L2) proficiency. However, most research has examined written, cross-sectional English L2 corpora and does not necessarily indicate how spoken lexical use develops over time or whether observed trends are stable across L2s. This study adds to previous research on the development of spoken vocabulary by investigating lexical features of L2 Spanish learners over a 21-month period, using the LANGSNAP corpus. Multiple lexical richness indices used in previous studies were examined including lexical diversity, word frequency, word concreteness, and bigram strength of association. Linear mixed-effects models were run to examine changes over time. The results suggest that although some features of lexical richness (e.g., word frequency) see meaningful change over time, others (e.g., bigram T score) may not be indicative of L2 oral development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fact that there are (at least) two different translations of the English preposition for used to describe duration in Portuguese, namely durante and por, shows that duration is an interesting area in the tense and aspect panorama of this language, which deserves close study. In this paper, I present an empirical study based on four different corpora to investigate the matter, looking at the Portuguese varieties from Brazil and Portugal and different text genres (general and specialised newspapers, oral interviews, and fiction). The material spans circa two centuries. This paper identifies some specific uses and preferences of the two adverbials and confirms and challenges other claims in the linguistic literature. It shows that narrative fiction is definitely different from newspaper text due to its need to describe short duration and that planned duration can be expressed using both kinds of adverbials. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Against the background of comparatively insufficient, expressly dedicated studies on double particle verb person nominalisations, this paper offers a qualitative, cognitive-constructionist approach to the properties of doubler-upper nominalisations of particle verbs in English and a reappraisal of some of the available analyses thereof. On the assumption of the validity of the flexicon stance on the organisation of words in the human mind, and on the basis of a preliminary semantic analysis of 300 types of doubler-upper nouns extracted from two corpora and Urban Dictionary, it is claimed that there are no identifiable constraints on the possibility of double-er marking and no particular properties of particle verbs as bases to preclude double -er marking. A hypothesis is formulated that, despite their deviance, doubler-uppers strike the optimal balance between complexity and unity and appear to be the most natural and morphophonologically best-fitting pattern for particle verb -er nominalisation (at least in spoken discourse and the media). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of this article is to explain the syntactic competition found in the complementation of Old English Prevent verbs. The competition on argumenthood involves linked verbal predications and linked nominal predications. Evidence is gathered for continuity both between finite and non-finite linked verbal predications as well as between non-finite and nominalised linked predications. This evidence points to a diachronic development: finite clause > non-finite clause > nominalisation. The main conclusion of the article is that the Interclausal Relation Hierarchy predicts the replacement of the finite clause complementation with non-finite clause complementation in such a way that the syntactically tighter noun phrase involving a deverbal nominalisation constitutes the next step of syntactic development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with one of the aspects involved in the compilation of a treebank of Old English within the framework of Universal Dependencies. More specifically, this study addresses the question of how to account for the remarkable degree of Old English morphological relatedness in a type of treebank designed to stress syntactic similarities across languages. The solution proposed and assessed in this study is the addition of an extra field of annotation for morphological relatedness. The data of this analysis comprise 1106 derivatives attaching the prefix un-. Out of these, there are around 80 morphologically complex nouns, adjectives, verbs, and adverbs whose derivation cannot be described gradually, 33 of which are unique formations or hapax legomena according to the attestations provided by the Dictionary of Old English Corpus. The main conclusion is that the specification of short-distance and long-distance morphological relatedness provides the Old English treebank with a paradigmatic dimension that can be particularly relevant for languages with relatively generalised and transparent derivational morphology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

English, in Pakistan, is taught since grade 1, yet the acquisition of receptive and productive skills in English language by Pakistani language learners remains questionable. The lack of vocabulary is a major factor as vocabulary is crucial for communication. In Pakistan, textbooks are the only source of vocabulary exposure for students. Keeping in view the importance of textbooks, this corpus-based research was conducted to know and compare the lexical load of Class X textbooks that are developed, published and distributed in public schools by the four textbook boards. These textbooks were evaluated on the basis of three parameters, namely the frequency of types and tokens present in textbooks and type-token ratio, the percentage of GSL/AWL covered, and the levels of BNC-COCA 25 present. The coverage of GSL/AWL lists for GSL_2nd_1000 and AWL750 was alarming. Most of the vocabulary present in these textbooks habituated first three levels of BNC-COCA 25 but rest of the levels had no or minor presentation. The results showed that these textbooks do not fulfill the needs of students as the amount of vocabulary included does not meet the internationally defined standards for vocabulary. Hence, vocabulary should be extended and distributed as per the standards. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The multilingual approach plays an important role in language teaching, therefore also in the teaching of German as a foreign/second language (DaF = Deutsch als Fremdsprache; DaZ = Deutsch als Zweitsprache) and Italian as a foreign/second language. Aim of this volume is to show how metalinguistic and cross-linguistic awareness, central pillars of multilingual didactics, can be developed through the use of lexicographic resources, corpora and new technologies. The contributions present research and didactic experiences of various kinds that are of interest to different levels of education (school, university, etc.); although the didactics of German is in the focus of many essays, references to other languages, primarily Italian, but also English, Romanian, Ladin and other Italian dialect varieties, are not missing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Slovo a Slovesnost is the property of Academy of Sciences of the Czech Republic, Czech Language Institute and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Some English verbs use distinct forms for the preterite (i.e., simple past; e.g., I broke the door) and the past participle (e.g., I've broken the door). These verbs may variably show use of the preterite form in place of the participle (e.g., I've broke the door), which the authors call participle leveling. This article contributes the first detailed variationist study of participle leveling by investigating the phenomenon in perfect constructions using data collected from three corpora of conversational speech: two of American English and one of British English. A striking degree of similarity is found between the three corpora in both the linguistic and the extralinguistic constraints on variation. Constraints on participle leveling include tense of the perfect construction, verb frequency, and phonological similarity between preterite and participle forms. The variable is stable in real time and socially stratified. The article relates the findings to theoretical linguistic treatments of the variation and to questions of its origin and spread in Englishes transatlantically. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We provide an account of the developmental trajectory of Emirati Arabic negation particles. We treat the non-verbal predicate negator (NVPN) mub as a negative copula, in contrast to the verbal predicate negator (VPN) maa, which encodes sentential negation in verbal and existential contexts. The analysis is supported by evidence from a longitudinal corpus of six Emirati children. Given the high frequency of occurrence of maa in the ambient language, we show that an input-frequency account predicts maa-mub substitutions in early stages of acquisition. However, confirming previous findings by Becker we show that when mub emerges in later stages, its distribution exhibits an asymmetry: mub is used frequently with individual-level nominal/adjectival predicates but it almost never appears with stage level adjectival/prepositional/ adverbial predicates, mirroring the distribution of copular elements in child English (and other languages). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]