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This paper traces the formal and functional development of evidential extra-clausal fragments of the form (the) last I/we + VERB in American English. Using data from the Corpus of Historical American English and the Corpus of Contemporary American English, the study shows that these fragments are first attested in the late 19th century as a truncation of specificational structures (e.g. The last thing I remember is…). In the course of the 20th century, however, they exhibit a shift in allegiance by becoming increasingly associated with a temporal adjuncts template (e.g. The last time I checked…). Functionally, these evidential fragments are used as downtoners with additional functions being added in the course of the 20th century, viz. booster function and ironic use. The processes identified for their development are cooptation and subsequent grammaticalization, together with semantic specialization and constructional contamination. More generally, the fragmentary form (the) last I/we + VERB is shown to specialize in evidential use, with non-evidential verbs becoming increasingly rare in this string, while the full form remains firmly non-evidential. Fragmentary form thus has become an important marker for evidential (and, by extension, epistemic) function. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates cultural variation in the reception and evaluation of the same apology event. More specifically, it looks at how Will Smith's apology for slapping Chris Rock has been metadiscursively constructed in two sets of YouTube comments (310,998 tokens): the English comments to the original apology video and the Japanese comments to a second video, which is addressed to a Japanese audience and reports and translates the apology. Corpus(-assisted) methods are employed to examine the Meta-Illocutionary Expressions (MIEs) apolog ∗ and 謝罪 shazai 'apology'/謝∗ ayama ∗ 'apologise' in context and, more specifically: (1) their function; (2) the underlying evaluations they convey; and (3) the moral orders they appeal to. The reading of concordances showed that the MIEs are used to problematise or endorse the apology and that negative evaluations of Smith and his apology are more prominent in English. A closer look at the collocates revealed that apolog ∗ typically co-occurs with sincere to challenge the sincerity of the act. Conversely, shazai / ayama ∗ is associated with お互いに (o-) tagai (ni) 'reciprocal(ly)' to indicate that a reciprocal apology from Rock would be appropriate. This suggests that culture-specific moral orders play a role in the negotiation of what is (im)polite. • There is variability in the evaluations of the same apology by Japanese and American English speakers. • The moral orders that language users draw upon to warrant their evaluations of (im)politeness can vary. • When evaluating the apology, American users prioritise (in)sincerity, Japanese users prioritise reciprocity. • YouTube comments provide insights on lay perspectives on (im)politeness and can be used for cross-linguistic comparison. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

AbstractThis study, with research questions guided by the socio-ecological model, examined how ethnic minority older adults with limited English proficiency navigate cultural and language barriers in their daily lives, relationships, and healthcare interactions, and what challenges and strategies emerge in their efforts while living in the U.S. Individual in-depth interviews with Korean American older adults with limited English proficiency and chronic medical conditions (N = 12) were conducted over a 90-day period between November 2023 and January 2024. Using the thematic analysis technique of constant comparative method, data analysis identified 9 coping strategies, which were organized into four levels: (1) individual-level strategies (resilience in self-management); (2) family-level strategies (prioritizing family in health decisions, mitigating acculturative hurdles, and avoiding burdening family); (3) co-ethnic peer-level strategies (reciprocal information sharing and expectations of cohesion); and (4) community-level strategies (reliance on Korean-speaking healthcare providers, community services, and religious groups). The findings highlight the importance of culturally tailored services and balanced support from family, peers, and community organizations to ensure equitable healthcare access among older ethnic immigrants. Future research should explore in what ways these findings may apply to other ethnic immigrant groups in the U.S. in efforts to develop interventions toward improving health and social outcomes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In many languages of lowland South America, nominal, verbal, and adpositional/adverbial stems are divided into two large classes, relational and absolute, according to whether or not they demand a complement in a specific position, respectively. After proposing a working definition of relationality with wide cross-linguistic applicability, we offer a typology of the morphological devices that convert stems from either of these classes to the other, surveying various parameters for describing such relationalizing and absolutizing morphology (RAM). These include directionality, productivity, pervasiveness of relational lability, existence of suppletive pairs, relationality preservation in derivation, and the possibility of RAM stacking. We observe that restricted relational lability is a strong areal feature in Eastern South America. Finally, we discuss so-called contiguity inflection, a category that has been proposed for a number of South American languages, and show that it is epiphenomenal and can be decomposed into RAM and person inflection. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the semantic headedness of English blends with distributional semantics methods. The semantic head of a blend is the source word that transfers its semantic information to the blend as a whole. For example, a sitcom is a kind of comedy. But is FedEx a kind of express , and is wi-fi a kind of fidelity ? We use corpus data and token-based semantic vector space modeling in order to address these questions. Specifically, we investigate whether Plag's ternary division of endocentric, exocentric, and coordinative compounds based on semantic headedness can also be applied to English blends, and whether the general tendency of semantic right-headedness can be observed for all three subtypes. We analyze a dataset of fifty-five blends and their respective source words, using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the English Web Corpus 2021. We measure the degree of semantic similarity between each blend and its two source words. The results show that for most endocentric blends, the hypothesis of semantic right-headedness holds true. At the same time, exocentric blends and coordinative blends are shown to behave differently. We conclude that Plag's classification offers a useful point of departure for the semantic analysis of blends and that distributional semantics methods can provide new insights into their semantic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Bali is the name of an island and province with a long-standing association as the epitome of Indonesian exotic ‘paradise’ from books and literary works made by outsiders. However, while the existing studies about place names have proliferated, there is a scarcity of empirical studies in corpus linguistics that shed light on how adjectival collocations of the word Bali are developed from a diachronic perspective. Meanwhile, it is pivotal to gain a valuable source of reflections and insights into how the outside world perceives Bali. Motivated by the existing gaps, the study aims to scrutinise adjectival collocations and their developments and relevance to records of events, history, or significant events. The study employed quantitative and qualitative approaches to achieve these objectives. The quantitative approach was from the autogenerated frequencies of the adjectival collocations retrieved from three large corpora, i.e. the Corpus of Historical American English (COHA), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), and the News on the Web (NOW). Furthermore, the qualitative approach was required to describe the development of adjectival collocations. The findings denoted that the adjectival collocations of Bali evolved into more varied and complex adjectival collocations over the centuries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study explores the use of the meta-rethorical expression (MRE) understatement in the Corpus of American Soap Operas. The high frequency of the nominal form shows (fictional) speakers' and script-writers' awareness of and active engagement with the rhetorical concept. There are a minority of self-directed (the speaker's own utterance) versus a majority of other-directed uses (somebody else's utterance). MRE comments are to a large extent realised by a restricted number of five patterns, and show a narrow range of common modifying collocates, both of which may show conventionalized usage. The function of the MREs is to mark the utterance targeted as semantically too weak and to imply or explicitly provide a stronger version of it. Thus they show a critical and challenging attitude vis-à-vis the target statement and, in the case of other-directed instances, the other speaker. • Prominent meta-rhetorical use of nominal understatement in American TV soaps. • The semantic effect is to upgrade/strengthen the target statement. • Overwhelmingly used to criticize the statements of other speakers. • There is overlap with the problematizing function of meta-illocutionary expressions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideologies of language and race are deeply connected in the United States. Language practices associated with racially marginalized communities, such as African American Language (AAL) or Spanglish, are often heavily stigmatized. Such stigma is not grounded in empirical research on language, but rather in "raciolinguistic ideologies" that reproduce white supremacy and oppression in teacher education and in US classrooms—including science classrooms. Science education need not be this way, however. Translanguaging pedagogies can create space for students to use any and all types of languaging practices to engage in scientific sensemaking. Implementing translanguaging pedagogies to support scientific sensemaking will require science teachers to develop inclusive ideologies of language—not only the knowledge that multiple varieties of language are valid tools for sensemaking, but also the inclination and ability to formatively assess student thinking even when that thinking is not couched in canonical "science language." In the present manuscript, we explore the relationships among teachers' language ideologies, their racial ideologies, their knowledge of language as an epistemic tool for teaching science, their self‐reported assessment practices, and their actual responses to several different samples of student science writing—including a writing sample that includes an oft‐stigmatized feature of African American Language. We show that teachers with more language‐inclusive ideologies—that is, those who take a translanguaging stance, and thus value the use of AAL in classrooms—appear to be better at formatively assessing and responding to student science writing compared to teachers with more language‐exclusive ideologies. We also show that seemingly race‐neutral ideologies of language are in fact strongly associated with oppressive ideologies of race, and that these language ideologies predict teachers' science formative assessment practices independently of existing measures of pedagogical knowledge. We discuss implications for science teaching, teacher education, and science education research. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article aims to provide an in-depth comparative analysis of think over and consider through the British National Corpus (BNC), the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and ChatGPT. It is important to note that consider and think over exhibit identical patterns only in the magazine genre and the miscellaneous genre of the BNC, whereas they share the same pattern only in the newspaper genre of the COCA. This can be taken as confirming evidence that in the BNC, think over and consider are 28.57% the same, whereas in the COCA, they are 14.28% the same. Simply put, think over and consider exhibit a low similarity in the BNC and the COCA. A further point to note is that consider is most similar to think over in the newspaper genre of the BNC, whereas the former is the closest to the latter in the TV/movie genre of the COCA. This, in turn, implies that in the newspaper genre of the BNC and the TV/movie genre of the COCA, think over and consider exhibit the highest degree of similarity. It is also worth noting that the standard deviation of think over and consider clearly shows American speakers' preferences. Most importantly, 18 of 30 collocations of think over and consider are the same, which suggests that consider and think over share 60% of their collocations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While adolescent foundational skills interventions can be critical levers for reading improvement, district leaders, teachers, and researchers must make complex decisions about how to evaluate their effectiveness in context. In this discussion article, we explore three issues and tensions we experienced during a 2‐year research–practice partnership overhauling Tier II high school reading intervention practices in a district serving largely African American students. First, we discuss assessment and the challenges of using data and reading theory to simultaneously address system‐level and student‐level needs. Second, we share our process for choosing a curriculum and evaluating its effectiveness. Finally, we weigh how students' African American English may have been related to program implementation and foundational skills development. We share our takeaways to help practitioners and researchers seeking systematic foundational skills improvement across a district, especially districts like ours. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Droke Family Burial Ground in Bentonville, Arkansas, was explored archaeologically in 2000, resulting in the discovery of just three graves. Although a slight data set, the graves' material culture, location, and time range combine to offer enormous insight into key historical events and cultural trends of the mid-nineteenth century. Although two major nineteenth-century phenomena, the Beautification of Death Movement and the Upland South Cemetery tradition, were potential influences in its creation, the expedient founding of the burial ground and its abrupt abandonment was likely due to a third force – the upheaval of the Civil War. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Emotion can have a profound effect on language processing, and taboo words have been increasingly used in research as highly emotional, negatively valenced stimuli. However, because taboo words as a lexical category are socially constructed and semantically idiosyncratic, they may also have complex emotional characteristics. This complexity may not be fully considered by researchers using taboo words as research stimuli. This study gathered tabooness, humor, and arousal ratings to provide a resource for researchers to better understand the sources and characteristics of the strong emotions generated by taboo words. A total of 411 participants aged 18–83 were recruited via online platforms, and all participants rated the same 264 words on tabooness, humor, and arousal. Analyses indicated that tabooness and humor ratings were positively related to each other, and both were predicted by arousal ratings. The set of ratings included here provides a tool for researchers using taboo stimuli, and our findings highlight methodological considerations while broadening our understanding of the cognitive and linguistic nature of highly emotional language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Arab World English Journal is the property of Arab World English Journal 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.)

Copyright of Journal of Educational Practice & Research is the property of National Taipei University of Education 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.)

This study considers the complex history of the Jewish diaspora that may have led to either direct or indirect adoption of Yiddish loanwords into American English, standard Japanese, Argentinian Spanish, and regional variants of Polish. This corpus-lexicographic loanword analysis connects the number of Jews in various regions with the status and entrenchment of Yiddish loanwords in the languages in question. The noted, in some cases, indirectness of loanword adoption is believed to be caused by varying degrees of language contact. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This mixed methods study examined how a National Professional Development Grant project's first cohort (2018–2020) in the Midwest impacted mostly White and monolingual inservice teachers who work with emergent bilingual learners (EBLs). Two research questions (RQs) guided this study: RQ1: What were the inservice teachers English language ideologies and their confidence in teaching EBLs after they completed professional development on racially, linguistically, and culturally (RLC) responsive teaching mindsets and pedagogies? and RQ2: How did the inservice teachers respond to prompts about raciolinguistic ideologies and EBLs' use of Standard American English? Quantitative t‐tests and factor analyses on pre‐post teacher surveys were conducted to investigate RQ1. Qualitative open and axial analyses on teachers' reflections to prompts about language ideologies were completed for RQ2. Quantitative results revealed that a majority of the participating teachers reported improved confidence in developing RLC responsive teaching strategies for EBLs. At the same time, their reflections showed that they persisted in their deeply‐rooted raciolinguistic ideologies about English, even though they intended to acknowledge and appreciate EBLs' use of language varieties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigates the efficacy of ultrasound tongue imaging as a tool for training Korean learners of English in producing the American English retroflex /ɹ/. Due to the absence of a direct equivalent of /ɹ/ in Korean and the complex phonetic relationship between Korean and English liquid sounds, Korean learners often struggle with accurate production. In the experiment, nine Korean participants of intermediate-level proficiency were trained to produce American English retroflex /ɹ/. Ultrasound imaging was employed to provide real-time visual feedback on tongue movements, aiming to enhance the articulatory accuracy of both onset and coda variants. Participants underwent six training sessions over three weeks, and results revealed significant improvements in articulatory accuracy after the training, particularly in tongue tip elevation and dorsum lowering. Also, these improvements were sustained a month later, indicating effective generalization. This suggests that ultrasound feedback can successfully facilitate the learning of complex L2 sounds like the English retroflex /ɹ/. In addition, there was a notable asymmetry in the learning process between onset and coda retroflex allophones, with the coda variant ([ɹ]) being acquired more readily than the onset variant ([ɹ w]). This discrepancy is attributed to the greater phonetic dissimilarity between the Korean L1 [l] and the English L2 [ɹ] in coda positions, compared to the dissimilarity between [ɾ] and [ɹ w] in onset positions. This finding suggests that Korean learners are likely to acquire the coda variant earlier than the onset variant in their learning development of the English L2 retroflex. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study used a quasi-experimental cohort approach to investigate the impact of early academic interventions on rural students' academic college readiness as measured by indicators of science, mathematics, and English language proficiency in the United States. The program, delivered by a higher education institution, implemented a range of academic supports for students, including tutoring and in-class and after-school support by credentialed instructors, with the aim of preparing students for success in secondary and post-secondary educational experiences. The American College Testing (ACT) Aspire scores in science, mathematics, English language comprehension, and reading for a cohort of 8th-grade students in their second year of program participation (n = 100) were compared to the scores of a cohort of non-participants (n = 86) from the same school. Students who had participated in the program were significantly more likely than non-participants to meet college readiness benchmarks in all content areas and scored significantly higher than the non-program cohort in terms of their average percentile ranks. More research is needed to understand how particular interventions or combinations of interventions implemented in middle school impact students' college readiness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature is the property of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature Editorial Office 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.)

Copyright of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature is the property of Interdisciplinary Studies of Literature Editorial Office 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.)

This article reflects on the author's experience of creating and teaching a set of courses with North American themes within the academic discipline of idéhistoria, intellectual history, at a Swedish university. It stresses the value of an area studies approach for training students in "a researcher's way to see and work" within this discipline. The more courses with themes from the US (and Canada) become "American studies," the better they contribute to prepare students to think about past thought in a way that defines the task of idéhistoria (in the author's opinion), namely a strictly contextualist approach. The article offers some examples of this. The fact that much about the US is familiar to Swedish students creates opportunities to understand past thought historically by exploring contexts that gradually make apparently familiar things less familiar, thus allowing them to be understood in unfamiliar ways. The courses have also become exercises in linguistic and cultural translation from American English, as a language that is fairly familiar to most Swedish students becomes more complex in their perception, with meanings and bearings shifting in time and space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article analyzes the semantic headedness of English blends with distributional semantics methods. The semantic head of a blend is the source word that transfers its semantic information to the blend as a whole. For example, a sitcom is a kind of comedy. But is FedEx a kind of express , and is wi-fi a kind of fidelity ? We use corpus data and token-based semantic vector space modeling in order to address these questions. Specifically, we investigate whether Plag's ternary division of endocentric, exocentric, and coordinative compounds based on semantic headedness can also be applied to English blends, and whether the general tendency of semantic right-headedness can be observed for all three subtypes. We analyze a dataset of fifty-five blends and their respective source words, using data from the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the English Web Corpus 2021. We measure the degree of semantic similarity between each blend and its two source words. The results show that for most endocentric blends, the hypothesis of semantic right-headedness holds true. At the same time, exocentric blends and coordinative blends are shown to behave differently. We conclude that Plag's classification offers a useful point of departure for the semantic analysis of blends and that distributional semantics methods can provide new insights into their semantic behavior. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper reports on the findings of a contrastive study exploring the frequency of the use of formulas against the evil eye. It also explores the different categories of compliment responses. The subjects are 100 female and male native speakers of Jordanian Arabic and native speakers of American English. The data are elicited through a DCT that consists of 10 situations. Analysis of the data showed that formulaic expressions were used by native speakers of Jordanian Arabic and native speakers of American English to keep the evil eye away from the speakers. There were no significant differences between the female and male students in complimenting. The participants employed different types of compliment responses. The most frequent category was to accept compliments. A future study is recommended to examine the similarities and differences between the compliments used by teachers and students using online classes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Very little work has been done on Lesotho English. The aim of this study was to advance the literature on southern African English by exploring the influence of American English and British English on Lesotho English. Using data obtained from 45 speakers of Lesotho English who were selected using purposive sampling, the study compared the ways in which the two varieties have influenced the structure of Lesotho English and the way in which speakers of Lesotho English perceive its identity. To collect the data, the study employed a questionnaire, and to analyse the data, the study employed a qualitative analysis that included the use of descriptive statistics. The findings show that none of the respondents used the term 'American English' as the name of the variety spoken in Lesotho, with the significant majority (69%) naming it 'British/UK English', which indicates a strong influence of British English on how the respondents view the identity of Lesotho English. However, the results for the influence of the two varieties on the structure of Lesotho English as spoken by the respondents showed that American English has slightly more influence than British English. These findings have implications for the teaching and use of English in Lesotho, the major one being that the influence of American English may complicate English learning, since British English has traditionally served as a model for 'correct English' that provides norms in the teaching and learning of English in the country. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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]

Introduction: Teaching English as a foreign language (EFL) to Deaf and hard-of-hearing (DHH) students is regarded as a major challenge.The aim of the study is to examine the perspectives of DHH students regarding their experiences in the EFL classroom. Methods: Utilizing a qualitative design, semi-structured interviews were conducted with 17 former DHH students who learned English at German schools for the DHH. Results: The findings reveal various language combinations within the EFL classroom, which entirely depend on the teacher. Several critical aspects of the EFL classes were highlighted, including the insufficient foreign sign language competences of teachers, the juxtaposition of German Sign Language (DGS) signs and spoken English, and the lack of Deaf cultural content and awareness in the teaching. Additionally, the absence of interactive engagement in the EFL classroom was noted as a significant issue. Based on the DHH students' EFL learning experiences, both English and American Sign Language (ASL) served as foreign languages for young DHH individuals, particularly in the context of international communication and social media engagement. Discussion: This study underscores the importance of integrating ASL into EFL classrooms to better support DHH students' language learning needs. The findings highlight the critical role of teacher training in ASL and the necessity for standardized approaches to EFL instruction. By aligning teaching practices with students' lived experiences and incorporating sign language, educators can foster more inclusive, effective learning environments that not only enhance academic success but also affirm students' identities and rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on diachronic and synchronic collexeme analyses, this paper investigated preferences of interpersonal metaphor of modality, which is realized by explicit subjective orientation, explicit objective orientation and implicit objective orientation, in academic disciplines of Corpus of Contemporary American English or COCA. The findings demonstrate that explicit subjective orientation is generally avoided by academic writers in later phases of COCA and more rarely used in natural sciences than in social and human sciences. Explicit objective orientation that denotes low modal value of probability, i.e., possible, and median value of obligation, i.e., important and necessary, is insensitive to both three phases and academic disciplines in COCA. Implicit objective orientation, inclusive of significantly attracted possibility and importance, employs probability and obligation that denote median value of probability and high value of obligation respectively to mask the subjective judgments of scholars regarding the proposition under scrutiny. This research is significant in shedding light on the use of interpersonal metaphor of modality in academic writings across disciplines. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the evaluation of males and females in the Corpus of Historical American English within three registers – Fiction, Newspapers, and Non-fiction – spanning the late-nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The aim is to fill a gap there remains in our understanding of how males and females are evaluated in American English across different communicative settings (registers) and historical periods. For this purpose, the study explores gender-specific personality traits, societal importance, physical appearance, appeal, and capacity via linguistic features such as male and female terms, pronoun usage, and adjectives. The results reveal significant differences in the frequency and nature of gender evaluation: while men are consistently evaluated more frequently than women, there are nuanced variations in gender evaluation patterns over time and across communicative settings. The increase in female evaluation towards the late twentieth century seems to correlate with societal changes such as the women’s rights movement and shifting gender norms during this period. The analysis also underscores the significance of linguistic registers in shaping gender evaluation, with, for instance, Fiction displaying less pronounced gender differences compared to Newspapers and Non-fiction. Overall, the findings underscore the complex interplay between language, registers, and sociocultural changes in shaping gender evaluation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines links between perfect rhymes and text readability and decoding using a measure of English rhymes called the Perfect Rhymes Dictionary (PeRDict). PeRDict is based on the Carnegie Mellon University Pronouncing Dictionary (the CMUdict) and provides rhyme counts for ∼48,000 words in English and for the most frequent 1,000, 2,500, 5,000, and 10,000 rhymes within the dictionary as measured by the Corpus of American English (COCA). Two assessments of PeRDICT are presented. The first examines the strength of rhyme features to predict text readability in conjunction with word neighborhood density effects reported by the English Lexicon Project (ELP) and a word frequency measure. The second examines the strength of rhyme features to predict word decoding in conjunction with word neighborhood effects and a word frequency measure. In both assessments, the number of rhymes per word was predictive of text or word processing beyond features related to word neighborhood effects and word frequency. Word rhyme counts performed more strongly in predicting text processing versus word processing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A consistent pattern emerges where African American students' scores lag behind their counterparts on both national and state literacy assessments. One possible explanation is rooted in the fact that approximately 80% of African American students speak African American English, which differs from the General American English, the language expected to be used within educational settings. African American English encompasses distinct phonological and grammatical (morphosyntactic) features compared to General American English. This paper aims to delineate the differences between these two languages, review research on African American English, and explore the prevalence of bidialectal or multidialectal abilities among African American students. Additionally, it will address research indicating that many teachers and teacher educators lack awareness of African American English, leading to a deficit-oriented perspective that views African American English as a linguistic deficiency rather than a linguistic difference. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The study investigates the acquisition of telicity in L2 English by L1 Slovak speakers as a function of L2 proficiency (measured by a cloze test score), exposure (operationalized as length of stay in an English-speaking country) and instruction type (monolingual vs. bilingual). Telicity judgments were collected from Slovak learners of L2 English (n = 50) and a control group of American English native speakers (n = 15) in two offline acceptability judgment tasks. Two types of telicity encoding were examined: (1) the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which involves processes in narrow syntax; and (2) the contribution of adverbial modifiers to telicity interpretations, including coercion contexts, which involve processes of aspectual reinterpretation. Based on previous research, it was hypothesized that the contribution of the [±quantized] feature of the object argument to predicate telicity, which is a syntactic phenomenon, will be easier to acquire than aspectual coercion by means of adverbial modifiers, which relies on pragmatic cues. The results indicate that the most significant predictor of telicity judgments based on syntactic cues is L2 proficiency, while length of stay affects telicity judgments in predicate categories involving coercion contexts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This research aims to compare the linguistic characteristics of Middle Eastern English with British and American English in the context of YouTube. For this purpose, the theoretical framework adopted is Biber's Multidimensional Analysis, in which Middle Eastern English is compared with British and American English regarding language usage features. To do so, the present study considers a purposive sample of 40 YouTube videos with speakers from the Middle East, Britain, and America. The methodology entails the use of a wellplanned and structured process to assess the various aspects of the language of spoken English in the videos. In the particular concern of this study, the emphasis lies on comparing Middle Eastern English and its relation to British and American English on YouTube. Specifically, the comparative analysis identifies the differences in the linguistic features due to cultural, social, and contextual factors in Middle Eastern English. Based on the findings, Middle Eastern English differs from British and American English because it is more argumentative, less abstract, less situation-bound, and less narrative. Consequently, the results of this study help analyze the current state of change in English varieties on social media and reveal the sociolinguistic aspects of the English language in relation to the video-sharing site YouTube. The study elicits a rather complex picture of how linguistic diversity comes into play with regard to the integrated and interconnected nature of today's cyberspace communication. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Variability in speech pronunciation is widely observed across different linguistic backgrounds, which impacts modern automatic speech recognition performance. Here, we evaluate the performance of a self-supervised speech model in phoneme recognition using direct articulatory evidence. Findings indicate significant differences in phoneme recognition, especially in front vowels, between American English and Indian English speakers. To gain a deeper understanding of these differences, we conduct real-time MRI-based articulatory analysis, revealing distinct velar region patterns during the production of specific front vowels. This underscores the need to deepen the scientific understanding of self-supervised speech model variances to advance robust and inclusive speech technology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Notwithstanding a body of research examining the way names are associated with the perception and treatment of individuals across social contexts, scant attention has been paid to the study of names in language attitudes research. This study explores American English listeners’ evaluative reactions to standard American and Spanish-accented English when exposed to a name indexing ethnic affiliation (White or Latinx). Participants listened to recordings and rated them along the dimensions of status and solidarity, and perceived accentedness. Additionally, listeners’ expectations about name–accent pairings were measured, and responses about how they reasoned these expectations were also collected and analysed thematically. The results showed that, overall, standard American English was more positively evaluated for status, but not solidarity, than Spanish-accented English. Relatedly, although names were not associated with solidarity or accentedness, there was an effect in which speakers paired with Latinx names were attributed higher status when compared to a control group (audio only). Furthermore, name–accent pairings were a reliable predictor of the valence of listeners’ expectations, which the thematic analysis revealed were underpinned by ideologies of nativeness, raciolinguistic ideologies and ideologies of goodness-of-fit. These findings underscore the importance of exploring other non-verbal cues such as names to better understand listeners’ language attitudes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An unquestionable characteristic of English modals is ambiguity. The particular modal flavors they receive are highly dependent on contexts, both linguistic (co-text) and non-linguistic (Hacquard 2006, Kratzer 1991, Szymański 2019). An account for this has been proposed by Kratzer (1991). In her model of the semantic field of modal expressions, Kratzer (1991) refers to the contextual factors that influence modal readings as conversational backgrounds. She draws a clear distinction between primary conversational backgrounds, i.e. modal bases, and secondary conversational backgrounds, i.e. ordering sources. The former are either circumstantial or epistemic. The latter impose an ordering on the possible worlds available in the context of a given proposition. The present study uses authentic language examples with the English modal must excerpted from The Corpus of Contemporary American English and demonstrates that there are frequently more than one ordering source in operation. Moreover, these ordering sources co-exist and intertwine, which makes their borders fuzzy. The study concludes that it may not be enough to take the context of an utterance into account, but it is also necessary to consider potential speaker's reasoning, which we can only guess. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In English, -ly suffixation of stative adjectival bases has been considered to be blocked since a dynamic interpretation of the resulting -ly adverb is not possible. However, this suffixation is different in subject-related -ly adverbs, i.e., subject-oriented adverbs that only retain the predicative meaning. Based on the analysis of 52,203 occurrences extracted by lemma from the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and with the support of Old and Middle English data obtained from relevant historical dictionaries and corpora, this paper provides a synchronic and diachronic perspective and analysis of stative adjectival bases that allow -ly suffixation. Our qualitative and quantitative analysis establishes both relevant conditions, such as the semantic features -CONTROL and +TEMPORARY, and, conversely, irrelevant conditions, such as the syntactic structure of the verb phrase, for stative adjectival bases to take the suffix -ly. This type of derivational behaviour is thus shown to appear in a specific type of adjectival bases, namely uncontrollable temporal stative adjectives, which are more liable to be used in specific registers, i.e., fiction. In addition, these results provide new evidence for the classification of -ly adverbs within the adjective/adverb interface. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Types of ideational metaphor in English considered in this research incorporate nominalization, verbalization, and adjectivization. Previous studies particularly highlighted functions of nominalization, leaving the other types of ideational metaphor unconsidered; in addition, expressions of ideational metaphor are not carefully selected while exploring the functions realized by these expressions. Against this backdrop, functions of ideational metaphor uncovered in previous studies are insufficient of coverage and typicality. Drawing on COCA in this research, a corpus of typical American English, expressions of the three types of ideational metaphor with significant attraction by means of the simple collexeme analysis are employed to analyze the functions that these metaphorical expressions actually realize in their linguistic contexts. The findings demonstrated that expressions of ideational metaphor could realize such interpersonal functions as authoritativeness and objectivity, such ideational functions as conciseness, abstractness, ambiguity, and semantic condensation, and such textual functions as formality and cohesion. Explanations to these realized functions of ideational metaphor are also provided. This research is of great significance in that the documented functions are typical and representative of ideational metaphor in English. Plain Language Summary: Functions of ideational metaphor Drawing on COCA in this research, a corpus of typical American English, expressions of the three types of ideational metaphor with significant attraction by means of the simple collexeme analysis are employed to analyze the functions that these metaphorical expressions actually realize in their linguistic contexts. The findings demonstrated that expressions of ideational metaphor could realize such interpersonal functions as authoritativeness and objectivity, such ideational functions as conciseness, abstractness, ambiguity, and semantic condensation, and such textual functions as formality and cohesion. Explanations to these realized functions of ideational metaphor are also provided. This research is of great significance in that the documented functions are typical and representative of ideational metaphor in English. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study takes the English concessive conditional construction " Just Because X Doesn't Mean Y " (JBX-DMY) as its object, extracts instances from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), applies Simple Collostructional Analysis to the representative collexemes, and investigates the experiential and conceptual characteristics of this construction from the perspective of cognitive construal in order to explain the source and mechanism of polysemy. Dividing JBX-DMY into two parts, this study analyzes ways of construal, vantage points and viewing arrangement under the dimension of cognitive construal. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Vowels vary in their acoustic similarity across regional dialects of American English, such that some vowels are more similar to one another in some dialects than others. Acoustic vowel distance measures typically evaluate vowel similarity at a discrete time point, resulting in distance estimates that may not fully capture vowel similarity in formant trajectory dynamics. In the current study, language and accent distance measures, which evaluate acoustic distances between talkers over time, were applied to the evaluation of vowel category similarity within talkers. These vowel category distances were then compared across dialects, and their utility in capturing predicted patterns of regional dialect variation in American English was examined. Dynamic time warping of mel-frequency cepstral coefficients was used to assess acoustic distance across the frequency spectrum and captured predicted Southern American English vowel similarity. Root-mean-square distance and generalized additive mixed models were used to assess acoustic distance for selected formant trajectories and captured predicted Southern, New England, and Northern American English vowel similarity. Generalized additive mixed models captured the most predicted variation, but, unlike the other measures, do not return a single acoustic distance value. All three measures are potentially useful for understanding variation in vowel category similarity across dialects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We draw from 102 interviews with American and English adults who attended the 2019 Women's World Cup to examine how fans perceive women footballers as 'role models', with attention to the operations of gender ideology. Despite the recent professionalization and commercialization of women's football, there is a dearth of research on fan perspectives of players as role models. Our findings show that most fans perceive role modelling as women's accessibility and authenticity in interaction. Fans naturalize women's often uncompensated labor as role models through a supposed love for their sport and desire to see its future growth, endorsing a gender essentialist view of women as notably caring and giving in comparison to men. However, a minority of fans embrace a more critical view by identifying role modelling as an expectation placed disproportionately on women within an already unequal resource environment. We conclude that role modelling is a gendered expectation for elite women footballers and that fans can be a source of pressure towards its enactment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The success of teaching and learning English largely depends on language teachers. In addition to their technical and pedagogical expertise, the teachers' proficiency in several languages is crucial in ensuring that learners acquire English to the greatest extent possible. Filipino English teachers vary in terms of their experiences in teaching English in nations where it is used as a foreign language (EFL), English as a second language (ESL), or English as a native language (ENL), especially when it comes to using the English variety in the classroom. The study aims to determine Filipino teachers' teaching experiences and perceptions of using English varieties in teaching in the ENL/ESL/EFL countries. This qualitative study employs the case study design and follows Kachru's Three Concentric Circles Model. Three Filipino teachers were chosen as participants using purposive sampling were selected according to the following criteria: Filipino female teachers who are teaching English to middle/junior high school in ENL, ESL, and EFL countries only, ages ranged from 25-45, with Masters degree related to their field of teaching, and has taught English for more than two years. The research questionnaire, one-on-one interview, and focus-group discussion were used to collect relevant data about the study. The direct transcriptions from the audio recordings of the individual interviews were subjected to data processing using Creswell's Thematic Analysis. The study's findings showed that the use of different English varieties is intimately related to the linguistic society's dominant language and the primary teaching objectives. Although teachers consider American English the mainstream variation, it is evident that all three linguistic groups also utilize the local varieties of English. It also showed that their beliefs on using different forms of English in the classroom were primarily based on functionality, proximity, inclusivity and awareness, and propensity for comprehension. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We aimed to explore the most and least used strategies of apology responses, as well as the differences between native and non-native speakers of English in formulating such responses. Additionally, we investigated the role of gender in the formulation of apology responses. The participants were 100 native and non-native speakers of English at an American university, who had to respond to two volunteers' apologies for blocking their path. The results regarding both genders indicate that the acceptance strategy was used the most frequently, while the evasion strategy was least used. Moreover, native speakers used more words than their non-native speaker counterparts. Furthermore, the syntactic structures of non-native speakers' apology responses were less sophisticated than those of native speakers. In terms of gender differences, men utilized the acceptance strategy more frequently than did women, whereas women showed a higher tendency to use the rejection strategy. Finally, the average number of words used by women in apology responses aimed at non-native and native speakers differed significantly, whereas this was not significant in the case of men. Based on our results, teachers and students should pay more attention to pragmatic competency learning in addition to conventional learning. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The interest in the phraseological nature of language has generated numerous studies on phraseology in various genres. The current study focuses on key phrase frames in business management research article discussions. Key phrase frames are recurrent phraseological expressions with a variable slot and are specific to the studied context, such as genre or discipline. The analysis is based on a corpus of research article discussions extracted from six leading business management journals published between 2017 and 2021. Four-word phrase frames in the corpus were identified using the KfNgram program and refined based on exclusion criteria to generate a list of phrase frames that were then compared with the Corpus of Contemporary American English. This comparison yielded a total of 63 four-word key phrase frames in business management, which were analysed following Biber and Gray's (2013) structural classification and Simpson-Vlach and Ellis's (2010) functional taxonomy. In terms of structure, most key phrase frames were found to be non-verb content word frames, while functionally, most served referential discourse functions. The results suggest that phraseological variation in business management is associated with both lexical and grammatical constructions. These findings are crucial as they have implications for discipline-specific academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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The article "Each One Can't Just Teach One" by Amy Pickard from Indiana University discusses the challenges faced by adult literacy learners in education programs. The text highlights the struggles of learners like Daryl, who face difficulties in making progress due to inadequate teacher preparation and lack of evidence-based instructional approaches. The article calls for improvements in teacher training, ongoing support for tutors, and the incorporation of research-informed strategies in reading instruction to better serve adult literacy learners. Additionally, the text suggests addressing policy constraints, expanding data collection on adult literacy, and enhancing the research base to improve adult literacy education programs. [Extracted from the article]

Scientific methods have evolved over the past three centuries, and modern trends are oriented toward evidence-based medical science. Humans, as researchers, no longer use primarily observational and descriptive methods to study the processes around them but rely on their participation and influence. In the case of health care professionals, practice-oriented paradigms require not only natural but also experimental research methods. At the core of nursing and midwifery is the care for the healthy and the ailing individuals, which requires in-depth knowledge in various medical and social-humanitarian disciplines. In line with technological and informational progress, the requirements for the type and quality of health care increase. The scientific methods used in nursing science are diverse and correspond to those of other medical fields - quantitative, qualitative and mixed. The founder of nursing research and one of the pioneers in medical quality science is Florence Nightingale. The road to building scientific research in nursing faced many challenges in the beginning but experienced a significant upsurge after the middle of the last century. The founders were the North American and English nurses and midwives and their associations. Gradually, the enthusiasm is transferred to European and Asian countries, which in recent years have proven a significant contribution to the development of nursing science and methodology. Research in the field of health care professionals has a dual significance. On the one hand, it is a mandatory step for the acquisition of new knowledge, skills and approaches in a theoretical aspect, and on the other, it has an evidential and educational role for practicing specialists. The current scientific and research activity in Bulgaria is a new phenomenon but with a positive development trend. Healthcare professionals are the main driving force behind supporting research and evidence-based practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While a large body of work in sentence comprehension has explored how different types of linguistic information are used to guide syntactic parsing, less is known about the effect of discourse structure. This study investigates this question, focusing on the main and subordinate discourse contrast manifested in the distinction between restrictive relative clauses (RRCs) and appositive relative clauses (ARCs) in American English. In three self‐paced reading experiments, we examined whether both RRCs and ARCs interfere with the matrix clause content and give rise to the agreement attraction effect. While the standard attraction effect was consistently observed in the baseline RRC structures, the effect varied in the ARC structures. These results collectively suggest that discourse structure indeed constrains syntactic dependency resolution. Most importantly, we argue that what is at stake is not the static discourse structure properties at the global sentence level. Instead, attention should be given to the incremental update of the discourse structure in terms of which discourse questions are active at any given moment of a discourse. The current findings have implications for understanding the way discourse structure, specifically the active state of discourse questions, constrains memory retrieval. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The widespread applications of emotion recognition (ER) in various fields have recently attracted much attention from researchers. Consequently, an array of advanced techniques has emerged, driven by enhancing the accuracy and robustness of these recognition systems. As emotional dialogue comprises sound and spoken content, the proposed model encodes the information from audio and text sequences using two separate channels and merges them for emotional classification. The two channels used inputs from audio and text modalities. The audio channel is encoded using a deep convolutional neural network with residual connections and further transformed using a self-attention-based multihead attention network called channel-wise global head pooling. Unlike the vanilla multihead attention network, an adaptive global pooling is used after concatenating all the heads. The text channel is encoded using a pre-trained BERT model. The proposed ER method is validated on four benchmark databases: Interactive Emotional Dyadic Motion Capture in English, the Berlin emotional speech dataset in the German language, Ryerson Audio-Visual Database of Emotional Speech and Song in North American English and Crowd-sourced Emotional Multimodal Actors Dataset in English. The classification accuracy on the above emotional corpora is 85.71%, 79.52%, 76.71% and 73.91%, respectively. Furthermore, cross-corpus analysis is presented to understand the variability of speech and text features and the robustness of the proposed architecture. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]