Little is known about the effect of pre-reading exposure on collocational learning. This study used eye-tracking and offline measures (form recall and recognition) to explore the effectiveness of pre-reading study and reading exposure on the processing and learning of novel collocations. Three learning conditions were evaluated: reading-only…

This study provides a multidimensional analysis of the structural and semantic peculiarities of phraseological units to identify the general, the similar, and the national-specific, which are different in terms of phraseological figurativeness. Most of the magical images and symbols became the basis of the symbolism of the numerals, which became…

When infants hear sentences containing unfamiliar words, are some language-world links (such as noun-object) more readily formed than others (verb-predicate)? We examined English learning 14-15-month-olds' capacity for linking referents in scenes with bisyllabic nonce utterances. Each of the two syllables referred either to the object's identity,…

Conspiracy theories (CTs) are spectacular narratives, widely spread, that pose societal threats. We test whether CTs might be linguistically creative products, which would facilitate their transmission and thereby account for their widespread popularity. We analyzed nominal compounds (e.g., "mind control," "carbon dioxide"; N =…

The availability of a first language translation equivalent (i.e., congruency) has repeatedly been shown to influence second-language collocation processing in decontextualized tasks. However, no study to date has examined how L2 speakers process congruent/incongruent collocations on-line in a real-world context. The present study aimed to fill…

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…

The meaning and emotional coloring of phraseology in the Tatar language may depend on the context and method of use. For example, the same phraseology may have different meanings and emotional connotations in different situations. In this study, we use a corpus provided by these researchers to analyze the expressions of emotions in the Tatar…

Data from whole-class discussions in Dutch upper primary school show that teachers occasionally explicitly take downgraded epistemic stances through epistemic disclaimers such as 'ik weet het niet' (English: "I don't know (it)"), which contrasts with their institutionally assigned epistemic authority. In the current study, we have…

Literary and linguistic patterns delineate structure and theme in many documents of the ancient Mediterranean world. In this dissertation, I utilize the Aeschylean tragedies of the "Persians" and the "Oresteia", the narratives of Genesis and Judges from the Hebrew Bible, and the New Testament narratives of the Gospel of Mark…

The purpose of this research is to explore three English synonyms, namely critical, serious, and crucial, with a particular focus on meanings, degrees of formality, collocations, and semantic preferences. Two dictionaries, namely the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online, as well as the Corpus…

Embodied cognition holds that one's body, actions, perceptions, and situations are integrated into the cognitive process and emphasizes the fact that sensorimotor systems play a role in language comprehension. Previous studies verified the embodied effect in literal language processing but few of them paid attention to metaphors in embodied…

Through consultations with the online version of the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (LDOCE) and the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA), this study focuses on distinguishing between the two synonymous verbs "restrict" and "constrain," both part of Coxhead's (2000) Academic Word List, in terms of formality…

Linguistic phenomena (e.g., words and syntactic structure) co-occur with a wide variety of meanings. These systematic correlations can help readers to interpret a text and create predictions about upcoming material. However, to what extent these correlations influence discourse processing is still unknown. We address this question by examining…

The article revisits the canonical (Dem>Num>A>N) and non-canonical (A>Dem>Num>N & Dem>A>Num>N) prenominal patterns in Mandarin Chinese, from the perspective of the Labeling Algorithm. It shows that the syntactic distribution of adjectives are different, depending on the attributive-predicative sources and the…

In this dissertation I investigate the Mandarin "you"-existential sentence. My focus is on its syntax. I also discuss in less detail some semantic peculiarity of the "you"-existential. I begin my investigation of the syntax of "you"-existentials by first looking into what they are not. To this end, I present five…