In recent years corpus linguistics research findings have begun to trickle down into some student language learning texts, both in terms of the focus and the specific material taught. However, when it comes to writing pedagogy, the materials, templates and the models presented to students tend to show a remarkably conservative (and uniform)…

This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, "increase" and "rise," by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students. We explored the behavioural characteristics of this group of near-synonym verbs using the British…

Speakers typically design definite referring expressions to uniquely identify the intended referent with respect to the alternatives in the referential context, and addressees interpret these expressions with respect to the contextual alternatives. Although it is clear that the relevant context includes entities in the immediate context, less…

In the path of academic writing, authors accomplish certain interactions with their readers through the means of meta-discourse markers such as hedges and boosters. There have been many studies that dwell on the function of meta-discourse markers (Abdi, Rizi, & Tavakoli, 2010; Crismore, 1984; Hyland, 1999, 2000, 2001; Longo, 1994). However,…

A sample of political expressions that have been common in Arab media since the Arab Spring in 2011 was collected from TV newscasts, online news websites and social media pages. Analysis of their structure, denotative and connotative meanings revealed the following features: (i) Use of lexical hybrids ([foreign characters omitted]; (ii) revival of…

Focusing on noun phrase complexity in writing, this study adopted Biber, Gray and Poonpon's (2011) hypothesized developmental stages to investigate the academic writing of Thai and native English university students by comparing their argumentative English essays as concerns their usage of noun modification. Prenominal modifiers and postnominal…

This paper investigates the use of lexical bundles in Chinese students' academic writing across different levels of studies at an English medium university. Frequency-based bundles were retrieved from a corpus of student academic texts written at four points of time between Year 1 and Year 4, and the structures and functions of the bundles were…

Corpus linguistics identifies the qualitative difference in the characteristics of spoken discourse vs. written academic discourse. Whereas spoken discourse makes greater use of finite dependent clauses functioning as constituents in other clauses, written academic discourse incorporates noun phrase constituents and complex phrases. This claim can…

Theories of reference assume that the referent's salience in the discourse context affects the choice between pronouns and definite noun phrases or names. We examined whether and how the referent's inherent properties affect the choice of expressions by investigating animacy. Experiment 1 showed that pronouns were more frequent for animates than…

This article examines how Boalian Theatre of the Oppressed exercises helped instructors and pre-service teachers navigate the consequences of ventriloquized, racialized discourses in a pre-service world language teacher education classroom. Applying a critical and performative approach, we analyse the mostly White student-actors' varying…

The process of writing journal articles is increasingly being seen as a collaborative process, especially where the authors are English as an Additional Language (EAL) academics. This study examines the changes made in terms of register to EAL writers' journal articles by a native-speaker writing centre advisor at a private university in Turkey.…

This paper reports a textual analysis of letters written by 21 male and 21 female participants in Persian. Each writer wrote two letters, one to a dating service and another one to a hypothetical person chosen and introduced by the center. Therefore, a total of 84 letters were collected from the participants. Schema theory was used to find the…

Research has shown that the comprehension of definite referring expressions (e.g., "the triangle") tends to be faster for "given" (previously mentioned) referents, compared with new referents. This has been attributed to the presence of given information in the consciousness of discourse participants (e.g., Chafe, 1994) suggesting that given is…

This study examined Korean English as a foreign language (EFL) learners' ability to establish textual cohesion in English through appropriate selection of reference forms and reference management strategies in their written narrative discourse. It employed both quantitative and qualitative analysis to explore how the language-specific reference…

The paper examines the nominal lexicon in later language acquisition as a window on linguistic knowledge and usage across childhood and adolescence. The paper presents a psycholinguistically motivated and cognitively grounded analysis of the distribution of ten semantic noun categories (the Noun Scale) across development, modality, and genre.…