This paper examines recent lexical expansion in New Zealand Sign Language (NZSL) in the context of change in the status of the language and ongoing contact with other (spoken and signed) languages. We categorised 917 new signs documented in the past five years according to their source, semantic field, and sign formation mechanism(s), both…

Despite extensive research on assessing collocational knowledge, valid measures of academic collocations remain elusive. With the present study, we employ an argument-based approach to validate two Academic Collocation Tests (ACTs) that assess the ability to recognize and produce academic collocations (i.e., two-word units such as "key…

Lexical bundles are recurrent multiword combinations and often function as discourse building blocks. Lexical bundles have been analysed in university students' writing to detect linguistic errors, measure writing competence, and investigate the divergence between L1 and L2 writing. Few studies, however, have focused on the high-stakes genre of…

Where has all the hilarity gone -- and, with it, the ethics of the dark? In this article, I engage with our metaphysical entities of darkness (in Maori, Te Po) and nothingness (Te Kore). Undermining and re-declaring (only to un-declare once again) are more than just pleasurable exercise for my own indigenous group -- Maori; they are ethical…

The research explores forms and function of variant tag questions (VTQs) in the native and non-native Englishes. For the said purpose, patterns of VTQs in Pakistani English are compared with two native (British and New Zealand) and two non-native (Indian and Singaporean) varieties. The components of the "International Corpus of English,"…

The present investigation focuses on first language (L1) and second language (L2) speakers' sensitivity to lexical fixedness and compositionality of Italian word combinations. Two studies explored language users' intuitions about three types of word combinations: free combinations, collocations, and idioms. In Study 1, Italian Verb+Noun…

Learning collocations is one of the most challenging aspects of language learning as there are literally hundreds of thousands of possibilities for combining words. Corpus consultation with concordancers has been recognized in the literature as an established way for language learners to study and explore collocations at their own pace and in…

CAN and COULD have multiple uses and multiple interpretations, which can be difficult for learners of English to understand. For example, the difference of "Can you help me?" and "Could you help me?" may go unnoticed to an English language learner, but a native speaker of English would recognise a difference in politeness. The…

Lexical bundles, recurrent multiword combinations in a register, are extremely common and important discourse building blocks in academic writing. An increasing number of studies have investigated lexical bundles in academic writing in recent years, but few studies have explored L2 learners' interpretations of their own bundle production,…

This article reports on a language learning system and a program designed to help students with academic vocabulary in the New Zealand university computer science department. The system is a learner-friendly corpus-based tool that allows students to look up lexico-grammatical patterns of a given word in academic writing. The program, based on a…

Adult second language (L2) learners have often been found to produce discourse that manifests limited and non-native-like use of multiword expressions. One explanation for this is that adult L2 learners are relatively unsuccessful (in the absence of pedagogic intervention) at transferring multiword expressions from input texts to their own output…