Subject-verb concord in English existential constructions is often viewed as problematic from both prescriptive and descriptive approaches to grammar and causes considerable confusion among teachers and learners of English as a second language (ESL). This paper aims to disentangle debates over the curious usage of the "there" + plural noun phrase…

This paper analyses the discourse of science through the study of collocational patterns of high frequency noun keywords in science textbooks used by upper secondary students in Malaysia. Research has shown that one of the areas of difficulty in science discourse concerns lexis, especially that of collocations. This paper describes a corpus-based…

Results of a study are presented that suggest the grammatical structures of English some deaf and hard of hearing students struggle to acquire. A review of the literature from the past 40 years is presented, exploring particular lexical and morphosyntactic areas in which deaf and hard of hearing children have traditionally exhibited difficulty.…

The scripts of 318 movies were analyzed in this study to determine the vocabulary size necessary to understand 95% and 98% of the words in movies. The movies consisted of 2,841,887 running words and had a total running time of 601 hours and 33 minutes. The movies were classified as either American or British, and then put into the following…

The fact that English non-count abstract nouns such as knowledge are compatible with the indefinite article a/an is not only perplexing for second language (L2) learners of English but also troublesome for both native and non-native English teachers. This paper does research on this curious phenomenon of English grammar to clarify its mechanism…

Studies from a range of disciplinary perspectives have highlighted how the public rhetoric of the Bush administration has shaped the representation of the conflict which has followed 9/11. However, the literature in this area raises but does not itself address the question of how the administration's use of "terror", "terrorism" and "terrorist(s)"…

Klin et al., 2004 and Levine et al., 2000 concluded that readers fail to resolve noun phrase anaphors when the antecedent is difficult to retrieve from memory and the inference is not necessary for comprehension. In four experiments we investigated the hypothesis that these inferences were actually partially encoded. Although the results of a…

Capitalization of all nouns has been the general German practice since the early 18th century. After 1945, the crisis of the German standard language, resulting from regional (dialectal) and foreign influences brought also intensive efforts for a controversial reform including decapitalization. Coordinated action for Germany, Switzerland, and…

Identifies the characteristics and functions of carrier nouns (such as "purpose"), including their function as countable abstract nouns, occurrence in "container" sentences, similarity to pronouns, and endophoric and exophoric references. Special focus is on ways that carrier nouns capture more than concepts. (19 references) (CB)

This article synthesizes research by applied linguists and mathematics educators to highlight the linguistic challenges of mathematics and suggest pedagogical practices to help learners in mathematics classrooms. The linguistic challenges include the multi-semiotic formations of mathematics, its dense noun phrases that participate in relational…

Investigates acquisition of noun-drop in Spanish. Indicates that rich agreement morphology is not a sufficient condition for noun-drop. Supports a model of the human language faculty in which points of syntactic variation are not fully reducible to the overt inflectional and declensional morphology. (Author/VWL)

Argues that the case-filter, essentially a morphological condition which determines the distribution of noun phrases, should be replaced. This new principle would relate morphological dependency of maximal lexical projections to a certain type of semantic dependency. (CB)

Demonstrates through statistical sampling that variability in the use of the so-called Spanish "personal a" can be explained by the importance of the role that marked nouns have in discourse and applies that notion to a case study from Hispanic literature. (CB)

Reports on analyses of stress patterns and syllable length for male names, female names, and English nouns, exploring such differences as female names having more syllables, female names typically beginning with unstressed syllables, and male names typically forming the unmarked case. (24 references) (CB)

In a recent study of conceptual combination, Estes (2003) presented evidence for the priming of relational information in the absence of shared constituents between the prime and target (e.g., "pancake spatula" was interpreted more quickly following "bacon tongs" than following "city riots"). He argued that these data support the view that…