While the idea of a named language as a separate and discrete identity is a political and social construct, in the cases of Sardinian and Asturian doubts over their respective 'languageness' have real material consequences, particularly in relation to language policy decisions at the state level. The Asturian example highlights how its lack of…

Automated alignment of transcriptions to audio files expedites the process of preparing data for acoustic analysis. Unfortunately, the benefits of auto-alignment have generally been available only to researchers studying majority languages, for which large corpora exist and for which acoustic models have been created by large-scale research…

This study compares English- and Korean-speaking university students' colloquial and mathematical discourses on the notion and practice of limit. There exists a lexical discontinuity in Korean with the word limit, since the mathematical word for limit is not commonly used as a colloquial word in Korean, unlike its use in English. This study…

This article contributes to the debate about the appropriate use of corpus data in language learning research. It focuses on frequencies of linguistic features in language use and their comparison across corpora. The majority of corpus-based second language acquisition studies employ a comparative design in which either one or more second language…

While tonal systems have typically been classified as "pitch accent" or "true tonal", there is growing evidence that systems instead have a variety of features which vary across languages, rather than falling into discrete categories. These category labels have been used widely in literature about the languages of New Guinea,…

Although Spanish and Italian voiced stops are similar in articulatory (place of articulation) and acoustic (prevoicing) terms, there are important contrasts associated with these sounds in each language that may affect second language (L2) learners' acquisition. Spanish maintains an allophonic alternation between word-initial voiced stops and…

Code-switching pedagogies do not consider that some features of African American Verbal Tradition (AVT) are rhetorically effective mainstream communication structures in academic writing. My research asserts that when teaching language/ dialect difference in majority white school settings, contrastive analysis techniques such as these may have…

Refusing is a common speech act; nonetheless people from different cultural backgrounds employ different refusal strategies. The present study compares refusal strategies used between native speakers of Javanese in Indonesia and native speakers of British English in the United Kingdom. Empirical data were elicited by means of discourse completion…

There is an ongoing debate whether phenomena of disfluency (such as filled pauses) are produced communicatively. Clark and Fox Tree ("Cognition" 84(1):73-111, 2002) propose that filled pauses are words, and that different forms signal different lengths of delay. This paper evaluates this Filler-As-Words hypothesis by analyzing the…

This dissertation is concerned with how elliptical sentences are generated. To be specific, I investigate when and in what module ellipsis occurs, and what is elided as a result of ellipsis. With regard to the first research question, I propose that XP ellipsis occurs as soon as all the featural requirements of the licensor of XP ellipsis are…

The aim of this paper is to find out the attitudes towards Geordie regional variety of English compared to Received Pronunciation (RP) among Turkish speakers of English. There is a recent trend in English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) studies which argue that there are different 'Englishes' and these Englishes have different attitude and prestige…

This article reports on a study investigating the role of scientific concepts in the metapragmatic awareness of Norwegian primary EFL learners following a four-week instructional intervention on requesting informed by sociocultural theory (Vygotsky, 2012/1934). Through introducing pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic dimensions of requesting, the…

A great deal of the research on cross-linguistic phonetic influence demonstrates that a speaker's knowledge of their first language (L1) significantly affects their ability to perceive and produce sounds in any other language. While current studies show that cross-linguistic transfer occurs at the L3 level, some research suggests that properties…

This dissertation explores dialect diversification in the long-distance New World Plautdietsch speech community. Plautdietsch dialects are traditionally classified as belonging to one of two types: either Chortitza or Molotschna. The traditional dialect classification has recently come under scrutiny because speakers rarely use features exclusive…

This article examines the diversity of sign language varieties used in Lima, Peru. The majority of the analysis is based on lexicostatistics, using data collected in 2014 to compare nine signers and to determine foreign influences. This technique is used to better understand the linguistic situation without the need for a large corpus of data. Two…