The employment of genre-based pedagogy and Task-Based Language Teaching in second language education is representative of a paradigmatic shift towards a focus on meaning-making. Despite this shift, second language acquisition (SLA) research continues to predominantly rely on complexity, accuracy, and fluency metrics to assess learner production…

Multi-word sequences are important components of language because they are building blocks that can be used to create long stretches of discourse. They are word combinations that have particular importance because of their co-occurrence and function in discourse that suggest that they are stored and retrieved from memory as a whole rather than as…

Studies in English as a Foreign Language (EFL) indicate that the use of discourse markers (DMs) in the academic writing of second language learners improves the overall quality of these texts by contributing to their cohesion and comprehensibility (Saif Modhish 2012; Jalilifar 2008; Intaraprawat & Steffensen 1995). However, despite the…

The purpose of this study was to explore the linguistic architecture of instructional language used during first grade read aloud lessons. The participants were from the CTL Year-3 Read Aloud study. The study's random assignment created 20 teachers in the treatment group and 19 teachers in the control group. My study investigated the variability…

This dissertation uses a corpus of tokens retrieved from broadcast news stories and print news articles to examine the array of constructions used to encode stative predications in Modern Standard Arabic. A state is defined as a situation that includes its reference time, whether that time is encoding time or another time of orientation. A range…

The goal of this study is to characterize the temporal phenomena in the Korean conjunctive constructions. These constructions consist of three components: a verbal stem, a clause medial temporal suffix, and a clause terminal suffix. This study focuses on both the temporality of the terminal connective suffixes and the grammatical meanings of the…

The present dissertation extracted 17,291 questions from Aki, Ryo, and Tai and their mother's spontaneously produced speech data available in the CHILDES database (MacWhinney, 2000; Oshima-Takane & MacWhinney, 1998). The children's age ranged from 1;3 to 3;0. Their questions were coded for (1) yes/no questions that include a sentence-final…

This study of John 1:1-18 describes how John (the speaker) presented his message to his audience within their activity of verbal communication. By focusing on verbal meaning, this interpretation analyzes how John presented and expressed his meanings through language by interpreting this text based on the seamless interrelation between John's…

A Korean particle "-(n)un" is widely known as a topic and/or contrast marker. Despite this seemingly well-established view on the meaning/function of "-(n)un," however, its exact nature is far from clearly understood. The main purpose of this dissertation is to shed light on the meaning of "-(n)un," by looking at it…

This dissertation explores genitive class selection of genitive case subjects in nominalizations and relative clauses in Hawaiian. The amount of research in the area of Hawaiian's "a"- and "o"-class is far from sufficient. Since Wilson (1976a), there has been minimal critical new inquiry to "a"- and…

As the Greek verbal system has become the subject of various dissertations and monographs, the future tense-form has been generally overlooked in the discussion. This dissertation seeks to overcome this lacuna by suggesting that the future tense-form functions as a rhetorical feature that expresses the author's expectation of an alternative state…

Russian legal-administrative documents from the early fourteenth through the mid-seventeenth century (Middle Russian) show extensive variation in expressing possessivity within the noun phrase. Possessor expressions can be conveyed by morphologically derived possessive adjectives, adnominal genitives, or by combinations of those constructions…

The structure of Biblical Hebrew (BH) verse remains an open question today despite the extensive amount of investigation that the question has inspired. Much headway has been made in terms of describing the features and devices that find expression in BH verse, but little has been done to make a compelling and consistent distinction between BH…

Grammar in natural interaction is an emergent, dynamic and adaptive system that is consistently subject to change. It is understood as a collection of open multiple subsystems, each of which is activated as the language users recurrently participate in a particular linguistic, interactional and social activity. When a certain linguistic form or…

Morpho-syntactic features of Modern Standard Arabic mix intricately with those of Egyptian Colloquial Arabic in ordinary speech. I study the lexical, phonological and syntactic features of verb phrase morphemes and constituents in different tenses, aspects, moods. A corpus of over 3000 phrases was collected from religious, political/economic and…