Purpose: In 1963, Charles Van Riper published "My Grandfather," a short reading passage that has evolved into a ubiquitous metric of reading ability and speech intelligibility. In this historical note, we describe several heretofore unacknowledged similarities between "The Grandfather Passage" (Darley, Aronson, & Brown, 1975) and a portion of "The…

In this article, we reappraise the model of Discourse Analysis developed by Sinclair and Coulthard (1975) to analyse classroom talk. We analyse an extract of teacher-student dialogue using this model, then re-analyse the same extract drawing on conventions and concepts developed within the framework of Conversation Analysis. We argue that this…

Throughout history, preachers have used various models to understand the relationship between the preacher and the hearers of sermons. In recent years, homileticians have responded to the challenges of postmodernism by exploring the metaphor of conversation as a way to develop less hierarchical or authoritarian conceptions of role and authority.…

This dissertation is about what prosody contributes to dialogue interpretation. The view of prosody developed in this account is based on detailed quantitative investigations of the prosodic forms and interpretations of cue word and declarative responses, specifically with respect to the distribution and interpretation of terminal pitch rises.…

It is commonly assumed in the print media that bilingual young adults in Bangladesh are subjugated by the colonial legacy of English and they are "polluting" Bangla, the national language of Bangladesh, by their indiscriminate insertion of English in it. However, this ethnographic study on a group of young adults in a university in…

This paper explores how referent honorifics contribute to identity construction on a Japanese TV shopping channel program. Drawing on Ochs' twostep model of indexicality (1993, 1996) and Agah's proposal (1993) that honorifics are not directly linked to social status but index a "relative position within events of discursive interaction"…

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…

Although "wh"-words generally stay in situ in Chinese "wh"-questions, they can be topicalized. However, the "wh"-topicalization is determined at the syntax-discourse interface and has to be governed by discourse conditions; only discourse-linked (D-linked) "wh"-words can be topicalized, but non-D-linked ones cannot. This article reports on an…

This article explores the feelings of imposture that are sometimes experienced by multilingual subjects--learners of a language other than their own or users of multiple languages--and their difficulty of finding authentic or legitimate subject positions in a global world with fluid boundaries and uncertain categories of identity. It examines what…

Sarcasm, or sarcastic irony, involves expressing a message that is often opposite of the literal meaning of what is being said, in a way that may sound bitter, or caustic (Gibbs, 1986). In the past, sarcasm has been viewed as a method of introducing the possibility of alternative interpretations of a discourse, by creating ambiguity as to the…

This paper discusses the complex and competing language ideologies that Korean educational migrant families in Singapore hold about the normativity and legitimacy of English language varieties. During their educational migration in Singapore, Korean families show ambivalent attitudes toward the local variety of English in Singapore, Singlish.…

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…

Korean learners of the Japanese language and Japanese learners of the Korean language not only feel that it is easier to learn the respective foreign language, but also acquire Japanese and Korean faster than learners from other countries because of the grammatical similarity between Japanese and Korean. However, the similarity of grammatical…

This study seeks to examine variations in patterns of interactivity as they are displayed in the ongoing discourse construction of high and low self-efficacy learners of Spanish in the context of computer-mediated-communication. The paper specifically focuses on the analysis of synchronous text chats of six university students of Spanish at…

In the last 20 years, technological advancement and increased multidisciplinarity has expanded the range of data regarded as within the scope of languages for specific purposes (LSP) research and the means by which they can be analyzed. As a result, the analytical work of LSP researchers has developed from a narrow focus on specialist terminology…