Situations of language contact are often the norm for sign languages. This article investigates a case of unimodal contact between Cena, a young sign language in its third generation that is used in a small rural community in Brazil, and Libras, the national sign language of Brazil. Our analysis concerns one by-product of this contact: reiterative…

Babu English is arguably one of the most popular varieties of Indian English and ironically the least studied too. An attempt to define the variety lands one in a mushy land of definitions that are untenable. It has been described variously by different scholars while German linguist Schuchardt classifies it as a pidgin, Kachru defines it as a…

The paper describes Saudi English morphosyntactic and lexical features that are widely practiced among educated Saudis, who completed at least nine years of English language study. The occurrence of the morphosyntactic features is argued to be affected by the speakers' contact to the native English. Those who are in direct contact with Standard…

This research investigates disciplinary variations using syntactic features in Pakistani academic writing (AW). The corpus of this research is developed from 160 dissertations across four disciplinary divisions and analyzed through AntConc. Results reveal heterogeneous and homogenous use of the said features. Heterogeneity is seen in relation to…

Purpose: This study sought to 1) identify linguistic features important for Chinese text complexity with a theory-based and systematic approach, and 2) address how feature sets and algorithms affect the performance of Chinese text complexity models. Method: Texts from Chinese language arts textbooks from Grades 1 to 6 (N = 1,478) in Mainland China…

Based on data from numerous languages, such as English, Frisian, and Danish, Merchant (2001) proposes the "preposition stranding generalization" (PSG), which states that only languages that allow preposition stranding under wh-movement also allow preposition stranding under sluicing. The availability of this generalization has been the…

The objectives of this study were to explore foreign tourists' responses to Thai English, a variety of English emerging in Thailand, in terms of comprehensibility, and to identify the linguistic features that made Thai English incomprehensible. One hundred international tourists in Bangkok from four regions including East Asia, Southeast Asia,…

We identify and propose an analysis in LFG of Gapping construction in Taif "Hijazi" Arabic (TA). Gapping occurs in a coordination structure where the initial conjunct is syntactically complete and the non-initial conjunct is incomplete. To my knowledge, there is no previous description or analysis of gapping in TA. There have been two…

This article examines the impact of social media on the linguistic and communicative practices in post-socialist countries, such as Bosnia and Herzegovina, Serbia, and Mongolia -- the contexts very much under-represented in the discussion of translingualism. Relocalisation of social media-based linguistic resources in the languages used in these…

Background and aims: Although autism spectrum disorder (ASD) has not traditionally been associated with morphosyntactic impairments, some children with ASD manifest significant difficulties in this domain. Sentence Repetition (SRep) tasks are highly reliable tools for detecting morphosyntactic impairment in different languages and across various…

Anchored on Labov's notion that some linguistic features may exhibit variants among speakers of the same language within the same community as well as on Parker and Riley's language variation theory, this inquiry which employs a qualitative-content [manifest] analysis assumes that "Surigaonon" exhibits some linguistic variations hence…

The study examined the relationship between children's explicit knowledge and awareness of diglossia (EKAD) and learning Arabic in school. Additionally, this study addresses the interrelationships between EKAD and oral comprehension, lexical, phonological, and morphosyntactic awareness upon the transition to reading to learn. Thirty typicaly…

Purpose: This study examines the development of narrative microstructure elements of productivity, lexical diversity, and syntactic complexity in the oral story production of preschool- and school-age Kuwaiti Arabic-speaking children. It also explores the effects of story task complexity on the target microstructural features. Method: This study…

In this paper, I provide an analysis of 'verbless' sentences in Arabic (mainly, the Standard variety, SA) in light of the claims of the feature-based probe-goal-Agree system of Chomsky (2001, 2004) and such assumptions as held by Biberauer et al. (2010) about probe-goal Agree relations being parameterized according to the feature-structure of…

Languages exhibit variation at all linguistic levels, from phonology, to the lexicon, to syntax. Importantly, that variation tends to be (at least partially) conditioned on some aspect of the social or linguistic context. When variation is unconditioned, language learners regularize it -- removing some or all variants, or conditioning variant use…