The study aims to investigate the similarities and differences between nominal synonyms people and persons focusing on collocations and semantic preferences. The data are drawn from the Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English (online version) and the original British National Corpus. The results of the study demonstrate that the two nouns share…

The purpose of this research is to explore three English synonyms, namely critical, serious, and crucial, with a particular focus on meanings, degrees of formality, collocations, and semantic preferences. Two dictionaries, namely the Oxford Advanced Learner's Dictionary and the Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary online, as well as the Corpus…

Speakers display considerable variability in language use and representations: they may have different pronunciations of the same word, different intended meanings for the same phrases, and different sets of syntactic constraints in their internalized grammars. Comprehenders adapt to such variability by constantly updating their expectations for…

"A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor" (2024) upgrades ED628218 (ERIC) with labels and analysis and brings the work up to date to reflect language change at the speed of the internet, ChatGPT, social discord, and bloody wars. The dictionary identifies language used figuratively in everyday…

This research investigated three synonymous adjectives "perfect," "flawless," and "impeccable" in terms of meaning, degree of formality, collocations, and grammatical patterns. The three synonymous adjectives were scrutinized through the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The findings suggested that these…

This thesis investigates the choice between reflexive pronouns (e.g., "herself") and personal pronouns (e.g., "her") in the expression of subject coreference in English locative prepositional phrases. A persistent puzzle for syntactic theories of pronoun licensing, commonly known as binding theories, it has long been observed…

"A Dictionary and Thesaurus of Contemporary Figurative Language and Metaphor" (2023) upgrades ED619049 (ERIC) and finishes its work. The dictionary identifies language used figuratively in everyday contemporary English--to include the language of "inclusion & exclusion" and "contempo-speak"--along with its…

This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms "important" and "significant" concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American…

This research investigated the discursive construction of COVID-19 in WHO director general's discourse through the lens of corpus linguistics and critical discourse analysis. 255 speeches of the WHO director general were collected, forming a 234,149-words corpus. Collocations of 'COVID-19' were generated and analyzed in terms of the semantic…

"Hospital" can refer to a physical place or more figuratively to the people associated with it. Such place-for-institution metonyms are common in everyday language, but there remain several open questions in the literature regarding how they are processed. The goal of the current eyetracking experiments was to investigate how metonyms…

In this paper we analyze the semantic and pragmatic properties of a colloquial interrogative construction attested in European Spanish, which we label invariable "qué" questions (IQQs). In doing so, we contribute to the better understanding of a relatively understudied phenomenon in Spanish, given that IQQs have been mainly approached…

This article aims to propose a practical model for intra-lingual translation or "paraphrase" in another term. Paraphrase is a restatement of a text, rewording something written or spoken, especially to achieve greater clarity. This approach could help a troubled translator who is having issues translating a complex text into a receptor…

The goal of this study is to provide better empirical insight into the licensing conditions of a large set of NPIs in German so that they can be used as reliable diagnostics in future research on negation-related phenomena. Experiment 1 tests the acceptability of 60 NPIs under semantic operators that are expected to license superstrong, strong,…

This study aims to identify the cementing devices used in the Holy Qur'an, Al-Qasas Surah, in particular. Specific cementing devices appear to connect the phrases and clauses contextualized in the verses of this Surah. Three exegeses and three different translations of the meaning of the Holy Qur'an were referred to in this study for data…

The aim of this study is to shed light on the learnability regarding usages of three English articles ("a," "the" and zero) among Chinese EFL learners. To this end, three tasks were administered in a pool of 107 participants to examine the extent to which learners can accurately use articles across different semantic contexts…