This study aims to investigate the distribution across genres and the collocation of three synonymous verbs "cease," "halt," and "stop." Data were drawn from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA). The results from the distribution across genres shed light on the degree of formality of each verb. The verb…

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and…

This article examines the use of prompt-based lexical collocations in opinion essays by Vietnamese English as a foreign language (EFL) students. Fifty second-year English majors at a Vietnamese university wrote 100 opinion essays on two topics as progress tests. The AntConc programme (Anthony, 2020) was employed to identify the frequencies of use…

Does language development drive language change? A common account of language change attributes the regularity of certain patterns to children's learning biases. The present study examines these predictions for change-in-progress in the use of "must" in Toronto English. Historically, modal verbs like "must" start with root…

Previous studies in the acquisition of clitic se in Spanish have focused on the syntactic processes needed to perform detransitivization. However, current approaches on event structure reveal that "se" encodes aspectual information which is crucial for its acquisition. We examine the use, intuition and interpretation of the aspectual…

This paper examines the usage frequency of phonetically reduced modals (i.e. "gonna," "wanna," "gotta") in Present-day English. It is assumed that in distinct sociolinguistic and discourse contexts, the use of reduced modals is dynamic. To collect the data, there are five corpora used in this study, "Corpus of…

The present study investigated the dominant verb-phrase structure and the semantic functions of the modal "must" in research papers. It also determined whether the modal "must" conforms to or deviates from the standard modal usage in American English. A total of 122 graduate research papers were analyzed. The findings revealed…

This study was designed to examine the differences between two world Englishes in an effort to add to the body of knowledge relative to world Englishes and cross-cultural communication. Specifically, select grammatical differences between a group of Filipino English language teachers and a Standard American English were examined. Differences…

Some results are reported of an investigation into the meanings of the English modal auxiliary verbs. The corpus consisted of the one million word Brown University corpus of American English and a matching Lancaster University corpus of British English. The three factors operative in the study were: (1) contextual features, that is, co-occurring…

This contribution investigates the frequency patterns of the modal verbs as they occur in the one-million-word corpus of Cameroon written English. An analysis of dominant senses of some of the modals is also attempted. I have used results and statistical figures from British and American English (as reported in studies such as Biber et al. 1999…

Discusses two basic areas of difference between British and American English, namely the complementation of certain participles and the complementation of certain verbs. Complementation after "concerned" and "interested" is illustrated by several examples taken from speech and from newspaper advertisements. (AMH)

A sentence such as "I am going to find the store" may be reduced to "I[ma]find the store." This reduction consists of a reduction of the auxiliary, changing "I am" to "I'm," and an adjunction of infinitival "to" onto "going" to derive "gonna." From there, "gonna" is…

Studies the quotative system of contemporary British and Canadian youth. Multivariate analysis of nearly 1300 quotative verbs demonstrates that the innovative form "be like" is productive in both Canada and Britain. Traditional quotatives such as "say,""go,""think" are used according to somewhat different…

In a sociohistorical variation analysis of verb inflection in Early Modern British and American English, corpus-based comparisons focus on several extralinguistic and linguistic factors that have influenced the choice of forms over successive periods of time. Contrary to customary theories of "colonial lag," the rate of change was faster…

"Done" occurs outside of the participle paradigm in several varieties of English particularly those associated currently or historically with the South. This feature is also found in Appalachian English. Grammatical classifications have been proposed, including that of quasi-modal, pre-verbal form, and adverb. None of the labelling…