Underspecification and coercion are two prominent interpretive mechanisms to account for meaning variability beyond compositionality. While there is plentiful evidence that natural language meaning constitution exploits both mechanisms, it is an open issue whether a concrete phenomenon of meaning variability is an instance of underspecification or…

Computerized classification of student answers offers the possibility of instant feedback and improved learning. Open response (OR) questions provide greater insight into student thinking and understanding than more constrained multiple choice (MC) questions, but development of automated classifiers is more difficult, often requiring training a…

This essay describes the struggle to get one second grade reader who was in need of fluency practice to overcome his resistance to rereading familiar texts. This was done through the use of videos which were sent to parents on a weekly basis after the texts had been practiced several time with an eye toward all aspects of fluency--phrasing,…

This dissertation examines the interface between music and language in "Huju", which is a Shanghai dialect based regional opera. Chapter I is a short introduction. Chapter II presents a thorough review of the studies on linguistic tone and music tune, and provides descriptive background information about "Huju" and Shanghai…

This dissertation approaches the idea of lexical types such as word, clitic and affix from an oblique angle. Starting with Cardinaletti & Starke's (1999) diagnostics for the Weak Pronoun, I deconstruct the category of clitic, breaking it down into two binary qualities: the syntactic primitive of being linked to a head of a different basic…

This study aims at investigating the challenges that Yemeni translation students encounter when translating neologisms from English into Arabic. It also aims at comparing students' translation with outcomes of machine translation (MT). The authors follow the descriptive and comparative methods in conducting this study. To achieve the objective of…

Over the last few decades, it has become obligatory to publish academic research to survive in the academic world. In academic writing skill, lexical bundles (LBs) usage is marked as a master ability to build well-organized paragraphs or essays and are essential instruments to sound more natural and be fluent in English. The current study aimed to…

The study aims to investigate whether second language learners perform sentence processing based on syntactic or structure-based parsing strategies during real-time comprehension of constructions with syntactic ambiguities. To this end, the recordings of eye movements from Turkish learners of English and native English speakers as a control group…

The present study aimed to examine and validate a rubric for translation quality assessment using Rasch analysis. To this end, the researchers interviewed 20 expert translation instructors to identify the factors they consider important for assessing the quality of students' translation. Based on the specific commonalities found throughout the…

The use of relative pronouns is an intriguing topic for learners and teachers. The past two decades have witnessed exponential growth in research on the use of relative pronouns. However, little attention has been given to relativizer omission among nonnative speakers in writing. This research examined the distribution of zero relativizers and the…

This empirical study attempts to examine the use of cohesive devices in the written discourse of EFL undergraduate students and seeks to find how the use of incorrect and repetitive cohesive ties affects the effectiveness of academic writing. Halliday and Hasan's (1976) list of cohesive devices was employed to analyze the cohesion in the…

This study examined the relationship between oral fluency and use of multiword sequences (MWSs) across four proficiency levels (Low B1 to C1 of the Common European Framework of Reference). Data came from 56 learners taking the speaking test of the Test of English for Educational Purposes, and our analysis obtained different measures of fluency…

The article attempts to determine whether translation errors (in particular semantic and stylistic ones) in translator-training settings are predominantly the result of translation directionality, i.e. of the fact that the student translators are translating into their L2 and that their language competence in L2 is not as strong as in their L1, or…

In two sentence repetition experiments, we investigated whether four- and five-year-olds master distinct representations for intransitive verb classes by testing two syntactic analyses of unaccusatives (Burzio, 1986; Belletti, 1988). Under the assumption that, with unaccusatives, the partitive case of the postverbal argument is realized only on…

This corpus-based study investigates to what extent L1 Turkish speakers of English produce lexical bundles in their academic writing. To this end, a corpus of published research articles in six academic disciplines was collected. The corpus included one-million words in total. The four and five-word lexical bundles in the corpus were identified…