Phonological field work is largely about establishing contrast in comparable environments. The notion of phonological contrast, however, can be confusing, particularly in its application to tone analysis. Does it mean phonemic contrast in the structuralist sense, or does it mean underlying contrast in the generative sense? Many linguists, in…

Tracey Derwing and Ron Thomson reflect on the growth of Canadian L2 pronunciation research from the early 1990s onward. Although many phoneticians and language educators called for pronunciation instruction (PI) for decades, in the early 1980s little empirical research existed to inform pronunciation pedagogy, despite an influx of Vietnamese…

This article considers the circuitous route of knowledge exchange from South (New Zealand)-to North (Finland)-to regional South (Estonia) by examining the development of Võro language nests ("keelepesä") in Estonia. Language nests reflect the global nature of educational knowledge exchange as well as the importance of networks of…

Instructed second-language acquisition (ISLA) research endeavours to make positive changes in pedagogical practices. In this regard, there is a recent debate concerning whether teachers are (or should be) willing to engage with research. To investigate the research-pedagogy link, the current case study conducted interviews with 12 EFL teachers in…

This paper presents a story of applied linguistics from my personal vantage point as a multilingual scholar whose career began outside the centers of research and scholarship. The article explains the assumptions and practices characterizing the foundation of the discipline in modernist discourses, and delineates the changes resulting from…

This special issue aims to develop a research agenda that brings language to the centre of our inquiry and critique of neoliberalism. Based on empirical case studies from across diverse contexts in Europe, North America, and East Asia, contributors to this special issue address two issues: (1) What can be said about the nature of neoliberalism…

Cognitive linguists claim that verb-particle constructions are compositional and analyzable, and that the particles contribute to the overall meaning in the form of image schemas. This article examined this claim with a behavioral experiment, in which participants were asked to judge the sensibility of short sentences primed by image-schematic…

High-frequency words are usually understood and produced faster than low-frequency words. Although the effect of word frequency is a reliable phenomenon in many domains of language processing, it remains unclear whether and how frequency affects pronominal anaphoric resolution. We evaluated this issue by means of two self-paced reading…

The importance of the topic of this study is determined by several factors: increased interest of linguists to the problem of interaction between language and culture; the need to study the onomastic units as body language. The purpose of this article is to identify the types of motivational nick names of famous American and English public…

This article introduces two sophisticated statistical modeling techniques that allow researchers to analyze systematicity, individual variation, and nonlinearity in second language (L2) development. Generalized linear mixed-effects models can be used to quantify individual variation and examine systematic effects simultaneously, and generalized…

In this paper, we propose a methodology for collecting naturally occurring data on evidentials and epistemic modals. We use Desano (Eastern Tukanoan) as a case study. This language has a complex evidential system with six evidential forms. The methodology in question consists of having Desano speakers to play a logic game, "Mastermind".…

Grammatical agreement phenomena such as verbal number have long been of fundamental interest in the study of second language (L2) acquisition. Previous research from the perspective of sentence processing has documented nativelike behavior among nonnative participants but has also relied almost exclusively on grammar violation paradigms. The…

Statements containing quantity information are commonplace. Although there is literature explaining the way in which quantities themselves are conveyed in numbers or words (e.g., "many", "probably"), there is less on the effects of different types of quantity description on the processing of surrounding text. Given that…

This study examines the "ba" and "bei" constructions in Mandarin using data from the Tong corpus, a new multimedia longitudinal child language corpus. A unified aspectual account of the two constructions is proposed: both require telic predicates, and should thus correlate with the perfective rather than imperfective aspect for…

Languages spoken in larger populations are relatively simple. A possible explanation for this is that languages with a greater number of speakers tend to also be those with higher proportions of non-native speakers, who may simplify language during learning. We assess this explanation for the negative correlation between population size and…