Search results for "English"

Words, Corpus and Back to Words : From Language to Discourse

2018

The aim of this issue of is to bring together investigation into the lexicon in a variety of languages, in a diversity of manifestations – both at the word level and beyond the word level – and from a variety of perspectives, including not only those which focus on how the vocabulary is internally organized, but also those which deal with the role that lexical units and lexical relations play in the organization of other language levels, particularly in the organization of the discourse. These issues are approached from a variety of perspectives that include not only developments in several disciplines of theoretical and descriptive linguistics, particularly in lexicology, phraseology, word…

L2 English derivational knowledge : Which affixes are learners more likely to recognise?

2016

Knowledge of derivational morphology is considered an important aspect of vocabulary knowledge both in L1 (mother tongue) and L2 (second or foreign language) English language learning. However, it is still not clear whether different derivational affixes vary in their (learning) difficulty. The present study examines whether Bauer and Nation’s (1993) teaching order of L2 English affixes can account for the difficulty learners have with recognising the affixes. The participants in the study were L1 Estonian and Russian learners of English at upper-secondary schools in Estonia (n = 62). Their performance was measured on a word segmentation task. There were significant differences in the numbe…

Getting rid of the Chi-square and Log-likelihood tests for analysing vocabulary differences between corpora

2018

Log-likelihood and Chi-square tests are probably the most popular statistical tests used in corpus linguistics, especially when the research is aiming to describe the lexical variations between corpora. However, because this specific use of the Chi-square test is not valid, it produces far too many significant results. This paper explains the source of the problem (i.e., the non-independence of the observations), the reasons for which the usual solutions are not acceptable and which kinds of statistical test should be used instead. A corpus analysis conducted on the lexical differences between American and British English is then reported, in order to demonstrate the problem and to confirm …

A Survey of University Students’ Knowledge of Vocabulary Learning Strategies and Influential Factors in Middle East

2016

In this study, the most and the least common vocabulary learning strategies was explored among Eastern Mediterranean University international students. Besides, the role of personal factors such as gender and English proficiency level of students were considered. After distributing the questionnaire, the data were analyzed applying t-test and ANOVA. It was revealed that the level of importance of vocabulary learning strategy use was moderate for the EMU international students. Furthermore, it was found that metacognitive strategies and social strategies are the most and the least common vocabulary learning strategies respectively utilized by EMU international students for learning vocabular…

A lesson in teaching English while White

2020

Secondary grammaticalization and the English adverbial -ly suffix

2015

Author's version of an article in the journal: Language sciences. Also available from the publisher at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.langsci.2014.10.003 This paper discusses the secondary grammaticalization of the English adverbial -ly suffix and makes claims about the concept of secondary grammaticalization. Secondary grammaticalization is defined as the development of a new grammatical function in an already grammatical element. It is shown that the development of the -ly suffix involves a number of the processes which are associated with grammaticalization, e.g. paradigmatization, specialization, obligatorification, subjectification, layering and persistence. However, none of these proces…

Lexical Borrowing in the Light of Digital Resources: Nyet as a Case Study

2021

Abstract The mere appearance of a foreign word does not necessarily mark the birth of a loanword, which requires documented usage by the speech community. Relatively little research has been dedicated so far to the “prenatal” stage that would investigate the tentative infiltration of foreign-derived words. Nyet, a borrowing from Russian, is taken as a case in point. Although its first recorded instance in the Oxford English Dictionary (OED3) is dated to 1928, it had been increasingly recognized in English for several decades. This article focuses on textual attestations for nyet discovered in a range of digital resources, including British and American newspaper archives, and discusses thei…

Towards more learning-centred English-medium education: promoting the combination of backward design and community of practice in teacher training

2022

Purpose Teaching in English-medium education (EME) requires mastery of content and ability to teach in a multilingual setting, but also pedagogical expertise and didactic agility. However, there is an apparent lack of proper training of EME teachers, who are typically experts of their field, but not necessarily equipped to design and implement EME. Moreover, there is still an evident gap with respect to understanding how EME teachers turn curricula into actual teaching and students’ learning. By addressing this gap, the present study provides recommendations for EME teacher training. Approach Finland, with its long EME traditions, was the present study’s context. Data saturation, i.e. adequ…

L2 English vocabulary breadth and knowledge of derivational morphology : One or two constructs?

2022

Derivational morphology (DM) and how it can be assessed have been investigated relatively rarely in language learning and testing research. The goal of this study is to add to the understanding of the nature of DM knowledge, exploring whether and how it is separable from vocabulary breadth. Eight L2 (second or foreign language) English DM knowledge measures and three measures of the size of the English vocabulary were administered to 120 learners. We conducted two confirmatory factor analyses, one with one underlying factor and the other treating vocabulary breadth and DM as separate. As neither model had a satisfactory fit without introducing a residual covariance to the two-factor model,…

Adnominal adjectives in Old English

2010

Even though adnominal adjectives in Old English are distributionally versatile in that they may precede, follow or flank the noun they modify, their positioning is not random but follows from systematic interpretive contrasts between pre- and postnominal adjectives, such as ‘attribution vs predication’, ‘individual-level vs stage-level reading’ and ‘restrictive vs non-restrictive modification’. These contrasts are largely independent of adjectival inflection (pace Fischer 2000, 2001, 2006). The placement of adnominal adjectives in Old English is investigated in relation to recent comparative and theoretical studies on word order and word order variation (see Cinque 2007; Larson & Maruši…