The present study is an attempt to explore the effect of one of the pragmatic elements of discourse (namely the conceptualizable agent) on overpassivization of English unaccusative verbs. Through employing the questionnaire originally used by Ju, (2000), 206 Iranian intermediate and advanced English majors were asked to choose the more grammatical form (active or passive) in target sentences wi...

abstracttask-based language teaching is considered an effective way to achieve a harmony between grammar and communication. the present study investigates two different ways of teaching modal verbs: task-based versus traditional approaches. to this purpose, an oxford placement test was administered to select 40 homogeneous participants out of a larger population who took this test. the selected...

The present study basically conducted a qualitative-oriented research to identify the articulating and listening problems of eleven AE vowels for Taiwanese eighth graders. It aimed to examine the relationship between production and perception of English vowels. Gender differences were probed under this sound pronunciation and discrimination framework. A vowel articulating test followed by a vow...

The current study addresses the extent of phonological planning during spontaneous sentence production. Previous work shows that at articulation, phonological encoding occurs for entire phrases, but encoding beyond the initial phrase may be due to the syntactic relevance of the verb in planning the utterance. I conducted three experiments to investigate whether phonological planning crosses mul...

English was long considered the only language to possess Verb Phrase Ellipsis (VPE), a process in which a verb phrase, identified in many standard accounts with the vP, goes missing under identity with the vP of an antecedent clause. An example of VPE in English is given in (1), where the elements struck through are not pronounced. A schematization of the relevant part of the structure is given...

Academic discourse has always been the focus of many linguists, especially those who have been involved with English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and discourse analysis. Persuasion, as part of rhetorical structure of academic writing, is partly achieved by employing modality markers.  Adopting a descriptive design, the present study was carried out to compare the use of modality markers in terms...