Compressed and implicit nominal phrases as syntactic features of academic writing (Biber & Gray, 2010, 2016) are underexplored in L2 research writing. In this study, I cross-examined attributive adjectives, prepositional phrases, noun premodifiers, appositive nouns qualitative quantitative articles (RAs) authored by Filipino writers (FRWs) across Applied Linguistics, Measurement Evaluation,...

Communication is an act of cooperation between two or more partners (Grice, 1975), and people normally assume that their communicators would speak in a way that is maximally truthful and informative. Imagine two people in a conversation, Tom and Sally, who are talking about pets they own. Tom says to Sally: “I have two dogs.” Assuming that Tom is a cooperative speaker, and that Sally also belie...

The superlative modifiers at least and at most are quite famous, but their cousins at best, at the latest, at the highest, etc., are less well-known. This paper is devoted to the entire family. New data is presented illustrating the productivity of the pattern, identifying a generalization delimiting it, and showing that the cousins, too, have the pragmatic effects that have attracted so much a...

The present study examined email communication practices of two groups of students in Iran and the United States to uncover the probable differences between Iranian and American email communication norms. The study also aimed at investigating how power distance in academic centers influences students’ choices of communication strategies in email writing. The use of two politeness strategies nam...

We developed a cooperative time-sensitive task to study vocal expression of politeness and efficiency. Sixteen dyads completed 20 trials of the ‘Maze Task’, where one participant (the ‘navigator’) gave oral instructions (mainly ‘up’, ‘down’, left’, ‘right’) for the other (the ‘pilot’) to follow. For half of the trials, navigators were instructed to be polite, and for the other half to be effici...

In order to build embodied conversational agents that are able to communicate with the user in a more natural manner, the consideration of social aspects seems inevitable. One aspect of social interaction is the use of politeness strategies. In this paper, we report on a corpus study we conducted in order to shed light on the co-occurrence of gestures and verbal politeness strategies in face th...

We review existing appoaches to semantics construction in LTAG (Lexicalised Tree Adjoining Grammar) based on the notion of derivation (tree)s. We argue that derivation structures in LTAG are not appropriate to guide semantic composition, due to a non-isomorphism, in LTAG, between the syntactic operation of adjunction on the one hand, and the semantic operations of complementation and modificati...

This paper links experimental psycholinguistics and theoretical syntax in the study of subject-verb agreement. Three experiments of elicited spoken production making use of specific characteristics of Italian and French are presented. They manipulate and examine its impact on the occurrence of 'attraction' errors (i.e. incorrect agreement with a word that is not the subject of the sentence). Ex...