The English cognate object (CO) construction like laugh a nervous laugh raises intriguing analytic and empirical questions. They include (a) what kind of verb licenses the CO, (b) what is the grammatical status of the CO (including its argumenthood), and (c) what are the semantic/pragmatic contributions of the construction? In answering these questions and to see real usages of the construction...

Several works on film theory and screenwriting practice take up the question of repetition within narrative. However, few if any, have articulated theories about the relationship between the repetition of the words that comprise the screenplay itself and repetition of the themes that lend coherence to the narrative. In this study we address this gap in the screenwriting and film literature. Spe...

This study is a corpus-assisted investigation concerning the functions of the formulaic sequence just kidding and its variants (e.g., only kidding, just joking, JK) in spoken and written American English. We identified 1200 instances of this phrase from multiple corpora representing a range of modalities (Contemporary Corpus of American English, Global Web-Based English corpus, The Santa Barbar...

Perceptual and acoustic research on dialect variation in the United States requires an appropriate corpus of spoken language materials. Existing speech corpora that include dialect variation are limited by poor recording quality, small numbers of talkers, and/or small samples of speech from each talker. The Nationwide Speech Project corpus was designed to contain a large amount of speech produc...

1. Idioms are constructions 1.1 Idioms in the Chomskyan paradigm Croft and Cruse (2004:225) describe the role of idioms in construction grammar as follows: “It is not an exaggeration to say that construction grammar grew out of a concern to find a place for idiomatic expressions in the speaker’s knowledge of a grammar of their language”. The reason for this focus on idioms in early construction...

Was Silvanus Phillips Thompson primarily a physicist, electrical engineer, biographer, or teacher? His obituarists could not agree. I argue was in fact polymathic generalist who, as philanthropic Quaker, worked to promote his own expertise but rather ensure the public swiftly informed of most important techno-scientific research and applications contemporaries. illustrate this comparison longer...

In recent years, Gothic literary studies have increasingly acknowledged the role played by Shakespeare in authorial acts of appropriation. Such acknowledgement is most prominently stated in Gothic Shakespeares (eds. Drakakis and Townshend, 2008) and Shakespearean Gothic (eds. Desmet and Williams, 2009), both of which base their analyses of the Shakespeare-Gothic intersection on the premise that...

The paper presents a logboat found by an expedition from the University of Warsaw in Lake Lubanowo (northwestern Poland) during underwater archaeological survey 2020. It is first made beech wood (Fagus sylvatica) registered area Poland. conventional radiocarbon date 2350±30 BP; thus, vessel may be attributed to Jastorf or Pomeranian culture, as it was border between territories both units. Only...

Affixation is one of the most common and productive ways to form new words in English and forming words through suffix, an affix that is placed after a base, and is a significant component of affixation. Although numerous studies on common suffixes have been conducted, relatively little attention has been paid to the seemingly less used affixes, say the suffix –esque. A thorough analysis is con...

The basic level is the level of conceptual structure at which categories are maximally informative. In this research, we investigated whether the privileged status of the basic level might be captured by the statistical properties of the Web. Using Google’s Web search programming interface, we found that frequency ratios for terms across three levels of abstraction (superordinate, basic, and su...