When people learn that I study lethal injection, they are usually curious to know more (or at least they are polite enough to ask questions). Interestingly, the question that arises most often— from lawyers, law students, and laypeople—is why states behave as they do. In the wake of botched executions and ample evidence of lethal injection‘s dangers, why do states fail to address their executio...

A student, supported by his classmates, throws a piece of chalk at the teacher who is writing on the blackboard. The teacher rapidly turns back and promptly catches him in the act. The student blushes and suddenly realizes how bad it was what he did. What happened to the guy? Why did he decide to throw the piece of chalk? And why, after a few seconds, he would have liked that what he did had ne...

Current approaches to handling indirect speech acts (ISAs) do not account for their sociolinguistic underpinnings (i.e., politeness strategies). Deeper understanding and appropriate generation of indirect acts will require mechanisms that integrate natural language (NL) understanding and generation with social information about agent roles and obligations, which we introduce in this paper. Addi...

Nowadays, university students suffer from a broad range of problems, such as educational underachievement or the inability to control themselves, that lead to procrastination as a consequence. The present research aimed at analyzing the determinants of decisional procrastination among undergraduate students and at assessing a path model in which self regulated learning strategies mediated the r...

This study examines the impact of a semester study abroad experience in Argentina on the second language acquisition of three American university Spanish learners. The goal is to measure development of two aspects of oral communication skills: fluency and performance in the oral functions of narration, and description and supporting an opinion. Research has shown that immersion in the target cu...

This chapter will shift the focus of attention away from the problems of understanding linguistic change that have occupied the discussion so far in order to examine the opposite situation: stable linguistic variation. The first step in a considered study of linguistic change is not the examination of change, but rather an investigation of the sociolinguistic patterns in the particular speech c...

In this article, we address the problem of age identification of Twitter users, after their online text. We used a set of text mining, sociolinguistic-based and content-related text features, and we evaluated a number of well-known and widely used machine learning algorithms for classification, in order to examine their appropriateness on this task. The experimental results showed that Random F...

A central probletn in considering the subjects of sociolinguistics and dialectology has to do with the relationship between these two topics, which has often been somewhat dlflcult and controversial. Is, for example, dialectologj part of sociolinguistics, or is it a separate discipline? Once their relative status and complementar): nature have been discussed, the ultimate goal of this article i...