: This study aims to explore the relationship between syntactic and lexical complexity and also the relationship between different aspects of lexical complexity. To this end, speech monologs of 35 Iranian high-intermediate learners of English on three different tasks (i.e. argumentation, description, and narration) were analyzed for correlations between one measure of sy...

This paper investigates the potential of defining a parsing representation for English data in Universal Dependencies, a crosslingual dependency scheme. We investigate structural transformations that change the choices of headedness in the dependency tree. The transformations make auxiliaries, copulas, subordinating conjunctions and prepositions heads, while in UD they are dependents of a lexic...

this study was intended first to categorize the l2 learners in terms of their learning style preferences and second to investigate if their learning preferences are related to lexical inferencing. moreover, strategies used for lexical inferencing and text related issues of text density and parts of speech were studied to determine their moderating effects and the best predictors of lexical infe...

People often speak about visually perceived events that unfold in real time. In doing so speakers regularly translate the details of the visual world they describe onto the grammatical properties of the sentences about it. For example, the speaker needs to map her constantly changing attentional state onto the syntactic plan of the produced sentences. The present paper briefly discusses what at...

By combining the Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) approach with the corpus linguistic method, this study compared the lexical choices employed by two English newspapers, i.e. China Daily and the New York Times, in their coverage of Sichuan earthquake. This study aims to probe into the different political stances and ideology concealed under the news reports. The comparative analysis of the two...

Two experiments are reported to investigate the roles of perceptual priming and lexical priming in Korean children s production of passive sentences. Experiment 1 examined whether manipulations of focal attention could affect Korean children s linguistic choices regarding subject role assignment, by using so-called fish film (Tomlin, 1997). 5-year-olds and 6-year-olds were not able to produce p...

This paper reports a case study investigating and comparing three word-learning methods [i.e. Meaning-Given, Meaning-Inferred with Multiple Choices (Meaning-Inferred with MC as below), and Pure Meaning-Inferred] in two modes of learning (i.e. incidental and intentional learning, ICL & ITL respectively as below) in terms of the retention of L2 word meanings in a Chinese University. Findings sugg...

In the systemic framework, lexis has received little attention in comparison to grammar. The paper compares existing systemic approaches to lexis and outlines a model for describing lexical items from the viewpoint of realization of communicative intentions by lexical items using the systemic network of lexical choices. As an example of the approach, the paper attempts to describe contrastive l...

Socioscientific controversies are “extended argumentative engagements over socially significant issues ... comprising communicative events and practices in and from both scientific and nonscientific spheres” (Stewart, 2009, p. 125). While global warming is not controversial among the vast majority of climate scientists, socioscientific controversies over global warming abound in various media, ...

Based on claims in the literature that relevant differences can be found in the lexical choices of translated and non-translated language, this paper sets out to examine potential differences between translated and non-translated texts of the same language with respect to the way words are combined in order to convey meaning. The primary issue under investigation is whether these two varieties ...