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In this study we compare the titles of scientific letters and those of research papers published in the field of astrophysics in order to identify the possible differences and/or similarities between both genres in terms of several linguistic and extra-linguistic variables (length, lexical density, number of prepositions, number of compound groups, number of authors and number of countries mentioned in the paper bylines). We also carry out a cross-genre and cross-journal analysis of the referred six variables. Our main findings may be summarized as follows: (1) When compared to research paper titles, scientific letter titles are usually shorter, they have a lower lexical density, they include a higher number of prepositions per number of words and a lower number of compound groups per number of words, although they have more up to 4-word compound groups, i.e. the simplest ones. As a consequence, scientific letter titles include less information, which is also less condensed, than research paper titles. (2) The predominance of compound adjectives over compound nouns in the titles of both genres highlights the scientificity of astrophysical discourse. (3) In general terms, our data show a positive correlation between title length and the number of countries mentioned in the bylines for both genres. The positive correlation between title length and number of authors is only met in the case of research papers. In light of these findings, it may be concluded that scientific letters are a clear example of a timeliness and more “immediate” science, whereas research papers are connected to a more timeless and “elaborate” science. It may also be concluded that two different collaboration scenarios are intertwining on the basis of three separate geographic and linguistic publication contexts (Mainland Europe, The United Kingdom and The United States of North America).

A prominent feature of formal writing, particularly in the field of science and technology, is the use of nominalization. Scientific writings, including medical writings, are expected to observe formality, precision, lack of ambiguity and concentration of highly technical terms. In such genres, the use of nominalization, affecting the lexical density of the text, plays a key role. In this connection, the purpose of this study was to compare the use of nominalization and the level of lexical density in medical academic articles written by native English writers and their Iranian counterparts based on the theory of grammatical metaphor proposed by Halliday (1985). To this end, the abstract section of 20 authentic English medical articles written by native English writers and 20 abstracts written by Iranian authors, drawn from highly influential medical journals, were selected. These abstracts were analyzed and compared based on the frequency of nominalization used and the level of lexical density in them. The findings revealed that Iranian writers used less nominalization in their writings.

One of the main assumptions of Complex Dynamic Systems Theory (CDST) is that internally complex language subsystems develop non-linearly while entering different kinds of supportive, competitive, conditional, or dual relationships which are characterised by trade-offs caused by learners’ restricted cognitive processing, especially in foreign language speech. The present paper belongs to a short series of articles which examines various aspects of the development of L2 English speech at secondary school on basis of the same longitudinal, exploratory, and corpus-based case study. The aim of this paper is to investigate the dynamics of the relationships between fluency and both syntactic and lexical complexity in the speech of a good, average, and poor language learner at the level of secondary school. Syntactic complexity was investigated in terms of general sentence complexity, subordination, coordination, and nominalisation, whereas lexical complexity was construed in terms of lexical density, sophistication, and variation. In general, the results indicated predominantly supportive relationships between fluency and different measures of syntactic complexity but competitive or dual relationships between fluency and lexical complexity. However, the relationships between the selected variables fluctuated over time and often differed in the case of a good, average, and poor language learner.

This paper investigates the lexical richness of newspaper editorials written by the writers from ESL (English as a Second Language) and EFL (English as a Foreign Language) of Southeast Asian countries. Using editorial texts published on the same day in two major online newspapers from Malaysia and the Philippines as representative of ESL countries, and two major online newspapers published in Indonesia and Thailand that represent EFL countries, this paper compares the production of Type Token Ratio (TTR) as a measurement of the lexical richness. This study displays a profile of lexical richness gained by submitting the texts into a vocabulary profiler program namely Lexical Frequency Profile (LFP) proposed by Laufer and Nation (1995) to highlight the emergence of the high-frequency word list (K1 and K2 words) and low-frequency word list (AWL and Off-list words). In general, the results show that in all terms of word lists, ESL texts have more varied vocabulary than EFL texts as indicated by the TTR scores (ESL: 0.51; EFL: 0.49). Although the gap of the TTR scores between ESL and EFL texts is slightly insignificant, a bigger TTR score indicates a high lexical richness, while a smaller TTR score shows a low lexical richness. The higher score of TTR in ESL texts could be understood since English plays an important role in education, governance policy and popular culture in those countries (i.e. Malaysia and the Philippines), meanwhile, in Indonesia and Thailand, it plays a lesser role.

Complex nominal groups are common in technical English (i.e., English for Specific Purposes, ESP) since they allow lexical items to be tightly packed into a clause which consequently leads to increased lexical density and syntactic ambiguity. In this paper, we analyse (complex) nominal groups in technical English. We propose that, in addition to context and extralinguistic knowledge (i.e. shared technical background that the ESP teacher does not necessarily possess), the structure of the nominal group — or, more precisely, the position of modifiers within the group also plays a role in resolving of syntactic ambiguity and disambiguation of meaning. Thus, modifiers standing farthest from the head have the least specifying potential and are followed by other modifiers that restrict the meaning of the entire nominal group. In this way, the participle reciprocating in steam reciprocating engine (vs.* reciprocating steam engine ) is more specific in meaning and is thus positioned closer to the head of the nominal group. Our results indicate the type of modification (i.e. linear or non-linear) lends support to the disambiguation of complex nominal groups. The paper‘s main contribution is in the field of ESP teacher education in the way that it helps ESP teachers who are not specialists in the field of (marine) engineering to process understand and successfully teach complex nominal groups.

This paper examines the problem of selectional ‘matching’ effects in Bengali V-V complex predicates, and English denominal verbs within the context of a decompositional syntax/semantics for verbal meaning and a theory of lexical insertion under non-terminals. It argues that within the particular version of this kind of lexical insertion, as proposed by Ramchand 2008b , selection can be captured by the underassociation of category features constrained by Agree. In this way, I argue that we can achieve many of the effects of selection without any distinct lexical subcategorization frame, or sub-type of feature-checking, once we have a suitably articulated theory of lexical insertion.

Laikraksti ir pastāvējuši jau gadsimtiem ilgi un vēsturiski tie ir attīstījuši dažādus veidus, kas attiecināmi uz laikrakstu izmēru, mērķauditoriju, aprakstītajiem notikumiem; tomēr visiem laikrakstiem ir noteikti struktūras un satura pamatprincipi, pēc kuriem tie vadās, lai saglabātu rakstīta teksta tipiskās pazīmes visā pasaulē. Šī darba mērķis ir izpētīt valodas lietojuma variācijas dienas laikrakstu tekstos, kas parādītu, kā atšķiras tematiski atbilstošās nodaļas un valodas reģistra variācijas dažādu tipu laikrakstos dažādos publicēšanas apgabalos. Metodes: Trīs britu un skotu laikraksti ar plašāko lasītāju publiku tika izvēlēti, lai tajos noteiktu leksisko blīvumu un dažādību divās tematiski atbilstošās nodaļās par biznesu un sportu, ņemot vērā dažādos laikrakstu tipus. Rezultāti: Pēc vārda tipa un lietojuma aprēķināšanas, kura bija vidēji 0,46, visos izpētītajos laikrakstos leksiskais blīvums un dažādība bija samērā līdzīgs. Visaugstākais leksiskais blīvums tika konstatēts reģionālajā laikrakstā un Britu laikraksti bija nedaudz informatīvāki nekā Skotu laikraksti kā arī tie satur garākus rakstus, rēķinot vidējo vārdu skaitu. Secinājumi: Pastāv dažādas teorijas par laikrakstu tipiem, tos saistot ar publicēšanas biežumu, formātu un stilu. Daudzi valodnieki ir aprakstījuši reģistra jēdzienu un dažādās pieejas tam, izskaidrojot to kā konteksta noteiktu valodas lietojumu, kas seko noteiktiem valodas paraugiem. Pēc tekstu atlases no laikraksta, tajos tikai pētīts leksiskais blīvums, kas ļāva secināt, ka teksti ir samērā informatīvi un valodas modeļi starp dažādiem laikrakstiem, to tipiem, publicēšanas reģioniem atšķiras tikai nedaudz., Newspapers have existed for centuries and through history they have developed various types according to the format, target readership, issues described; however, all newspapers have particular structural and content related patterns that should be complied with in order to retain the characteristics of a written newspaper discourse all around the world. The goal of this research is to explore the variation of linguistic features in daily newspapers that reveal differences within thematically corresponding sections of newspapers and register variations within various types of newspapers in different regions. Method: Three British and Scottish newspapers with the widest reader circulation were selected for the analysis of lexical density and diversity within two thematically corresponding sections of the papers – ‘business’ and ‘sport’ taking into consideration various types of newspapers. Results: All examined newspapers had rather similar degree of lexical density and diversity according to the standardized type/ token ratio which was calculated to be approximately 0,46. The newspaper type with the highest density proved to be regional newspaper and British papers have slightly higher informativity of the text than the Scottish papers as well as more explicit articles in regard to the word count. Conclusions: There are various theories on newspaper types according to the publishing frequency, format and style. Many linguists have described the notion of register and various approaches to it, explaining it as context-related language use that follows particular patterns. After the extraction of texts from the newspapers, they were analysed in respect of linguistic density which allowed to conclude that newspaper texts are relatively informative and the patterns among various papers, types of papers, regions of publication vary only slightly.

The authors deal with one of the key issues in teaching translation, namely selecting suitable texts for in-class translation training. Translation belongs to the core courses in the study programme “Foreign Languages and Intercultural Communication” at the Faculty of Applied Languages, University of Economics in Bratislava. For the text to be selected for the purpose of its didactisation, and in this way to contribute to the development of translation skills, it has to fulfil numerous criteria. The focus of this paper is on text topic and its content, text type, text length, and degree of text complexity. Learners need to be prepared for diverse situations; therefore they have to be exposed to diverse text types in terms of topic and genres. As far as the criterion of text length is concerned, we consider shorter texts more suitable for training translation, because they enable teachers to work with several texts within one lesson unit and study texts on various topics. We deal with the text complexity in terms of content, as well as syntactic structures and lexical density. Text complexity has to be adapted to learners’ language, professional and cultural level of students. Features of this kind of text and criteria of text selection described in the paper are based on domestic and international sources as well as on authors’ experience in teaching translation and their own translation activities.

The focus of this paper is on lexical items which are traditionally referred to as\ud prepositions, adverbs and particles, grouped here under the term P-items. It is argued that the\ud relative lack of detail concerning lexical representation within systemic functional linguistics\ud (SFL) theory means that there are some issues related to the status of lexis within the framework\ud that require some development. As Tucker (2009: 424) points out, “if the theoretical principles\ud are not fleshed out by way of description of both the actual grammatical and lexical resource of a\ud given language, it is of little use to the majority of consumers, those who adopt if for (ultimately)\ud the socio-semantic analysis of actual texts”. By examining the treatment of P-items within the\ud SFL framework and by drawing on the rich literature on this topic in cognitive linguistics, this\ud paper aims to offer some proposals for integrating a more comprehensive, cognitively informed\ud approach to lexis in SFL.

The differences in the frequencies of some parts of speech (POS), particularly function words, and lexical diversity in male and female speech have been pointed out in a number of papers. The classifiers using exclusively context-independent parameters have proved to be highly effective. However, there are still issues that have to be addressed as a lot of studies are performed for English and the genre and topic of texts is sometimes neglected. The aim of this paper is to investigate the association between context-independent parameters of Russian written texts and the gender of their authors and to design predictive re-gression models. A number of correlations were found. The obtained data is in good agreement with the results obtained for other languages. The model based on 5 parameters with the highest correlation coefficients was designed.

Marchand, Tim. 2013. Speech in written form? A corpus analysis of computer-mediated communication. Linguistic Research 30(2), 217-242. This paper investigates the nature of computer-mediated communication (CMC) and examine whether CMC more closely resembles written or spoken language in its structure and organization. The CMC in this paper refers to messages posted on the BBC’s Have Your Say website over a two year period, and begins by describing how the 1.5 million word corpus was constructed from these postings. It then discusses how the characteristics of the corpus can be analyzed, with reference to research undertaken by Biber et al. (1999) into lexical bundles. Biber et al. compared the distribution of lexical bundles across typical written discourse (academic writing) with typical spoken discourse (conversation) and found there to be a marked contrast in the form and function of the most predominant chunks of language in these two registers. This study uses a similar methodology to determine the degree to which each kind of discourse more closely matches the CMC corpus by examining the statistical composition of various lexical bundle types in the CMC corpus. The paper concludes that while CMC shares several characteristics of both written and spoken language, it is in fact far more formulaic in its structure than either, and so properly deserves to be considered as having a register type of its own. (J. F. Oberlin University)

English academic writing is a challenging task for Chinese EFL learners. For graduate students, they need systematic and explicit guidance to improve their academic writing competence. Grammatical metaphors are important resources for constructing academic discourse, and nominalization in ideational metaphors is regarded as the most powerful tool for achieving formality, objectivity, lexical density and text cohesion typical of academic papers. This article focuses on the role of grammatical metaphors in the production of quality academic written texts. It analyzes the function of grammatical metaphors in academic register and the application of these grammatical metaphors in creating academic meanings. The paper also provides some pedagogical implications for academic writing instruction for advanced EFL learners.

In this paper I discuss similarities and differences between a potential new model of language development - lexical selection, and its biological equivalent - natural selection. Based on Dawkins' (1976) concept of the meme I discuss two units of language and explore their potential to be seen as linguistic replicators. The central discussion revolves around two key parts - the units that could potentially play the role of replicators in a lexical selection system and a visual representation of the model proposed. draw on work by Hoey (2005), Wray (2008) and Sinclair (1996, 1998) for the theoretical basis; Croft (2000) is highlighted as a similar framework. Finally brief examples are taken from the free online corpora provided by the corpus analysis tool Sketch Engine (Kilgarriff, Rychly, Smrz and Tugwell 2004) to ground the discussion in real world communicative situations. The examples highlight the point that different situational contexts will allow for different units to flourish based on the local social and linguistic environment. The paper also shows how a close look at the specific context and strings available to a language user at any given moment has potential to illuminate different aspects of language when compared with a more abstract approach.

International audience; Between simple electronic dictionaries such as the TLFi (computerized French Language Treasure) 1 and lexical networks like WordNet 2 (Diller et al., 1990; Vossen, 1998), the lexical databases are growing at high speed. Our work is about the addition of rich links to lexical databases, in the context of the parallel development of lexical networks. Current research on management tools for lexical databases is strongly influenced by the field of massive data ("big data") and by the Web of data ("linked data"). In lexical networks, one can build and use arbitrary links, but possible queries cannot model all the usual interactions with lexicographers-developers and users, that are needed, and derive from the paper world. Our work aims to find a solution that allows for the main advantages of lexical networks, while providing the equivalent of paper dictionaries by doing the lexicographic work in lexical DBs.

The objective of the paper is mainly about the analysis of the lexical errors caused by negative transfer of the native language that occur in Chinese EFL writing. Lexical errors in the paper mainly refer to the conceptual or semantic errors in lexis where the subjects use the forms that exist in a target language, but these forms do not represent the meanings they wish to express. The lexical errors mainly involve three types, that is, errors in word choice, errors in derivation and those in collocation. Based on the findings of the research, the three issues are examined in an effort to seek implications for EFL learning and teaching in China.

Standardisation on the level of text is visible in the employment of stable and fixed expressions for a specific textual purpose. When gauging the extent of standardisation in texts, one of the parameters which should be taken into consideration is the length of such stable patterns. Since it is more difficult, and therefore rarer, to reproduce long chunks of text in an unchanged form, such a practice points towards greater standardisation. To explore the textual behaviour of long fixed strings in legal texts, this paper concentrates on long lexical bundles built out of eight consecutive elements (8-grams) and their frequency and function in historical legal texts. The database for this pilot paper comprises two collections of legal and administrative texts written in Scots between the fourteenth and the sixteenth century. The research results point to a considerable degree of textual standardisation throughout the corpus and to the most prominent functions of long repetitive chunks in historical legal discourse. 1. Lexical bundles and the study of historical discourse A lexical bundle is a recurrent string of words in a text, regardless of its semantic or phrasal structure. Lexical bundles are extracted by a computer program which moves through the text one word-boundary at a time, searching for strings of a given length repeated in exactly the same form and arrangement. This method stems from the research into grammar teaching methods (Biber 1997) and was developed by Biber and his associates in their seminal grammar of English (Biber et al. 1999) and then in subsequent publications, dealing mainly with academic discourse (Cortes 2002; Biber et al. 2003; Biber 2004; Cortes 2004; Biber et al. 2004; Biber--Barbieri 2007; Tracy-Ventura et al. 2007). The interest in recurrent word-strings has been growing for the last decade and a half, and the method is also finding its way into historical linguistics (see Kopaczyk 2012a for an overview of ongoing and recent research). Lexical bundles are useful for research into historical specialised discourse for three related reasons. Firstly, lexical bundles allow a "corpus-driven" rather than a "corpus-based" approach (Biber 2009: 276), which ensures objectivity. The lists of lexical bundles are products of an automatic computerised search, independent of the research question, and therefore unbiased. In other approaches to fixed expressions, for example idioms, the researcher typically comes up with an inventory on the basis of reference material and experience, and then runs searches in the database using queries based on the list of, say, idioms previously prepared (e.g. Moon 1998). This method might be useful for a study of a particular inventory. In exploring text-type fixedness, however, regardless of the expectations, the researcher will never know exactly how a specific text is structured in terms of standardized patterns, until the most characteristic, recurrent strings of lexical items are revealed. But before this happens, the researcher does not know what exact patterns are fixed and how frequently they are repeated. It is true that after having browsed a certain number of texts the researcher gains an intuitive understanding of how the texts are structured. This kind of intuitive judgement has served researchers so far in singling out expressions characteristic for legal language. In such seminal works as Mellinkoff's Language of the law (1963) one finds intuitive lists of expressions typical of legal discourse in the eyes of the author, without any comment on their frequency or the actual implementation in context. Naturally, one cannot compare the robustness of research tools from fifty years ago and today. Notwithstanding this, current descriptions of legal language often repeat the traditional observations and there seems to be a gap in scholarly practice which calls for a corpus-driven, inductive methodology. …

Title of a research article is an abstract of the abstract. Titles play a decisive role in convincing readers at first sight whether articles are worth reading or not. Not only do research article titles show how carefully words are chosen by authors, but also reflect disciplinary differences in terms of title words and structure between hard sciences and soft sciences. This study examined the lexical density and syntactic structure of 690 research article titles chosen from five Library Science and Scientometrics journals, aiming to reveal disciplinary differences. The result suggested both Library Science and Scientometrics have almost the same title length and the prevalent usage of Nominal Phrase (NP) to govern the title structure. The result also stated some disciplinary differences: Library Science demonstrates more punctuation complexity, particularly a greater frequency in using colons; but Scientometrics shows more involvement of words related to research methods, which is an indicator to papers’ scientific value, and more usage of declarative Full Sentence (FS) structure, which were mostly discovered in the research articles in hard sciences.

In this paper it is assumed that syntactic structure is projected from the lexicon. The lexical representation, which encodes the linguistically relevant aspects of the meanings of words, thus determines and constrains the syntax. Therefore, if semantic analysis of syntactic structures is to be possible, it is necessary to determine the content and structure of lexical semantic representations. The paper argues for a certain form of lexical representation by presenting the problem of a particular non-standard structure, the verb phrase of the form V-NP-Adj corresponding to various constructions of secondary predication in English. It is demonstrated that the solution to the semantic analysis of this structure lies in the meaning of the structure's predicators, in particular the lexical semantic representation of the verb. Verbs are classified according to the configuration of the lexical semantic representations, whether basic or derived. It is these specific configurations that restrict the possibilities of secondary predication. Given the class of a verb, its relation to the secondary predicate is predictable; and the correct interpretation of the V-NP-Adj string is therefore possible.

The aim of this paper is to motivate the syntactic and morphological behaviour of the Old English verbs which share the core meaning of 'to remember', 'to emit a smell', 'to produce a sound' and 'to speak' from their semantic structure. Firstly, as a result of the analysis of these verb subclasses, I will propose a subclass-based lexical template for each lexical subclass. Within the Lexical Grammar Model, lexical templates are conceived as lexical representations where meaning description is encapsulated and interacts with the syntactic behaviour of lexical units. In order to construct a lexical template, Role and Reference Grammar logical structures will be complemented by a semantic decomposition which will define different lexical (sub-)classes. Secondly, the Lexical Template Modelling Process will stipulate the linking between the syntactic and semantic representation of these verbs. This process will establish the lexical rules that account for the mapping between the different semantic constructions and the syntactic structures and alternations in which these verbs participate and the lexical templates codified by these verb subclasses. As a result, a catalogue of the syntactico-semantic constructions exhibited by these Old English verbal predicates will be provided. This paper is part of the research projects EX2003-0118 and BFF2002-00659, funded by the State University Office with Social European Funds, and the Spanish Ministry of Science and Technology, respectively.

This paper entitled “Lexical Density and Grammatical Intricacy in Debaters’ speeches (Case Study of National University Debating Championship 2018)” discusses the lexical density and grammatical intricacy to identify the level of lexical density and grammatical intricacy in debaters’ speeches conducted by means of descriptive qualitative method. The theories supporting this thesis are the ones proposed by Ure, Halliday, and Simon Quinn. The data source in this thesis were debate speech from Main Grand Final round of NUDC 2018 which are Opening Government team (Prime Minfister and Deputy Prime Minister) and Opening Opposition team (Leader of the Opposition and Deputy Leader of the Opposition) taken from youtube video of NUDC 2018, Malang. The data in this study were lexical items for lexical density and clauses for grammatical intricacy. The step passed in this analysis are collecting the data by transcribing the debate speech into text, identifying the lexical items and clauses, and concluding the analysis. The result of this thesis shows that lexical density and grammatical intricacy of Prime Minister = 40.95 % and 3.43, Deputy Prime Minister = 42.44% and 2.72, Leader of the Opposition = 46.14% and 2.91, and Deputy Leader of the Opposition = 47.90% and 3. Thus, both the level of lexical density and grammatical intricacy in debaters’ speeches account for higher density and intricacy, so debaters’ speeches represent much information due to many lexical items as the proportion of running words and indicate that clause complex is more dominant than simple sentence.

Nominalizations can refer to events, instances of events or participants in an event. The particular reference is determined by the lexical semantics of the base and the suffix, and by the conceptual structure of the base. The comparison between deverbal and denominal nominalization in -ata in Italian reveals that the conceptual structure plays a crucial role in determining the reference of a nominalization. Italian nominalizations of -ata are productively derived from verbal and nominal bases. Derivations from verbal bases refer to a single event denoted by the base. Derivations from a nominal base N denote events or results corresponding to a limited number of pattems, such as a hit by N, a characteristic action of N, a period of N, a quantity that is contained in N, etc. The paper argues that the function of the suffix operates on the lexical meaning of the base, but the con~positiono f the lexical meaning of the base with the lexical meaning of the suffix is restricted by the conceptual properties of the base., ZAS Papers in Linguistics, Bd. 27 (2002): Nominalizations

The paper seeks to establish the level of lexical complexity in the discourse of Economic Community of West African States (ECOWAS) peacekeeping agreements (EPKA) and to describe the lexical strategies through which the observed complexity is created. Many studies on linguistic complexity focus on second language acquisition, assessment and writing development. But, this article focuses on lexical choices that create complexity capable of hindering reader’s comprehension. It utilizes quantitative and qualitative designs in its analysis of corpus which consists of ten purposively selected EPKA texts. The data are analysed using Web-based Lexical Complexity Analyzer. The findings indicate that the language of the EPKA is complex. The complexity is attributed to high lexical density, lengthy words and long sentences in the corpus. Also, a large proportion of words in the corpus are redundant and vague. It is hoped that this article provides information about the lexical choices needed to improve the discourse of peacekeeping agreements.

This paper reports a cross-sectional study that investigates the developmental features in second language writings by Chinese beginner learners of English by using four lexical richness measures—lexical sophistication, lexical variation, lexical density, and lexical errors—from the perspective of the language exposure hypothesis. Specifically, the study compares English compositions written by Chinese students of grade 7, grade 8, and grade 9 in terms of lexical sophistication, lexical variation, lexical density, and lexical errors. The English compositions were sampled from the Writing Corpus of Chinese Beginner Learners of English, and the sample size of the three grades remained almost the same. The analysis revealed that lexical richness in the writing samples of beginner learners is comparatively low, with beginner learners transferring lexical features of the oral register to their second language writings; furthermore, all four measures yielded significant, albeit non-linear and unevenly paced, developments across grade levels. Based on the findings, several suggestions for vocabulary teaching are provided.

This study aims at investigating gender differences in written texts using Halliday’s framework about the functions of language. Halliday claimed that females’ writing style is, what he described as, ‘involved’ while males’ writing style is more ‘informative’. The results of the study do not confirm Halliday’s assumptions about gender differences in writing. No significant differences were found between males and females in the frequencies of the use of nouns, prepositions, numerals and modifiers. The only significant difference that was found is the use of pronouns, which is not enough to account for the assumptions. This paper also aims to investigate the differences between Arabic and English in the average sentence length, lexical density, and readability. To measure readability, the Gunning-Fog index formula was used. The results show that there was no significant difference between Arabic and English in the average sentence length, but there were significant differences in lexical density and readability.

This paper analyzed the lexical density of the adjective and noun clauses in an English textbook for senior high school students in Indonesia. It aimed to discover whether or not the textbook was suitable for the students in terms of lexical density. The researchers employed a content analysis approach to analyze data. There were 116 sentences, containing adjective and noun clauses, which were investigated. The researchers implemented the lexical density theory and the lexical density indicators to determine the average level of the lexical density measurements. Results showed that there were three lexical density levels found in those adjective and noun clauses. The three levels were low, medium, and high. The average level of the lexical density obtained from the adjective and noun clauses in the textbook was 47%, which was categorized as low lexical density. Thus, the researchers concluded that the English textbook for the tenth-grade students published by the Indonesian Government was appropriate for the students.

The number of publications and the number of citations received have become the most common indicators of scholarly success. In this context, scientific writing increasingly plays an important role in scholars' scientific careers. To understand the relationship between scientific writing and scientific impact, this paper selected 12 variables of linguistic complexity as a proxy for depicting scientific writing. We then analyzed these features from 36,400 full-text Biology articles and 1,797 full-text Psychology articles. These features were compared to the scientific impact of articles, grouped into high, medium, and low categories. The results suggested no practical significant relationship between linguistic complexity and citation strata in either discipline. This suggests that textual complexity plays little role in scientific impact in our data sets., 27pages, 6 figures, accepted by Journal of Informetrics

This paper aims to investigate the Readability and Lexical Density of the mission statements of the large service and manufacturing firms. In respect of mission statements, a comparison between the service and manufacturing firms is drawn. For initial data arrangement, the mission statements of all selected service firms are grouped together, same was also done with the manufacturing firms separately. The mission statements are processed through the software for Readability (Gunning Fog, Flesch-Kincaid, SMOG, Coleman-Liau, Automated, Flesch Reading Ease score) and Lexical Density analysis in two categories, service firms and manufacturing firms. Result show that Service firms’ mission statements are more Lexically dense and possess higher average level than those of the manufacturing firms. This study contributes to the Strategic Management literature and practical implications to the service and manufacturing firms and their stakeholders. Also comes out of the ole ways of data analysis in management studies. Future researchers may carry out similar research in a specific industry.

Lexical cloning, formally known as ‘contrastive focus reduplication’, refers to the phenomenon whereby there is a modifier reduplication of a lexical item. The reduplicated modifier, which receives a contrastive focus accent, is used to single out some privileged sense, in contrast to other senses, of an ambiguous, polysemous, vague or loose lexical expression ( Huang, 2009 ). Lexical cloning is found in a variety of Englishes including American, Australian, British, Canadian, New Zealand, and South African English, but it is most widely used in American English. It is also a recent phenomenon. Furthermore, the use of lexical clones is largely restricted to a certain, informal conversational register of spoken English. Even the tokens of lexical cloning that are found in written English such as scripts for plays, films and TV programmes are largely representations of spontaneous spoken language (as a mode) in written form (as the medium). In this short paper, improving on Huang (2009) , I shall first provide a description of lexical cloning in English. I shall then discuss context-dependency of lexical cloning. Finally, I shall outline a neo-Gricean lexical pragmatic analysis of this novel lexical phenomenon in the language.

This paper presents an empirical study investigating the relationship between first language (L1) lexical organisation and second language (L2) vocabulary development. The participants consisted of 191 native Arabic learners of English as a foreign language (EFL) within higher secondary education in Saudi Arabia. To conduct the study, two receptive vocabulary size tests (L1 Arabic-Lex and L2 English X-Lex) were used with an L1 lexical organisation test (ALOT) which was designed for the purpose of the study. Learners' L1 lexical organisation scores were found to be associated with their L1 and L2 receptive vocabulary scores. However, the strong correlation found between lexical organisation and the size of the lexicon in learners’ L1 might well suggest that lexical networks and the size of the lexicon are one unified system. Nevertheless, to find any potential interaction between L1 lexical organisation and size on L2 vocabulary acquisition, ‘moderation’ analyses were performed. Moderation results revealed three levels of interaction; low, average and high. The low level shows that a low level of lexical organisation leads to low levels of L1 and L2 vocabulary size. The same relationship trend was logged for average and high levels. These results thus emphasise the importance of a well-structured L1 mental lexicon on L2 vocabulary acquisition

In this paper, the Arabic lexicon has been investigated in the context of relational database theory. A feature analysis of lexical entities has been carried out which shows that lexical attributes can be classified into five categories comprising nineteen attributes, including form attributes, morphological attributes, functional attributes, meaning attributes, and referential attributes. Based on this analysis, eleven database relations have been identified which form the backbone of an Arabic lexical database, including: words, roots, forms, infinitives, verbs, nouns, plurals, particles, meanings, lexical functions, and cross-references. The design ideas discussed in this paper were tested using a sample of lexical items selected from a modern printed dictionary. The results of developing an experimental lexical database indicate that the relational approach provides an efficient method for storing and retrieving Arabic lexical information. It should be mentioned, however, that several problems were encountered when the printed data was translated into a database form. Some of these problems are inherent in the Arabic lexicon itself, while others are due to the way by which lexical information is presented by paper-based dictionaries.

Within English early childhood education, there is emphasis on improving speech and language development as well as a drive for outdoor learning. This paper synthesises both aspects to consider whether or not links exist between the environment and the quality of young children’s utterances as part of their speech and language development and if so, the nature of those links. In a small-scale case study, data were captured in a natural environment and in indoor and outdoor classrooms. The quality of utterances was analysed using Type/Token Ratios (TTR) analysis. Findings indicate that participant’s speech quality differed according to environment. Children’s lexical diversity was richer in a natural environment than in indoor and outdoor classrooms, which produced mirrored outcomes. The findings suggest that within the natural environment, where learning is child-initiated, the quality of utterances manifest in ways not found in indoor or outdoor classrooms, where learning is adult led.

This paper describes our approach to the SemEval-2017 “Semantic Textual Similarity” and “Multilingual Word Similarity” tasks. In the former, we test our approach in both English and Spanish, and use a linguistically-rich set of features. These move from lexical to semantic features. In particular, we try to take advantage of the recent Abstract Meaning Representation and SMATCH measure. Although without state of the art results, we introduce semantic structures in textual similarity and analyze their impact. Regarding word similarity, we target the English language and combine WordNet information with Word Embeddings. Without matching the best systems, our approach proved to be simple and effective.

The massive popularity of online social media provides a unique opportunity for researchers to study the linguistic characteristics and patterns of user's interactions. In this paper, we provide an in-depth characterization of language usage across demographic groups in Twitter. In particular, we extract the gender and race of Twitter users located in the U.S. using advanced image processing algorithms from Face++. Then, we investigate how demographic groups (i.e. male/female, Asian/Black/White) differ in terms of linguistic styles and also their interests. We extract linguistic features from 6 categories (affective attributes, cognitive attributes, lexical density and awareness, temporal references, social and personal concerns, and interpersonal focus), in order to identify the similarities and differences in particular writing set of attributes. In addition, we extract the absolute ranking difference of top phrases between demographic groups. As a dimension of diversity, we also use the topics of interest that we retrieve from each user. Our analysis unveils clear differences in the writing styles (and the topics of interest) of different demographic groups, with variation seen across both gender and race lines. We hope our effort can stimulate the development of new studies related to demographic information in the online space., Comment: Proceedings of the 28th ACM Conference on Hypertext and Social Media 2017 (HT '17)

International audience; This paper proposes a contrastive analysis of lexical verbs in English and French academic discourse. The EIIDA corpus enables us to adopt a doubly contrastive viewpoint, comparing the frequency and types of verbs used both in research articles and oral presentations in the two languages. The results indicate that mode differences are less distinct in French and that overall lexical and verbal density is higher in English (46% the English oral mode and 61% in the written mode, whereas it is 42% and 47% in the French oral and written mode). In contrast, the French articles and presentations sub-corpora display greater lexical variation, suggesting that information is densely packed in English and the same lexical items are often reused, whereas information is less dense in French but is accompanied by greater lexical diversity and less reuse.

International audience; Dictionaries are designed as huge texts made up of a collection of much smaller texts, i.e. lexicographic articles. To put it differently, dictionaries are two-dimensional textual models of natural language lexicons. Lexicographers, however, are well aware of the fact that their task is to account for a truly multidimensional entity: a gigantic graph of lexical units connected by various paradigmatic and syntagmatic relations. The most significant advance that computer science will bring to the future of lexicography is therefore not the ability to better store, search and manipulate textual lexicographic data; it will be to allow lexicographers to bypass the text as a formal representation of lexicons and to directly work on lexical networks. Such networks are more suitable to the lexicographic endeavour because they are better formal metaphors of the “natural” structure we are trying to account for. This paper presents lexical systems as graph models of lexicons and introduces the corresponding lexicography of virtual dictionaries. It is based on extensive lexicographic work that is being conducted on the French Lexical Network, a lexical database built according to theoretical and methodological principles borrowed from Explanatory Combinatorial Lexicology.

The paper looks at the oral exchanges between two teachers and their B2-C1 level students (Common European Framework of Reference) in a particular EFL classroom, from the perspective of the Cambridge examinations assessment standard for the category of “lexical resource”. Since teachers are the role models in terms of language production in the classroom, this research focused on revealing lexical features which characterise the classroom discourse of two teachers of English and the impact this exposure has on their students’ lexical production. This research is part of my doctoral research, which is a multifaceted analysis of authentic oral classroom exchanges in order to determine patterns and practices at the level of developing speaking skills in the EFL context.

This paper presents an investigation of lexical first language (L1) attrition, asking how a decrease in lexical accessibility manifests itself in long-term residents in a second language (L2) environment. We question the measures typically used in attrition studies (formal tasks and type–token ratios) and argue for an in-depth analysis of free spoken data, including factors such as lexical frequency and distributional measures. The study is based on controlled, elicited and free data from two populations of attriters of L1 German (L2 Dutch and English) and a control population (n = 53 in each group). Group comparisons and a Discriminant Analysis show that lexical diversity, sophistication and the distribution of items across the text in free speech are better predictors of group membership than formal tasks or elicited narratives. Extralinguistic factors, such as frequency of exposure and use or length of residence, have no predictive power for our results.

This paper presents a statistical comparison of regional phonetic and lexical variation in American English. Both the phonetic and lexical datasets were first subjected to separate multivariate spatial analyses in order to identify the most common dimensions of spatial clustering in these two datasets. The dimensions of phonetic and lexical variation extracted by these two analyses were then correlated with each other, after being interpolated over a shared set of reference locations, in order to measure the similarity of regional phonetic and lexical variation in American English. This analysis shows that regional phonetic and lexical variation are remarkably similar in Modern American English.