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This contrastive corpus-based study aims to analyze the similarities and differences of two synonyms "important" and "significant" concerning on the degree of formality in their distribution across genres as well as their collocations and semantic preference. The corpus data derived from the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) and the British National Corpus (BNC) which represent varieties of English usage across different cultures (American and British). This study analyzed the top 20 noun collocates with Mutual Information (MI) scores value of at least three. The corpus data from COCA and BNC explored some shared characteristics and contrastive features. The findings discovered that the two adjectives have the same core meaning and degree of formality since their highest frequency in academic texts whereas frequencies are the lowest in informal genres i.e. TV and movie subtitles and fiction. In certain conditions, these synonyms are different in terms of noun collocation due to the fact that these synonyms co-occur with particular noun collocates. Interestingly, the findings also confirm two adjectives are near synonyms as they share only two similar theme of semantic preference. In consequence, the two synonyms cannot be used interchangeably in all contexts. Moreover, it was found that the corpora provide some useful details that are deficient in the dictionary.

The global prevalence of English as a lingua franca (ELF) across diverse linguacultural communities within the three circles invites an in-depth analysis of its phonological and lexicogrammatical features, especially among non-native English speakers. This qualitative study investigated these features among 30 Thai students from English and nonEnglish programs, emphasizing natural occurrences in academic settings. Participants were directed to record audio and video during collaborative activities with peers and lecturers inside and outside the classroom. Through Conversation Analysis, findings revealed a significant divergence in the phonological and lexicogrammatical features of ELF participants compared to speakers of standard British English (BrE) and American English (AmE). Specifically, nonstandard lexicogrammatical features concerning verb, noun, article, word choice, tense, and preposition emerged predominantly. Furthermore, common phonological deviations included omission of final consonant sounds, mispronunciation of the schwa sound, confusion in pronouncing the article 'the,' mispronunciation of words ending with '-ine,' and substitution of /[open-mid back unrounded vowel]/ with /[open-mid back rounded vowel]/. The data suggests widespread use of non-standard English norms, indicating linguistic adaptation beyond traditional boundaries in various environments. Significantly, this study contributes by highlighting how ELF participants reshape language for effective communication, prioritizing intelligibility over nativelike proficiency, with insights extending beyond the Thai context, valuable for educators, linguists, and intercultural communication practitioners.

This study emerged as a result of insufficient knowledge and descriptions of the behavioural profiles of the near-synonym English verbs, "increase" and "rise," by non-corpus-based traditional reference sources used by students. We explored the behavioural characteristics of this group of near-synonym verbs using the British National Corpus (BNC) of 100 million words as our corpus. Using the "Sketch Engine" Tool, we examined their frequency, subject and object noun collocations, adverb collocations, and syntactic behavioural profiles. The results demonstrate that both words collocate with subject and object nouns. However, on their top ten subject collocation lists, "increase" only collocates with abstract nouns related to finance and economy, whereas "rise" collocates with three different kinds of abstract nouns related to finance/economy, the human entity, and the natural environment, and one concrete noun related to natural environment. In addition, they only have two collocates in common on their top subject noun collocates list. In terms of object noun collocations, "increase" only collocates with abstract nouns connected to finance/economy and the natural environment, but "rise" collocates with abstract and concrete nouns on their top list. They also only have three adverb collocations in common on the top list. "Rise" has 17 distinct syntactic patterns, whereas "increase" has 15 different syntactic patterns. In teaching near-synonyms, we propose using corpus-based reference resources.

This study investigates the use of DO, HAVE, MAKE, GIVE and TAKE in light verb constructions (LVCs) and their corresponding simplex verb forms in British L1 and Malaysian L2 students' writing. The students' essay sub-corpus of the International Corpus of English (ICE) of Great Britain (ICE-GB) and Malaysia (ICE-Malaysia) formed the data of this study. The analysis revealed that most LVCs in the L1 and L2 student writings are basic in structure, comprising indefinite article, no modifier, and in the active voice. The analysis also showed that although LVCs are common in the students' writing, the corresponding simplex verb form of the verbs are higher in frequency. The only notable difference between the two groups is the overuse of zero article LVCs in the L2 students' writing, which is possibly due to their L1 influence.

Despite substantial scholarship relating to word structure (Anderson, 2018), for English affixes the relationship between productivity, genre, and second language (L2) learning remains unclear. Analysis of the existing literature reveals that deadjectival noun suffixes (i.e., nouns derived from adjectives such as "appropriacy" or "goodness") have been underexamined. To address this gap, we examine two rival suffixes, "-acy" and "-ness," through the lens of Construction Morphology (Booij, 2010), considering numerous factors which might condition their varying usage. Critically, corpus data in the Corpus of Contemporary American English and the British National Corpus (Davies, 2008-) reveal the importance of considering these affixes' productivity in relation to genre, since "-acy" is especially frequent in academic texts, principally within certain social sciences. The implications for learners and teachers of English as a second language are discussed, particularly higher-level learners building communicative competence in academic contexts, along with a preliminary learner corpus comparison of the two variants.

This study aims to explore how corpus-based approaches can be used to address the distinctions of English near-synonyms effectively. Especially, it collected source data from the British National Corpus (BNC) and adopted Sketch Engine (SkE) as an analyzing tool to compare the near synonymous pair "damage" and "destroy" commonly misused by Chinese-speaking learners of English in terms of frequencies, genre distribution, colligation and collocation, differences in meanings and uses. It is found that "damage" and "destroy" are near-synonyms because they are relevant words and share most collocates but they are not fully intersubstitutable for certain contexts. Some words related to the human body or physical health are more collocated with "damage" and some such as military affairs and one's thought or belief more with "destroy." In addition, the core meaning of "damage" gives more emphasis on something that can be recovered but does not work well as before, while "destroy" offers more senses for something that no longer exists. Furthermore, the British tend to collocate the two near-synonyms with the same word to create a build-up, because "destroy" is endowed with a stronger degree of destruction than "damage." The study ends by suggesting corpus-based analysis should be promoted in language teaching and learning to improve the accurate use of English vocabulary by language learners.

The present study explores the effects of structured input and traditional instruction on the acquisition of English causative passive forms using online measurements (eye-tracking). Previous empirical research investigating the effects of processing instruction through offline measurements (sentence and discourse) has overall shown positive results for this pedagogical intervention. Research investigating the main factor responsible for the effectiveness of processing instruction has confirmed that it is the structured input component that is the causative factor for the positive effects of processing instruction. The main questions of this study are: (1) what are the effects of structured input and traditional instruction on accuracy when measured by an eye-tracking picture selection task? (2) would possible difference in accuracy between structured input and traditional instruction be accompanied by changes in eye-movement patterns? To provide answers to the two questions formulated in this study, one eye-tracking study was carried out. Fifty-two adult learners (aged 19-21 years) participated and were assigned to one of two groups: structured input (n = 26) or traditional instruction (n = 26). Neither instructional groups received explicit information. A pre and post-training design was adopted and the two groups received two different instructional treatments (structured input vs. traditional instruction). Participants were assessed through a picture selection eye-tracking task to measure accuracy and eye-movement patterns while they were processing auditory sentences. Results of the eye-tracking task indicated that the structured input group achieved significantly higher accuracy scores compared to the group receiving traditional instruction. The main findings from the present study reveal that structured input training causes a change in learners' eye-movement patterns.

English as an International Language (EIL) is grounded in the concept of multiplicity. Such proliferation of non-native varieties of English leads to several controversies including the intelligibility of its speakers to listeners from various language backgrounds. Although this concern has been continuously addressed in EIL research, the focus was mainly on major ESL accents. English language educators form English periphery accents know very little about the scenario of their own English in relation to its use in international settings. This study explored the Thai-accented English pronunciation features that result in intelligibility failure. It employed the innovative and comprehensible intelligibility measurement of which the results can be applied to other English accents with the similar phonology patterns such as tonal and syllabic-timing languages as most of languages in Asian mainland continent. Thai-accented English spontaneous speech was measured for overall intelligibility using a transcription task performed by the listeners from a variety of different L1 backgrounds. The errors in transcription were phonetically analysed to ascertain which phonological features of Thai English pronunciation which led to a detriment in intelligibility. These features; hence, must be the focus in teaching English for international communicative purposes. Analysis of the results revealed that the salient features identified as posing the highest threat to international intelligibility were cluster simplification, consonant de-voicing, lack of final consonant released, and fully stressed unstressed vowels.

This paper explored a less-studied preposition, "after," and its uses in a corpus. The analysis included an inspection of dictionary senses, followed by the distributional patterns of parts-of-speech, the co-appearing verbs of "after," the contextual uses of [-"ly after"] and [-"ly after"+NOUN], and finally a pre- and post-teaching investigating the effectiveness of using a corpus. The goal was to see what semantic information is embedded in "after" in each of these analyses and to explain the contextual uses of "after" that are not often realized. We used probes and corpus techniques to search for instances in the British National Corpus to retrieve expressions of "after" that appear in certain contexts. Based on the data, two conceptualizations of "after," comprising the relations of two events, were postulated. For the uses of "after" and its two constructions [-"ly after"] and [-"ly after"+NOUN], we also tested their production by EFL students before and after a corpus workshop was introduced to EFL learners. The results showed that the workshop not only was effective, but also helped accelerate students' speed of generating expressions of "after." This paper could serve as a sample work for research on function words, and it also imposes pedagogical implications on the effectiveness of using a corpus for EFL learners.

The paper titled "Nominal Group as Qualifier to 'Someone'" investigated types of qualifiers which are embedded to the head "someone" in a nominal group. This research was conducted in the light of Systemic Functional Linguistics analysis. The data was analyzed, classified then described using descriptive qualitative method. This research produced four classifications of nominal group as qualifier, which were clauses, prepositional phrases, nominal groups, and linked independent element. The clause as qualifier is sub-classified into finite and non-finite clauses. Further sub-classification is conducted over finite clause into Full Relative Clause (FRC), Relative Clause with Preposition (RCP), and Contact Clause (CC). Further sub-classification over non-finite clause resulted in Operative Imperfective Non Finite Clause (OINFC), Receptive Imperfective Non Finite Clause (RINFC), and Operative Perfective Non Finite Clause (OPNFC). This research also found qualifiers which consisted of two or more linked non-embedding elements.

This corpus-based study provides a baseline of complex word usage patterns in the spontaneous speech of English preschool children to ascertain the characteristics of their derivative vocabulary before literacy development affects language skills. Frequencies of suffixed derivatives produced by (N = 243) children aged 2-5 and their caregivers were extracted for 58 suffix variants, yielding 558 types from the former and 1,364 from the latter. Between the youngest and oldest groups, 11 suffix categories increased significantly in type frequency, compared with 22 in the caregiver dataset. All derivative types were classified for transparency of meaning and simplicity of form on a five-point analysability scale. Around 59% of both the child and caregiver derivative vocabulary sets were classified as transparent regardless of age, suggesting that the potential analysability of the preschool child's input remains surprisingly invariant over time. The study provides baseline data for future studies on the development of morphological awareness in English-speaking schoolchildren.

The present study aims to investigate how conceptual symmetry plays a role in the use of spatial particles in English and to further examine its pedagogical implications via a corpus-based evaluation of the course books in senior high schools in Taiwan. More specifically, we adopt a quantitative corpus-based approach to investigate whether bipolar spatial particles (e.g., up/down) on the same spatial dimension (e.g., vertical axis) exhibit a symmetrical extension to similar sets of target domains in real language use. Our data is based on the British National Corpus. We examine the correlation patterns between 13 spatial particles and their co-occurring nouns in English preposition constructions through exploratory statistical methods. The distributional patterns of the spatial particles have clearly revealed different patterning on three dimensions with respect to their degrees of conceptual symmetry. On the other hand, we further analyze the distribution of the spatial particles in three major officially-approved versions of textbooks in senior high schools, namely, Far East, Lungteng and Sanmin. This evaluation features a critical comparison with the authentic corpus-based realization of these spatial particles in the BNC. The similarities and differences between the textbook illustration and the realistic corpus instantiation may shed light on the pedagogical practices for language teachers on the frontline.

We report on an analysis of spontaneous gesture production in 2-year-old children who come from three countries (Italy, United Kingdom, Australia) and who speak two languages (Italian, English), in an attempt to tease apart the influence of language and culture when comparing children from different cultural and linguistic environments. Eighty-seven monolingual children aged 24-30 months completed an experimental task measuring their comprehension and production of nouns and predicates. The Italian children scored significantly higher than the other groups on all lexical measures. With regard to gestures, British children produced significantly fewer pointing and speech combinations compared to Italian and Australian children, who did not differ from each other. In contrast, Italian children produced significantly more representational gestures than the other two groups. We conclude that spoken language development is primarily influenced by the input language over gesture production, whereas the combination of cultural and language environments affects gesture production.

Incidental learning of grammar has been an area of interest for many decades; nevertheless, existing research has primarily focused on artificial or semi-artificial languages. The present study examines the incidental acquisition of the grammar of a natural language by exposing adult speakers of an ungendered L1 (English) to the gender agreement patterns in Russian (a language that was novel to the learners). Both receptive and productive knowledge and the mediating role of working memory (WM) in learning were measured. Speakers of the ungendered language were able to successfully acquire receptive but not productive grammatical knowledge in a new language under incidental exposure. WM was engaged in production but not in a grammaticality judgment task in the incidental learning condition, indicating cognitive effort during knowledge retrieval.

We report three experiments that explore the effect of prior linguistic knowledge on implicit language learning. Native speakers of English from the United Kingdom and native speakers of Cantonese from Hong Kong participated in experiments that involved different learning materials. In Experiment 1, both participant groups showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and noun animacy. In Experiment 2, neither group showed learning of a mapping between articles and a linguistically anomalous concept (the number of capital letters in an English word or that of strokes in a Chinese character). In Experiment 3, the Chinese group, but not the English group, showed evidence of learning a mapping between articles and a concept derived from the Chinese classifier system. It was concluded that first language knowledge affected implicit language learning and that implicit learning, at least when natural language learning is concerned, is subject to constraints and biases.

This study investigates whether number dissimilarities on subject and object DPs facilitate the comprehension of subject- and object-extracted centre-embedded relative clauses in children with Grammatical Specific Language Impairment (G-SLI). We compared the performance of a group of English-speaking children with G-SLI (mean age: 12;11) with that of two groups of younger typically developing (TD) children, matched on grammar and receptive vocabulary, respectively. All groups were more accurate on subject-extracted relative clauses than object-extracted ones and, crucially, they all showed greater accuracy for sentences with dissimilar number features (i.e., one singular, one plural) on the head noun and the embedded DP. These findings are interpreted in the light of current psycholinguistic models of sentence comprehension in TD children and provide further insight into the linguistic nature of G-SLI.

Using a picture pointing task, this study examines toddlers' processing of phonological alternations that trigger sound changes in connected speech. Three experiments investigate whether 2;5- to 3-year-old children take into account assimilations--processes by which phonological features of one sound spread to adjacent sounds--for the purpose of word recognition (e.g., in English, "ten pounds" can be produced as "te[mp]ounds"). English toddlers ("n" = 18) show sensitivity to native place assimilations during lexical access in Experiment 1. Likewise, French toddlers ("n" = 27) compensate for French voicing assimilations in Experiment 2. However, French toddlers ("n" = 27) do not take into account a hypothetical non-native place assimilation rule in Experiment 3, suggesting that compensation for assimilation is already language specific. (Contains 5 tables and 4 figures.)

This paper presents a comprehensive overview of lexicogrammatical devices which highlight important or relevant points in lectures. Despite the established usefulness of discourse organizational cues for lecture comprehension and note-taking, very little is known about the marking of relevance in this genre. The current overview of lexicogrammatical relevance markers combines a qualitative and quantitative investigation of 160 lectures from the British Academic Spoken English (BASE) corpus. These markers could mostly be classified according to their main element into adjective, noun, verb and adverb patterns. Verb patterns were the most common, followed by noun patterns. The verb pattern V clause (e.g., "remember slavery had already been legally abolished") and the noun pattern MN v-link (e.g., "the point is") are the predominant types of relevance markers. The discrepancy between the prevalent markers and what may be thought of as prototypical or included in EAP textbooks as relevance markers also demonstrates the need for corpus linguistic research. Implications for EAP course design, teaching English for lecturing purposes, and educational research are discussed. (Contains 6 tables.)

Universities and students collaborate in a shared language of excellence, quality and choice, and become part of the same discourse of marketisation, commodification and globalisation, where each plays their part as provider and consumer in a highly competitive international area. Whilst there are an increasing number of studies which focus on the use of the Internet and websites, there are still very few articles on the use of websites in the context of higher education and university choice. This study uses a sample of 60 personal statements from online postgraduate applications submitted by international students. The extracts are coded for analysis and compared against the website information provided on university and British Council websites during the time period of the applications. Applicants used specific nouns, adjectives and phrases published on the British Council website and the website of their target university as reasons for choosing a university. (Contains 6 tables.)

Three experiments examined the hypothesis that the demonstrative noun phrase (NP) that N, as an anadeictic expression, preferentially refers to the less salient referent in a discourse representation when used anaphorically, whereas the anaphoric pronoun he or she preferentially refers to the highly-focused referent. The findings, from a sentence completion task and two reading time experiments that used gender to create ambiguous and unambiguous coreference, reveal that the demonstrative NP specifically orients processing toward a less salient referent when there is no gender cue discriminating between different possible referents. These findings show the importance of taking into account the discourse function of the anaphor itself and its influence on the process of searching for the referent. (Contains 1 figure, 4 tables and 4 footnotes.)

Theories of reference assume that the referent's salience in the discourse context affects the choice between pronouns and definite noun phrases or names. We examined whether and how the referent's inherent properties affect the choice of expressions by investigating animacy. Experiment 1 showed that pronouns were more frequent for animates than inanimates after discourse factors were controlled, and Experiments 2 and 3 showed that the referent's animacy affected pronoun use when the competitor's animacy was counterbalanced, suggesting that the referent's inherent salience has an effect. Furthermore, when the referent was animate, pronouns were less frequent when the competitor was also animate than when it was inanimate, whereas no effect of animacy congruence was found with inanimate referents, suggesting that when the competitor was salient and similar in meaning to the referent, it made the referent's representation less accessible. (Contains 4 figures and 1 table.)

This study investigated whether the semantic similarity and grammatical class of distracter words affects the naming of pictured actions (verbs) in Japanese. Three experiments used the picture-word interference paradigm with participants naming picturable actions while ignoring distracters. In all three experiments, we manipulated the semantic similarity between distracters and targets (similar vs. dissimilar verbs) and the grammatical class of semantically dissimilar distracters (verbs, verbal nouns, and also nouns in Experiment 3) in addition to task demands (single word naming vs. phrase/sentence generation). While Experiment 1 used visually presented distracters, Experiment 2 and 3 used auditory distracter words to rule out possible confounding factors of orthography (kanji vs. hiragana). We found the same results for all three experiments: robust semantic interference in the absence of any effects of grammatical class. We discuss the lack of grammatical class effects in terms of structural characteristics of the Japanese language. (Contains 3 figures, 3 tables and 12 footnotes.)

Effective writing is to some degree characterised by the ability to use complex grammatical structures. However, grammatical complexity is poorly defined in linguistics and related disciplines such as literacy. This empirical study examined the notion of grammatical complexity and its relevance to literacy. Complexity is multifaceted, so for reasons of scope the study was confined to nominal structures, i.e. the noun phrase (e.g. "I finished the book on Marx") and the nominal clause (e.g. "I heard what you were doing"). Such nominal structures were analysed by frequency and category in a bank of essays from Year 10/11 pupils in a UK comprehensive school. The results suggest that complexity is a product of the interaction of grammar with the context of production, and that in literacy it is helpful to view grammar as a system of options that can be manipulated to maximise the meaning potential of a text.

The theory of syntactic bootstrapping proposes that children can use syntax to infer the meanings of words. This paper presents experimental evidence that children are also able to use word inflections to infer word reference. Twenty-four- and 30-month-olds were tested in a preferential looking experiment. Children were shown a pair of novel images, one showing a single object, the other a pair of objects, whilst they heard novel words with and without the English plural inflection. Word-image associations were then assessed. Analyses revealed that the older group of children had learnt to associate the words with the appropriate pictures. These results demonstrate that early in the third year, children are readily able to identify whether a spoken word is a singular or plural form, that they have a proper understanding of the significance of plural morphology and that they can deploy this knowledge inferentially to aid the process of word learning--a strategy we call inflectional bootstrapping. (Contains 2 figures and 4 tables.)

The ultimate goal of this article is to show that consist of and made up of are somewhat different in their use. It is worth pointing out that the type made up of (1,129 tokens) may be preferable to the type consist of (993 tokens) in the UK. A further point to note is that consist of is 57.14% the same as made up of. Talking about consist of and made up of in the Hansard Corpus (20, April 2022. Online https://english-corpora.org/hansard/), the former is preferable to the latter in the British parliament. Quite interestingly, consist of was the most preferable one (942 tokens) for British politicians in 1960, but it was the least preferred one (49 tokens) in 1800. On the other hand, made up of reached a peak (1,020 tokens) in the British parliament in 1990. More importantly, the BNC (20, April 2022. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc) shows that consist of people is the most frequently used one in the UK, whereas made up of people and made up of representatives are the most widely used ones. Finally, it is worthwhile noting that 6.66% of forty five nouns are the collocations of both consist of and made up of. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The main purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that impressed by and impressed with are low similarity synonyms. A major point to note is that impressed by and impressed with show different patterns in all genres of the COCA (10, December 2021. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/coca). It is interesting to note that impressed by and impressed with show the same pattern in the misc. genre of the BNC (10, December 2021. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc), but they show a different pattern in six genres. It is significant that impressed by and impressed with show a high degree of similarity in the misc. genre, but do not show it in the academic genre. The COCA (10, December 2021. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/coca) shows that only 13.63% of forty-four nouns are collocations of both impressed by and impressed with. Similarly, the BNC (10, December 2021. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc) indicates that impressed by Mr. and impressed by arguments are the most frequently used types in the UK. The BNC (10, December 2021. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc) further shows that impressed with home and impressed with Mr. are the most preferred collocations in the UK. Finally, the BNC (10, December 2021. Online https://corpus.byu.edu/bnc) shows that only 2.5% of forty nouns are the collocation of both impressed by and impressed with. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Research dissemination through academic blogs creates opportunities for writers to reach wider audiences. With COVID-19, public dissemination of research impacts daily practices, and national and international policies, and in countries like the UK and Spain, The Conversation publishes accessible COVID-19 themed research. Such academic blogs are important to the global academy, yet the role of authorial stance therein is notably under-investigated. This paper presents a corpus-based contrastive analysis of "stance nouns + that/de que" in a comparable corpus of English and Spanish COVID-19 themed academic blogs from The Conversation. The analysis identifies similarities and differences across languages that reflect how COVID-19 is framed in each language. For example, Spanish academics use Possibility and Factualness nouns when self-sourcing their stances with expanding strategies, while English academics use Argument and Idea nouns with external sources in contracting strategies. Overall, this paper adds to current linguistic knowledge on academic blogs and scientific communication surrounding COVID-19. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Using comparative sociolinguistic methods, we probe the underlying mechanisms governing the variation between possessive determiners, my bike, and the definite article, the bike, in possessive contexts in two mainstream English varieties (Canadian and British English, N = 6,217). Results indicate the is stable and pervasive, occurring approximately 30 percent of the time with personal domain possessed nouns. For some nouns, e.g. dog and cat, the occurs over 75 percent of the time. The Canadian Oxford Dictionary records possessive the as chiefly British, while Quirk et al. (1985: 271–272) observe that only low-status men use it; however, we find no difference between the UK and Canada, nor a significant gender or education effect in either dataset. When we model the variation between forms according to conceptions of ownership, we find an underlying system for encoding communal possession that transcends social categories and dialect: the more that possession is communal, the more the is used. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the first article in this series (Murphy 2016), I recounted Geoff Pullum's (2014) dismissal of British-American linguistic differences as ‘mostly nouns’. From a theoretical linguist's position, nouns can seem simpler and less interesting than other parts of speech, since concrete noun senses are fairly self-contained. Compare a noun like cup to an adjective like big. You can picture a cup in and of itself, but in imagining big we need to think about things that could be big. And what we mean by big changes depending on which thing we are talking about. Since the meaning of cup does not have to interact with other words in order to get its meaning, investigating concrete nouns is a low priority for many linguistic semanticists. It can be ‘difficult to distinguish where the discussion of a noun's sense stops and where discussion of its extension (the things it refers to) begins’ (Murphy 2010: 149), and so that aspect of meaning is often left to philosophers and psychologists: What does love mean, really? or How do you know which things to call green? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Double case is a widespread phenomenon in which a feature, typically a case feature which originates on a noun phrase A, is realised externally to a feature which originates on a noun phrase B which is a subconstituent of A. Although not included in the above collection, examples of the English phrasal genitive such as [ the girl who invited [ me’s]] best friend and [ a friend of [ mine’s]] mother, in which the genitive case marker is realised externally to a pronoun in the accusative or genitive case, fit this paradigm exactly. In this paper, I argue therefore that any analysis of the English genitive must be consistent with the constraints imposed by the general typology of double case. Having outlined an edge-feature analysis which satisfies these constraints, I further show that, in distinction to postlexical clitic analyses, it provides an account of Kruisinga’s observation that the English phrasal genitive, as in * the queens of England’s, is incompatible with (regular) plural marking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Standard English is not a monolithic entity but shows systematic variation in terms of regional or stylistic preferences and ongoing change. The corpus-based approach has been used to study these patterns of variation in a number of so-called inner-circle varieties. Linguists have only recently started to collect data on variation in outer-circle varieties. The cumulative evidence from a number of such studies will eventually allow us to determine whether these varieties are still oriented toward exonormative models or whether they are developing internal (endonormative) models of usage. This article aims to contribute to this field of research by investigating one syntactic variable—concord with collective nouns—in two outer-circle varieties: Singaporean English, which is British-based, and Philippine English, which is American-based. For both varieties, components of the International Corpus of English are examined. The results show that neither Singaporean nor Philippine English patterns exactly like its "parent" variety. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

British and American speakers exhibit different verb number agreement patterns when sentence subjects have collective head nouns. From linguistic and psycholinguistic accounts of how agreement is implemented, three alternative hypotheses can be derived to explain these differences. The hypotheses involve variations in the representation of notional number, disparities in how notional and grammatical number are used, and inequalities in the grammatical number specifications of collective nouns. We carried out a series of corpus analyses, production experiments, and norming studies to test these hypotheses. The results converge to suggest that British and American speakers are equally sensitive to variations in notional number and implement subject-verb agreement in much the same way, but are likely to differ in the lexical specifications of number for collectives. The findings support a psycholinguistic theory that explains verb and pronoun agreement within a parallel architecture of lexical and syntactic formulation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]