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Many datasets resulting from participant ratings for word norms and also concreteness ratios are available. However, the concreteness information of infrequent words and non-words is rare. This work aims to propose a model for estimating the concreteness of infrequent and new lexicons. Here, we used Lancaster sensory-motor word norms to predict the word concreteness ratios of an English word dataset. After removing the missing values, we employed a stepwise multiple linear regression (SW-MLR) procedure for choosing an optimum number of norms to develop a predictive multiple regression model. Finally, we validate our model using 10-fold cross-validation. The final model could predict concreteness by Residual Mean Standard Error equal to 0.723 and R-Square of 0.515. Also, our results showed that all 11 variables of this dataset except the Head-mouth parameter are useful predictors. In conclusion, as a growing demand to know the concreteness values of non-words and also infrequent words is evident, our statistical method can pave the way for controlled experiments when choosing non-words as a stimulus is critical. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Blends have long been a source of new lexical elements in English word formation. Classic examples of such elements include -burger in words like soyburger or oysterburger , -furter in words like turkeyfurter or chickenfurter and -scape in cloudscape or manscape. Among more recent examples are -zilla (bridezilla , momzilla), -cation (staycation , mancation) or -splain(ing) (mansplaining , whitesplaining). Some of these have been studied in greater or lesser detail, highlighting various researchers' interests in the topic, such as regularities in blend formation, formal and semantic patterns of blends, or the emergence of new combining forms from lexical blends (see in particular Baldi & Dawar, 2000; Frath, 2005; Kemmer, 2003; Lalić–Krstin, 2014; Lehrer, 1998; Mattiello, 2017a, 2017b; Panić–Kavgić & Kavgić, 2009). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Reading contributes to vocabulary development and is regarded as an efficient pedagogical approach to vocabulary learning. Through reading, learners are exposed to new words in their rightful context of use. This study investigates the effects of input enhancements on incidental academic word learning through reading English academic texts among English as a Second Language (ESL) undergraduates. The study compares different input conditions, gloss, contextual clue and no clue. Twelve academic words from Coxhead's Academic Word List (AWL) were selected as the target words for this study. Three vocabulary tests were employed to assess academic words learnt incidentally from the texts in terms of their form, meaning recognition and ability to recall. Seventy-nine proficient and less proficient Malaysian ESL undergraduates participated in this study. Findings revealed that proficient participants recognised more target words compared to less proficient participants. In addition, gloss increases the noticeability of the target words, at least at the form recognition level. The study's findings suggest that input enhancement would better impact vocabulary learning if integrated into a reading task or facilitated by vocabulary learning instruction. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Among the English words first recorded in William Langland's Piers Plowman is araten "reprove." This new, or newly literary, word encapsulates a peculiar quality of Piers Plowman, its cyclical depiction of verbal combat between opponents with unequal cultural authority. The word araten is perfect for Piers Plowman and plausibly was coined to purpose. This note suggests that araten cuts both ways in Piers Plowman's multilayered analysis of class, and more broadly that visions of reproof with their political, social, literary, and theological implications were a central form through which Langland extended the A text into the B and C versions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Some linguists have claimed that foreign language learners are unaware that English words containing Greek and Latin roots are analyzable. One purpose of the present study was to assess this claim. A second purpose was to see whether making these learners aware of the analyzability of these words would help them to expand their vocabulary. The final purpose was to find out whether students find the meanings of certain types of such words easier to guess than others. The 30 subjects in this study were pretested, given instruction in analyzing words into their component roots and guessing their meanings, and then post-tested. Descriptive and inferential statistics were used to evaluate the hypotheses, and these yielded the following results: (1) advanced Iraqi EFL learners are not aware of the analyzability of this type of words, and (2) making these learners aware of this analyzability will enable them to expand their vocabulary considerably, (3) learners find guessing the meanings of words containing Greek roots easier than those of words containing Latin roots, and (4) learners find guessing the meanings of words whose roots have not undergone any linguistic changes easier than those of words whose roots have undergone such changes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In our publication, the specifics of the use of neologisms and the peculiarities of their translation into Ukrainian are analyzed on the basis of modern English language periodicals. Neologisms reflect the trends of modern English; they are constantly appearing and some of them become part of everyday lexicon. Therefore, the constant growth of the number of neologisms and their impact on language development is the cause of the relevance of the study. The purpose of the research is to analyze new lexical items at the morphological and semantic levels, identify trends in the creation and translation of lexical items in English-language media. The material of the study was 110 neologisms, selected by the method of continuous sampling from articles of modern English online publications. We have researched political articles of BBC and CNN. The prospect of further study of modern media English neologisms lies in the possibility to establish the cognitive mechanisms of derivational processes. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Speech is basic to language, written word came into existence as a graphic manipulation representing the spoken word. It is for this reason that even when we write or read, we continue to speak the written word in our mind. Dr. B. Ballard states, "We are ever liable to forget that language is first and foremost a spoken thing, not a written thing. Its appeal is to the ear, not to the eye." He has further stated that "the bulk of mankind are as illiterate as our multitudinous ancestors and the literate themselves speak far more abundantly than they write." This statement in no way divests the written word of its significance. Due to this, Dr. Ballard, in his book Teaching and Testing English, recommends, "Speech training should have precedence over learning to read, in point of time as well as in point of importance." F.G. French too is of the same opinion when he writes, "Speech is the groundwork; all the rest are buil t up from it. Through speech, the pupil learns to make the direct connection between the English word or phrase and the object, action or idea it bears. He learns the habit of using words in the correct sentence-patterns and phrase-patterns and he can learn this in no other way." This paper discusses about role and position of English language in India. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Eurasian Journal of Philology: Science & Education is the property of Al-Farabi Kazakh National University and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

Within the broad field of word formation in English, the paper outlines particular available means for production of new meanings in established forms of words in the English language. More specifically, the paper presents two major types of production of complex forms (derivation and compounding), with accompanying definitions and generalisations which are substantiated with relevant examples which are further discussed and analysed.

This work is an attempt to devise a Stemmer that can remove both prefix and suffix together from a given word in English language. For a given input word, our method considers all possible internal N -grams for detection of potential stems. We frame a hypothesis where the stem length is closest to the half of the length of the input word. A standard English dictionary has been employed to identify morphologically correct N -grams in the process. We apply our techniques over a random sample of 100 English words, each possessing both prefix and suffix. We also compare our proposed Stemmer with three standard algorithms from the literature. Empirical results exhibit that our technique performs better than the rest of the stemmers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corpora are well-known for the affordance to make linguistic regularities salient. Since the coinage of the term 'data-driven learning' (DDL) in the 1990s, much has been done to investigate the effects of DDL on learning vocabulary, most notably lexico-grammatical patterns. However, less researched is how learners construct vocabulary knowledge from scratch with DDL approaches. While generalizing recurring lexico-grammatical patterns is relatively straightforward, deducing meanings of unknown words from truncated concordances can be challenging. In this exploratory study, learners constructed knowledge of new words with the inductive approach or deductive one; and their retention of word knowledge was measured holistically using a word knowledge framework. The ways in which learners availed themselves of corpus data in the construction of word knowledge were also examined. The results provide evidence that the inductive approach is more conducive to developing collocational knowledge; and the deductive approach provides the opportunity to consolidate definitional knowledge of the newly acquired words. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

One of the most difficult tasks to master among EFL learners is pronunciation. Therefore, this study highlights the difficulties of English pronunciation among Egyptian people. The objective of this study was to identify the specific sounds that are commonly mispronounced by Egyptian people in English words, and tofind out the strategies that might help Egyptian people to improve their pronunciation. A qualitative case study is used in this research, where video samples were used in order to select information rich cases. Observing Egyptian's people through selected videos from YouTube was the way of collecting the sample. The researcher watched thefive short videos in order tofind the pronunciationproblems of Egyptian people. Thefindings of this study showed that the samples had difficulties to pronounce some consonant and vowel sounds. The study also provided some useful strategies to avoid English pronunciation problems. Such study will help the researchers as well as teachers to know the problems faced by EFL learners in pronunciation and try to overcome such difficulties. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The idea of England as a land of superiority or a perfect utopia has been heralded in the psyche of the Indians and this is an exercise taught by the West to remain superior in the eyes of Indians. This utopian idea of England clashes due to an actual encounter or ocular impressions of the Indians. This paper focuses on the resistance to the dominant centre and to create a counter - discursive strategy that has enabled the Indian writers to fight back in the form of writing back to the Empire. Writing back to the West was important in order to redefine the image of India and also to unravel the larger - than - life idea of England. Dean Mahomed is one of those writers who focuses on this, and through his writing, he showcases this. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Since Mo Yan was given the Nobel Prize for Literature-iterary translation has been heatedly debated. Howard Goldblatt, as one of Mo Yan's major translators of English world, is gaining global eyes. And his translations are so popular that some scholars claim that Howard flatters MoYan himself, and he has rewritten Mo Yan. To make the debate known to the public, the thesis explores Howard's translation of Red Sorghum, based on the perspective of Media-translatology. In the translation, Howard Goldblatt has made addition, subtraction, rearrangement, etc., in the translation. His changes and adjustments are quite different from the ST, but it retains the image, structure of the ST, and it adopts aesthetic fidelity, which is a universal principle in literary translation. Howard's choice of MoYan is another reason to help him achieve success in translation for western readers are particularly interested in Mo Yan's invention of genre, style, techniques and language. And what Howard's action has coincided with the significant opening-up policy of China is also a great power to popularize his translation. Actually, Howard's performance and practice are necessary steps to communicate culture in cross-cultural interactions, he is not only a communicator of Chinese literature, modern and contemporary, but also a constant contributor of world civilization and culture, for his new attribute in translation--a thirdness. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Copyright of Journal of Educational & Psychological Sciences is the property of Arab Journal of Sciences & Research Publishing (AJSRP) and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

The aim of this paper is to extract out the Urduized English words from BBC Urdu Newspaper, Pakistan, and to trace back various reasons which are responsible for code mixing and borrowing in Urdu language which has been used in BBC Urdu Newspaper, Pakistan. English as a language became the language of globe as a Lingua Franca. Most of the people came from various countries communicate in English language. As a result it has affected each other’s languages and it became part of the languages consciously and unconsciously. Such a living example from these languages is Urdu language which had gotten and even still it is getting words from English Language. Some of the reasons of Urduization of English words in Urdu language are the outcome of scientific inventions, modernization, globalism, colonialism, prestige, status and sometime a source language concept is lacking in the target language. In this paper, which is both quantitative and qualitative in its nature, Urduized English words extracted from BBC Urdu Newspaper, 4th march and 26th May, 2016.Then the words are categorized into nouns, verbs, adjectives, and adverbs. Each word is describe from various perspectives such as etymological, historical, political, and cultural etc. Total number of words are eight hundred seventy five and out these eight hundred seventy five words, sixty words are used as Urduized English words. The percentage of Urduized English words are seven percent. For the study, the BBC Urdu Newspaper has been chosen as it represents the language in use. It was selected for the purpose due to its most accessible nature and can be read online in Pakistan. This paper elucidates that there are large number of English words in Urdu language which are part of English Language. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Classification of English biotechnological terminology is proposed in this article. The author identifies the main groups of terms referring to general scientific, basic and proper terminology that have emerged within the framework of this science. Basic terms that have been borrowed from other terminological systems and have retained their original meaning, derivatives and complex terms (word combinations), terms borrowed from adjacent to biotechnology terminologies, but partially changed their semantics have been identified from the point of view of the formation and development of terminology. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article is devoted to the word-forming analysis of onecomponent terms that are part of the veterinary terminology. The most productive methods of term formation, as well as their structural types, are determined. Morphological ways of formation of one-component English terms of veterinary medicine are described. On the basis of the analysis of existing forms of one-component terms, the most productive methods and models for their formation, using a large number of Latin and Greek elements, are established. We hope that, through a better awareness of the inner structure and roots of veterinary specialized terms, students in this field will have a better perception upon their field of specialization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Examining the vocabulary according to various criteria is an extremely complex task. It is made even more complex, if we intend to cover the issue of neologisms only, because it is not always possible to know exactly when a new word was coined. Using a really detailed online source of neologisms, Word Spy, which also includes the dates of the earliest use, I attempt to count the words coined between 2014 and 2018 and registered on Word Spy. My paper - which examines only that source of new words, and which is therefore a case study - also covers these words' word-formation patterns, the frequency of the parts of speech, and the conceptual contents. The ratio of the parts of speech offers us some insight into English native speakers' habits in terms of word formation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Age of acquisition (AoA) is an important variable in word recognition research. Up to now, nearly all psychology researchers examining the AoA effect have used ratings obtained from adult participants. An alternative basis for determining AoA is directly testing children's knowledge of word meanings at various ages. In educational research, scholars and teachers have tried to establish the grade at which particular words should be taught by examining the ages at which children know various word meanings. Such a list is available from Dale and O'Rourke's (1981) Living Word Vocabulary for nearly 44 thousand meanings coming from over 31 thousand unique word forms and multiword expressions. The present article relates these test-based AoA estimates to lexical decision times as well as to AoA adult ratings, and reports strong correlations between all of the measures. Therefore, test-based estimates of AoA can be used as an alternative measure. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study investigated the relationship between processing time and comprehensibility judgments in non-native listeners' perception of L2 speech as a function of an L1- match between speaker and listener and non-native listeners' proficiency. Instructed L2-English learners differing in L1 (Catalan, German) and L2-proficiency (Low, High), and native-English listeners performed speeded speech processing tasks with English word and sentence stimuli spoken by L1-Catalan, L1-German and native English speakers, and rated the sentence stimuli for comprehensibility. The results showed significant moderate correlations between processing times and comprehensibility judgments mediated by an interaction between listeners' L1 and their L2 proficiency. Non-native English was processed faster and judged to be more comprehensible by non-native listeners if produced by L1-matched speakers. When non-native English was produced by L1-matched speakers, low-proficiency listeners found it easier to process and understand than native English, whereas high-proficiency listeners showed a processing advantage over native English listeners [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In terms of word formation and word building processes, language learning strategies may be more or less productive depending on language pairs. The English language has many 'additive processesʼ (Hatch & Brown 1995: 196) in word building, such as reduplication and blending. Some examples of reduplication in English are words in which an element has been added to emphasize quantity or a lack of it (e.g. hush hush, teeny tiny). In English sentences, emphasis may also be expressed using reduplication (e.g. 'He is very very sorry'). This paper examines how 42 Millennials whose L1 is Bosnian responded to questions on whether they activate their passive vocabulary (of English) and in what instances they resort to additive processes, language borrowing or language mixing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The present study analyzes present be leveling with pivot is (as in I is, we is, the old dogs is) in Tristan da Cunha English, a variety of South Atlantic English that developed in geographic isolation and under intense contact conditions. The findings, based on data from a total of 45 speakers born throughout the 20th century, indicate that community-wide variation correlates with social history; whereas present be was subject to (near-)categorical leveling until the 1940s, an opening-up phase after World War II saw interaction with speakers of other dialects on the island, which triggered an increase of a standard am/is/are concord pattern. Variability began to increase from the 1950s onward and the community has now frayed out widely in its usage of leveled is forms (ranging from 10% to over 90% in speakers of the youngest generation, born in the 1980s). The internal constraint ranking for preceding environment in younger generations was partially restructured, which suggests that the social changes affected the grammatical variable. Three outliers represent exonormative orientation and outward mobility. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article explores how morphological instruction could increase morphological awareness and success in reading and writing for English language learners (ELLs). A research which outlines the benefits of this instruction on ELLs is discussed. The role of morphological awareness in preparing students to read with understanding is highlighted. The morphemes, the smallest unit of meaning in a word, is discussed. The special role of derivational morphology for ELLs is also examined.

Students' knowledge of morphology can play a critical role in vocabulary development, and by extension, reading comprehension and student writing. This reflection describes the nature of this knowledge and how it may be developed through the examination of generative vocabulary knowledge and the role of the spelling system in developing this knowledge. In addition, it explores morphological development and the significant insights and understandings that students should attain: the basic nature of word formation processes, the spelling-meaning connection, the generativity of morphology: roots and affixes, etymology and morphology, and the role of morphological knowledge in learning other languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The current study focused on the production of non-contrastive geminates across different boundary types in English to investigate the hypothesis that word-internal heteromorphemic geminates may differ from those that arise across a word boundary. In this study, word-internal geminates arising from affixation, and described as either assimilated or concatenated, were matched to heteromorphemic geminates arising from sequences of identical consonants that spanned a word boundary and to word-internal singletons. Word-internal geminates were found to be longer than matched singletons in absolute and relative terms. By contrast, heteromorphemic geminates that occurred at word boundaries were only longer than matched singletons in absolute terms. In addition, heteromorphemic geminates in two word phrases were typically “pulled apart” in careful speech; that is, speakers marked the boundaries between free morphemes with pitch changes and pauses. Morpheme boundaries in words with bound affixes were very rarely highlighted in this way. These results are taken to indicate that most word-internal heteromorphemic geminates are represented as a single long consonant in the speech plan rather than as a consonant sequence. Only those geminates that arise in two word phrases exhibit phonetic characteristics that are fully consistent with the representation of two identical consonants crossing a morpheme boundary. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Numerous words used in English today come from other languages. There are lots of Latin and Greek and French influences on most European languages like English, and Spanish. You would be surprised at how this basic awareness of the origin of the English language can be of great help to us. English language has been enriched by borrowing from foreign tongues, but it is not merely by borrowing; new words can easily be created and are being created almost every day. English has a long history of growth since long; basically it can be divided in three periods - old English, Middle English and modern English. The period of old English falls between 450 and 1150 a. C. It was quite flexible like many European languages such as Greek, Latin and Indo-European languages. This period is marked as a period of formation and growth of English as a new language. The most meaningful changes came in Middle English between 1150 and 1500 a. C. The grammar was also changed. It was no more flexible but it had become completely analytical. This remarkable change was due to the invasion by the Normandy, which continued for about 400 years. Thousands of words were added to its vocabulary from French and Latin and its growth was in full swing. The period of modern English started from 1500 till the date. At this time the printing press was invented which eased the conservative process of grammar and orthography. The need for a standard language for its readers was badly felt at that time. The discoveries and travels by the British all over the world highly accelerated the transmission process of new vocabulary and its growth. They came into contact of about 50 languages, among which especially French and Spanish highly enriched English. In this period, there occurred notable changes in its pronunciation and phonology. There are a variety of ways in which a new word can be formed out of the native speech material, showing thereby, that English has grown from within and is still growing of itself. The different ways by which new words have been formed are: [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Abstract: The left inferior frontal gyrus (LIFG) exhibits increased responsiveness when people listen to words composed of speech sounds that frequently co-occur in the English language (), termed high phonotactic frequency (). The current experiment aimed to further characterize the relation of phonotactic frequency to LIFG activity by manipulating word intelligibility in participants of varying age. Thirty six native English speakers, 19–79 years old (mean=50.5, sd=21.0) indicated with a button press whether they recognized 120 binaurally presented consonant–vowel–consonant words during a sparse sampling fMRI experiment (TR=8s). Word intelligibility was manipulated by low-pass filtering (cutoff frequencies of 400Hz, 1000Hz, 1600Hz, and 3150Hz). Group analyses revealed a significant positive correlation between phonotactic frequency and LIFG activity, which was unaffected by age and hearing thresholds. A region of interest analysis revealed that the relation between phonotactic frequency and LIFG activity was significantly strengthened for the most intelligible words (low-pass cutoff at 3150Hz). These results suggest that the responsiveness of the left inferior frontal cortex to phonotactic frequency reflects the downstream impact of word recognition rather than support of word recognition, at least when there are no speech production demands. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Abstract: The present study explored whether language-nonselective access in bilinguals occurs across word classes in a sentence context. Dutch–English bilinguals were auditorily presented with English (L2) sentences while looking at a visual world. The sentences contained interlingual homophones from distinct lexical categories (e.g., the English verb spoke, which overlaps phonologically with the Dutch noun for ghost, spook). Eye movement recordings showed that depictions of referents of the Dutch (L1) nouns attracted more visual attention than unrelated distractor pictures in sentences containing homophones. This finding shows that native language objects are activated during second language verb processing despite the structural information provided by the sentence context. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Copyright of Psychologie Française is the property of Elsevier B.V. and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)

This journal article takes issue with the morphological structure of complex nouns in Old English. This stage of the language is characterised by a rich morphology and, with most of its lexemes being morphologically complex, Old English provides a fertile field of study for the kind of analysis here undertaken. The present study analyses the interaction between affixation, compounding, zero-derivation and inflection in terms of the feeding of the morphological processes, that is, the successive order in which they appear, thus allowing for the establishment of regular patterns of noun formation and generalizations on lexical creation. Overall, 119 different word structures have been identified, depending on the type and number of morphological processes involved. The conclusion is reached that non-basic nouns in Old English contain up to six levels of complexity, with the bulk of the formations consisting of three and four levels, that is, with three or four derivational steps taking place. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims to be an introduction to the General Service List (GSL) that brings together descriptive data with material otherwise dispersed throughout the literature. The discussion first provides an historical overview of the work that scholars, researchers, and educators used as foundations for the manufacturing of the GSL. Following, a collection of modern studies is presented in an effort to critically assess the contents and intent of the GSL. In this manner, the paper attempts to provide comprehensive information on the manufacture, content, characteristics, and analyses of the GSL that can serve to inform those interested in the GSL, in particular, and the compilation and assessment of new word-lists, in general. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Verbs are traditionally assumed to have an 'argument structure', which imposes various constraints on form and meaning of the noun phrases that go with the verb, and an 'event structure', which defines certain temporal characteristics of the 'event' to which the verb relates. In this paper, I argue that these two structures should be brought together. The verb assigns descriptive properties to one or more arguments at one or more temporal intervals, hence verbs have an 'argument-time structure'. This argument-time structure as well as the descriptive properties connected to it can be modified by various morphological and syntactic operations. This approach allows a relatively simple analysis of familiar but not well-defined temporal notions such as tense, aspect and Aktionsart. This will be illustrated for English. It will be shown that a few simple morphosyntactic operations on the argument-time structure might account for form and meaning of the perfect, the progressive, the passive and related constructions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper is both a linguistic study and a search for learning using word formation, such as English compound. Compound constructions are very common in everyday speech and all types of written texts. They have been selected for study because ELL (English Language Learners) often ignore them from their academic writing. The reasons for conducting such research are also linguistic and pedagogic in nature. ELL might find it difficult to cope with the complex constructions which might absent in their languages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examines the discrimination of words ending with voiceless stops /p t k/ in first language (L1) and second language (L2) by three groups of native Thai participants. These participants differed in their countries of residence and experience with L2 English in the formal education system. The first group (T1) was a group of 18 Thai listeners who were living in Australia. The second and third groups consisted of 12 university students (T2) and 12 high-school students (T3) living in Thailand. Eighteen Australian English (AusE) listeners were included as controls. English and Thai words minimally contrasting in the final stop (e.g. ?cap? vs. ?cat?) were presented to the listeners to investigate whether L2 phonetic learning occurs even for the contrasts that are expected to be discriminated with high accuracy from the onset of L2 learning and if so, how it is influenced by L2 experience. All three Thai groups showed reasonably accurate discrimination for both English and Thai words, but only T1 showed discrimination accuracy comparable to AusE in English. Further, only T3 was clearly more accurate in discriminating unreleased Thai than English stop contrasts, most of which were accompanied with release bursts. These two findings are taken to be evidence for phonetic learning of specific aspects of L2 contrasts rather than positive L1 transfer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper argues against the view of intrusive [r] as a synchronically arbitrary insertion process. Instead, it is seen as a phonologically natural process, which can be modelled within the framework of Optimality Theory (OT). Insertion of [r] in phonologically restricted environments is a consequence of a more general theory of consonant epenthesis outlined here. This theory ties epenthesis in with the notion of prominence and strives to formalize a general theory of epenthesis which explains why glottal stops and glides are crosslinguistically frequently found epenthetic consonants, although in different prosodic contexts. I argue that glottal stops are optimal margin consonants and thus inserted in margin positions (e.g. word-initially) while glides are optimal peak consonants, inserted in peak positions (e.g. as hiatus breakers). This hypothesis is derived from sonority-based prominence scales [Prince, A., Smolensky, P., 1993. Optimality Theory: Constraint Interaction in Generative Grammar. Ms. Rutgers University and the University of Colorado at Boulder]. Intrusive [r] can then be understood as the optimal consonant in a peak position when glide formation is blocked, because [r] is the most sonorous possible element in this position. Spreading-based or perceptually grounded accounts of intrusive [r] are consequently rejected under this approach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The present study is an attempt to account for current changes taking place in the behaviour of what are commonly taken to be stress-neutral endings in contemporary British English. The methodological framework being that of Lionel Guierre, this study aims for comprehensive coverage, via a survey of Guierre’s original database (which was initially compiled from the 12th edition of Daniel Jones’English Pronouncing Dictionary, 1964) and a systematic collation of all relevant items with the entries of current phonetic corpora such as the two editions so far available of The Longman Pronunciation Dictionary, by Wells (1990, 2000), and the thoroughly updated 15th edition of Jones’English Pronouncing Dictionary, by Hartman et al. (1997). From the entries of the above-mentioned dictionaries, it clearly appears that, in contemporary English, word stress is subject to variation and changes to a much larger extent than generally held. Thus, stress shifts are commonly observed in conjunction with allegedly neutral (and very productive) suffixes such as-ed,-ing,-ly,-atory or-able. Whilst some of these shifts can be ascribed to conflictual constraints, most are quite obviously induced by a system of rules governed by word categories and the quality of the syllable to which these suffixes attach. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

The section provides an overview of works covering English language morphology. An Introduction to English Morphology, by Andrew Carstairs-McCarthy, has chapters on words, inflection derivation the history of English word formation and words in languages in general. Among general morphological issues, the extent to which morphology mirrors syntax has continued to occupy several minds. Joseph Edmonds sees A Common Basis for Syntax and Morphology: Tri-Level Lexical Insertion. He points out that the Right Hand Head Rule of morphology is also encountered in many syntactic phrases, and goes on to suggest that the heads of words are also heads of phrases. Also, Laurie Bauer, in Why Are We Linguists and Not Linguisticians? tries to trace the semantic and pragmatic factors that have governed the fortunes of the -ician suffix.

Focuses on Anne McCaffrey's use of back-formations of words in the novel `The Rowan,' to describe certain ideas. Use of the word jerry-rigged; Comparison with the creation of the word televise; Use of the word contraption.