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This study attempts to shed new light on one of the most notoriously challenging aspects of English language instruction—the English phrasal verbs. The highest frequency phrasal verb constructions in the 100‐million‐word British National Corpus are identified and analyzed. The findings indicate that a small subset of 20 lexical verbs combines with eight adverbial particles (160 combinations) to account for more than one half of the 518,923 phrasal verb occurrences identified in the megacorpus. A more specific analysis indicates that only 25 phrasal verbs account for nearly one third of all phrasal‐verb occurrences in the British National Corpus, and 100 phrasal verbs account for more than one half of all such items. Subsequent semantic analyses show that these 100 high‐frequency phrasal verb forms have potentially 559 variant‐meaning senses. The authors discuss how learners, teachers, and materials developers might utilize the findings of the study to improve instruction of phrasal verbs in English language education.

Linguistic studies of evidentiality, the coding of source of knowledge, have often appeared divided into two camps: those whose focus is the semantic, morphological and typological characteristics of grammaticalized morphological evidential systems (e.g. Aikhenvald, 2004), and those whose focus is on the social functions of non-grammaticalized evidential constructions as markers of epistemic authority and responsibility (e.g. Fox, 2001; Sidnell, 2012). While interest in the discourse functions of all evidential systems has been growing as seen in the recent special issue of the journal Pragmatics and Society on 'Evidentiality in Interaction', there has been little direct attention on whether the deployment of evidential strategies in discourse varies according to the grammatical status of the grammatical resources available to the speaker. This article examines the nature of both grammaticalized and non-grammaticalized evidential systems in a number of languages to show that while the underlying pragmatics of evidentiality is the same regardless of grammatical system, nonetheless grammaticalized evidential systems provide important evidence of the particular features of knowledge sources that are used in routine ways in discourse sufficiently to motivate their development into grammatical systems.

Numerous disclosure studies have demonstrated that individuals randomly assigned to write about emotional topics evidence improved physical health compared with those who write about superficial topics. The writing samples from three previously published studies of 74 first-year students, 50 upper-division students, and 59 maximum-security prisoners were reanalyzed using Latent Semantic Analysis (LSA) to explore possible relationships of writing content and style to changes in frequency of physician visits following the disclosure intervention. LSA revealed that flexibility in the use of common words--particularly personal pronouns--when writing about traumatic memories was related to positive health outcomes. The findings point to the importance of the role of discussing the self and social relationships in writing and, at the same time, to the remarkable potential of techniques such as LSA.

This study investigates the development of interactional competence by second language (L2) learners of Japanese studying abroad as indexed by their use of incomplete sentences, a common linguistic phenomenon in Japanese conversations. Eighteen international students of mixed L1 backgrounds participated in the study at a Japanese university. They conversed with a peer for 20 minutes in Japanese, while the researcher participated in the conversation occasionally. Analysis of the two conversations, recorded 12 weeks apart at the beginning and end of the semester, showed a notable increase in the learners' production of incomplete utterances, although change in participant structure (dyadic between learner peers vs. triadic among learner peers and the researcher) showed no effect in the learners' use of incomplete sentences. Close analysis of the use of the incomplete sentences in sequential organization revealed the learners' development in interactional competence: Over time they became able to use the linguistic resource of incomplete utterance endings to co-construct meaning in talk-in-progress. (Verlag).

In Tłı̨chǫ Yatıì (Dogrib), spoken in the Northwest Territories, Canada, the periphrastic particle ı̨lè, which has been considered a past marker, is optional in the clause. As in other Dene (Athapaskan) languages, viewpoint aspect is encoded morphologically on the verb. These two facts can give the impression that aspect is the only obligatory temporal category in this language and that other temporal distinctions are peripheral. I argue, on the contrary, that a future/non-future distinction is a necessary element of well-formed clauses, that Future, rather than Past/Non-Past Tense or Aspect, serves as an anchor in the sense of Enç (1987), and that anchoring does not necessarily correlate with the prominence of a temporal category in the sense of Bhat (1999). I adduce evidence in support of these proposals from the contrasting obligatoriness of past and future marking in predicates, as well as from word order facts.

Cinque (Linguist Inq 36(3):315–332, 2005; Universals of language today. Springer, Dordrecht, pp 165–184, 2009; Functional structure from top to toe. Vol. 9 of The cartography of syntactic structures. Oxford University Press, New York, pp 232–265, 2014a) observes that there is an asymmetry in the possible ordering of dependents of a lexical head before versus after the head. A reflection on some of the concepts needed to develop Cinque's ideas into a theory of neutral word order reveals that dependents need to be treated separately by class. The resulting system is applied to the problem of word order in the Germanic verb cluster. It is shown that there is an extremely close match between theoretically derived expectations for clusters made up of auxiliaries, modals, causative iet', a main verb, and verbal particles. The facts point to the action of Cinque's fundamental left-right asymmetry in language in the realm of the verb cluster. At the same time, not all verb clusters fall under Cinque's generalization, which, therefore, argues against treating all cases of restructuring uniformly.

This study examines the development of interactional competence (Hall, 1993, 1995) by English-speaking learners of Japanese as a foreign language (JFL) in a study abroad setting, as indexed by their use of the interactionally significant particle \"ne.\" The analysis is based on a comparison of (a) 6 sets of conversations between JFL learners and native Japanese peers during the first week of the study abroad program, and (b) 6 sets of conversations between the same pairs of speakers during the fifth week of the program. Although there is great variability in efficiency of interactional competence acquisition among JFL cohorts, JFL learners on the whole seem to have enhanced their interactional competence by using more \"ne\" alignments. This study supports the argument that a study abroad program provides a valuable developmental experience that can accelerate JFL learners' acquisition of interactional competence. (Verlag).

Western Abenaki, an Eastern Algonquian language spoken until recently at Odanak (St. Francis), Quebec, makes extensive use of a set of enclitic particles that are typically placed in second position in a clause. This article presents an analysis of the formal properties of these particles, describes their meanings and their discourse functions, and provides a brief account of their syntactic distribution. The phonological properties of the clitics and their hosts are identified, with particular attention to the realization of word-final h, which surfaces only before enclitics in a restricted set of particles and suffixes. The data for this study come primarily from nineteenth-century texts, but attention is also given to phonological developments in the treatment of clitics and their hosts that took place in the twentieth century.

The Quranic Arabic Corpus (http://corpus.quran.com) is a collaboratively constructed linguistic resource initiated at the University of Leeds, with multiple layers of annotation including part-of-speech tagging, morphological segmentation (Dukes and Habash 2010) and syntactic analysis using dependency grammar (Dukes and Buckwalter 2010). The motivation behind this work is to produce a resource that enables further analysis of the Quran, the 1,400 year-old central religious text of Islam. This project contrasts with other Arabic treebanks by providing a deep linguistic model based on the historical traditional grammar known as i'rāb (باىإ). By adapting this well-known canon of Quranic grammar into a familiar tagset, it is possible to encourage online annotation by Arabic linguists and Quranic experts. This article presents a new approach to linguistic annotation of an Arabic corpus: online supervised collaboration using a multi-stage approach. The different stages include automatic rule-based tagging, initial manual verification, and online supervised collaborative proofreading. A popular website attracting thousands of visitors per day, the Quranic Arabic Corpus has approximately 100 unpaid volunteer annotators each suggesting corrections to existing linguistic tagging. To ensure a high-quality resource, a small number of expert annotators are promoted to a supervisory role, allowing them to review or veto suggestions made by other collaborators. The Quran also benefits from a large body of existing historical grammatical analysis, which may be leveraged during this review. In this paper we evaluate and report on the effectiveness of the chosen annotation methodology. We also discuss the unique challenges of annotating Quranic Arabic online and describe the custom linguistic software used to aid collaborative annotation.

Recent research in cognitive linguistics has shown that idiomatic phrases are decomposable and analyzable and that the individual words in idiomatic phrases systematically contribute to the overall figurative interpretations. This cognitive linguistic view suggests that enhancing awareness of conceptual metaphors embedded in the individual words may help second language students to learn idioms. This study examined whether enhancing awareness of orientational metaphors of particles facilitates acquisition of phrasal verbs by Japanese English as a foreign language (EFL) students. The students in the control group learned a set of phrasal verbs through traditional instruction, whereas those in the experimental group received the same input through a cognitive linguistic approach. The students in both groups were then asked to fill in the missing adverbial particles of the phrasal verbs. Results showed that the students in the experimental group performed significantly better than those in the control group, implying that when the target idioms are not stored as a unit in learners' mental lexicon, learners who are aware of conceptual metaphors may rely on metaphorical thought to produce an appropriate adverbial particle. This highlights the implications that EFL learners need to be explicitly taught about the notion of orientational metaphors before they can actively comprehend and produce appropriate phrasal verbs.