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Topic Review
Lexical Bundles
The term “lexical bundles” was defined as “recurrent expressions, regardless of their idiomaticity, and regardless of their structural status”. As is well documented, lexical bundles not only contribute to fluent linguistic production but also form essential building blocks of discourse. A good command of lexical bundles could be indicative of a proficient and professional academic writer and is thus considered a pivotal skill for student writers, especially EFL student writers, for achieving sustainable growth of writing competence. Appropriate use of lexical bundles in academic writing helps writers from an academic community demonstrate their research writing ability.
  • 6.4K
  • 17 Jun 2021
Topic Review
Caret
The caret (/ˈkærɪt/) is a V-shaped grapheme, usually inverted and sometimes extended, used in proofreading and typography to indicate that additional material needs to be inserted at this point in the text. There is a similar mark, ^, that has a variety of uses in programming, mathematics and other contexts. The symbol was included in typewriters and computer printers so that circumflex accents could be overprinted on letters (as in ô or ŵ). The character became reused in computer languages for many other purposes, and over time its appearance was enlarged and lowered, making it unusable as an accent mark. This symbol is often called a "caret", but this page will call it a "circumflex" to distinguish it from a true caret. This circumflex is not to be confused with other chevron-shaped characters, such as the circumflex accent, the turned v or the logical AND, which may occasionally be called carets.
  • 5.8K
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
Theories of the Metaphor
Metaphors are an integral and important part of human communication and greatly impact the way our thinking is formed and how we understand the world. The theory of the conceptual metaphor has shifted the focus of research from words to thinking, and also influenced research of the linguistic metaphor, which deals with the issue of how metaphors are expressed in language or speech.
  • 4.6K
  • 12 Jun 2023
Topic Review
The Acquisition of Negation
Although negation in natural languages is a complex and heterogeneous phenomenon, the first instances of linguistic negation appear in children’s speech quite early, by 18 and 24 months of life. Nevertheless, its acquisition is a gradual and challenging process, as it takes time for children to fully grasp the semantic meanings of the different negative words to be able to use them correctly across different sentential contexts. Moreover, in order to understand how to negate a sentence, children must also learn how negation can have scope over different parts of the sentences, leaving the others unaffected. The picture becomes even more complicated for children when multiple negative structures come into play, in which the negative meaning is conveyed by the combination of two (or more) negative elements. The interpretation of these complex syntactic constructions is indeed not always straightforward since a different arrangement of the same negative elements may yield different semantic interpretations of the same sentence.
  • 3.5K
  • 16 Jun 2022
Topic Review
Institutional Translation
Institutional Translation refers to translation activities or translated works initiated or benefited by institutions.
  • 3.4K
  • 02 Sep 2021
Topic Review
Family Language Policy
Family and its language are one of the most important domains when it comes to acquiring a language as a mother tongue. 
  • 2.1K
  • 24 Aug 2022
Topic Review
Logical Form (Linguistics)
In some theories of syntax and grammar, in particular in the Chomskyan schools of government and binding theory and the minimalist program, the Logical Form (abbreviated LF and conventionally spelled with capital initial letters) of a linguistic expression is a mental representation of it, derived solely from surface structure. In the words of Noam Chomsky, LF captures "those aspects of semantic representation that are strictly determined by grammar, abstracted from other cognitive systems". It functions as the interface between grammar and conceptual-intentional properties of language, analogous to how the phonetic form (abbreviated PF) is the interface between grammar and the audio-perceptual properties of utterances. Logical Form is the level of representation that affects the semantic interpretation of a sentence. LF is sometimes referred to as a covert level of representation, because the output of this level is not actually pronounced by the speaker. Worth noting is that many theories of syntax do not acknowledge Logical Form (e.g. Lexical Functional Grammar, Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar, Dependency Grammars, Tree-Adjoining Grammar, etc.), at least not in the way it is understood in Government and Binding Theory and the Minimalist Program. The postulation of such a level of representation remains a subject of debate.
  • 1.6K
  • 30 Nov 2022
Topic Review
MDPI English Writing Prize 2020
The MDPI Writing Prize is an annual award supported by MDPI Author Services, which provides services including language editing, reformatting, plagiarism checks. The winners of the 2020 MDPI Writing Prize about the theme “My work and the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals” are posted on Encyclopedia. In this competition, we received many excellent submissions from entrants who shared their inspirational and thought-provoking work.
  • 1.5K
  • 01 Mar 2021
Topic Review
Working Memory Models in Language and Bilingualism Research
Working memory (WM) generally refers to our ability to ‘mentally maintain information in an active and readily accessible state while concurrently and selectively processing new information’. WM, as the primary memory, plays a fundamental role in multiple facets of human cognitive life, including language learning and processing.
  • 1.4K
  • 09 Jun 2022
Topic Review
Enhance Learning Experience with Mobile-Assisted Language Learning
With the growth of information and communication technology, technology-enhanced language learning has been increasingly regarded as a successful way to support learners with more interconnecting and collaborative language learning environments. Since smartphones have recently become an indispensable item in modern society, mobile-assisted language learning (m-learning) has been introduced to assist students’ language learning with the convenient features of digital devices and mobile technologies.
  • 946
  • 22 Mar 2022
Topic Review
Relativizer
In linguistics, a relativizer (abbreviated REL) is a type of conjunction that introduces a relative clause. For example, in English, the conjunction that may be considered a relativizer in a sentence such as "I have one that you can use." Relativizers do not appear, at least overtly, in all languages; even in languages that do have overt or pronounced relativizers, they do not necessarily appear all of the time. For these reasons it has been suggested that in some cases, a "zero relativizer" may be present, meaning that a relativizer is implied in the grammar but is not actually realized in speech or writing. For example, the word that can be omitted in the above English example, producing "I have one you can use", using (on this analysis) a zero relativizer.
  • 866
  • 09 Oct 2022
Topic Review
University Students’ Attitudes towards ELF
Macao university students’ attitudes towards English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) were investigated. Macao maintains a diverse multilingual society, with speakers from several cultures converging into one city for work and travel. Traditionally, the common languages of communication have been Chinese and Portuguese, due to Macao’s historical connection with both mainland China and Portugal. However, with the development of tourism and economy, English has become a lingua franca in the city.
  • 819
  • 25 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Deception, Speaking and Writing
When addressing lying and deception in language production, it is imperative to acknowledge that behavioral indicators may play a role. This include evaluation of multiple distinct verbal and nonverbal behavioral indicators, such as gaze cues, pulse rate, hand movements, and manifestations of nervousness. Here, the role of cognitive load during speaking and writing, and how cognitive load due to the parallel tasks of deciding what to say/write, and how to say it while actually expressing the thought may be visible during language production is discussed. The assumption is that lying and deception would increase the cognitive load and that this will, to some extent, be observable through the behavioral indicators. 
  • 761
  • 11 Mar 2024
Biography
Ray Jackendoff
Ray Jackendoff (born January 23, 1945) is an American linguist. He is professor of philosophy, Seth Merrin Chair in the Humanities and, with Daniel Dennett, co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies at Tufts University. He has always straddled the boundary between generative linguistics and cognitive linguistics, committed to both the existence of an innate universal grammar (an important
  • 730
  • 14 Nov 2022
Topic Review
AI-Based Conversational Large Language Models
The demand for psychological counselling has grown significantly in recent years, particularly with the global outbreak of COVID-19, which heightened the need for timely and professional mental health support. Online psychological counselling emerged as the predominant mode of providing services in response to this demand. The Psy-LLM framework, an AI-based assistive tool leveraging large language models (LLMs) for question answering in psychological consultation settings to ease the demand on mental health professions.
  • 615
  • 02 Jan 2024
Topic Review
Crosslinguistic Influence
Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) refers to the different ways in which one language can affect another within an individual speaker. It typically involves two languages that can affect one another in a bilingual speaker.  An example of CLI is the influence of Korean on a Korean native speaker who is learning Japanese or French. Less typically, it could also refer to an interaction between different dialects in the mind of a monolingual speaker. CLI can be observed across subsystems of languages including pragmatics, semantics, syntax, morphology, phonology, phonetics, and orthography. Discussed further in this article are particular subcategories of CLI—transfer, attrition, the complementarity principle, and additional theories.
  • 569
  • 01 Dec 2022
Topic Review
Sustainability of Bilingual Education
Is multilingualism sustainable? Would it not be better if humanity could only speak one language perfectly? The answer to the first question is yes, and that to the second is no. There are some data showing that multilingualism does not hinder literacy achievement and thus, some negative biases often raised against providing double literacy have no scientific basis. 
  • 567
  • 18 Jan 2022
Topic Review
Iconic Handshape Preferences in Family Homesign Systems
Homesigners are deaf individuals who have not acquired a signed or spoken language and who innovate unique gesture systems to communicate with hearing friends and family (“communication partners”).
  • 557
  • 15 Jul 2022
Topic Review
Temporal Relations in Mandarin Chinese
Temporal connectives play a crucial role in marking the sequence of events during language comprehension, particularly in tenseless languages which lack overt inflectional marking of tense. Mandarin Chinese, for instance, is a tenseless language which does not mark past, present, or future with dedicated morphemes, yet Mandarin speakers successfully comprehend temporal information, largely depending on temporal adverbials (e.g., yesterday, last week), viewpoint aspect morphemes (e.g., ‘le’ termination or completion, ‘zài’ ongoing state), and temporal connectives (e.g., ‘zhiqian’ before, ‘zhihou’ after).
  • 549
  • 27 Apr 2022
Topic Review
Positive Affect Evoked by Music and the Arts
A positive experience in response to a piece of music or a work of art (hence ‘music/art’) has been linked to health and wellbeing outcomes but can often be reported as indescribable (ineffable), creating challenges for research. There are two simultaneously occurring classes of experience are proposed: the ‘emotion class’ of experience (ECE) and the positive ‘affect class’ of experience (PACE). ECE consists of conventional, discrete, and communicable emotions with a reasonably well-established lexicon. PACE relates to a more private world of prototypical aesthetic emotions and experiences investigated in positive psychology.
  • 511
  • 25 May 2022
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