Depending on the demands of a particular communicative situation, bilingual or multilingual speakers ("bilingualism-multilingualism") will switch between language varieties. Code-switching is the practice of moving between variations of languages in different contexts. In an educational context, code-switching is defined as the practice…

The pragmatic study of silence has not got much concern in the Arab world in general and in Jordanian Arabic in particular. The purpose of the current study is to investigate the perception and practice of silence in casual conversation in Jordanian society from a pragmatic point of view. This study adapts Volosinov's notion of…

This paper is concerned with literature as a phenomenon that people talk and write about for various purposes, e.g. for the purpose of sharing opinions with friends or of giving a piece of literature positive or negative value in a community. First I will briefly explore how literature has been characterized, suggesting that it needs to be viewed…

This article is a report on an investigation of quoting strategies in English, an investigation that is part of a longer-term research programme exploring clauses of "saying" and their quoted and reported content as direct and indirect speech by members of the SAL (Systemics Across Languages) Group. Here the focus is on how quotes are…

In this article the authors present a discussion on the genre of editorial as distinct from that of news-reports in that its language is more loaded with attitudes and more indeterminate and hedged than that in the genre of news-report. Another distinctiveness the authors point out is that the genre of editorial is not only concerned with the…

Every text has a communicative purpose that it performs by dividing itself into generic stages. These stages are assigned specific goals and have differing linguistic structures. This paper makes an attempt to investigate whether there is a definable co-relation between linguistic features and stages in the genre of look-good advertisements. It…

The present study investigates the phonological effect triggered by the different types of phonetic pause used in Quran on morphology, syntax, and semantics. It argues that Quranic pause provides interesting evidence about the close relation between phonology and semantics, from one side, and semantics, morphology, and syntax, from the other…

This study analyzes the ability of advanced Russian learners of English as a foreign language (FL) to compose authentic essays in the target language (TL) reflecting morphosyntactic, discursive, and cross-cultural expectations. Thirty-four students at Russian universities were asked to utilize their TL, English, to write compositions focusing on…

Korean learners of the Japanese language and Japanese learners of the Korean language not only feel that it is easier to learn the respective foreign language, but also acquire Japanese and Korean faster than learners from other countries because of the grammatical similarity between Japanese and Korean. However, the similarity of grammatical…

Many studies have explored the difficulties faced by foreign language learners when they begin the learning journey from survival to advanced level. Most of these investigations, however, tend to focus on what makes the road to fluency strewn with obstacles and challenges; no significant attention has been paid to what makes the journey…

This paper is an attempt to study empirically a sample of spoken narratives of Hindi, Telugu and Dakkhini speakers in the multilingual setting of Hyderabad. After a brief account of multilingualism and variation within a language as commonly occurring phenomena, the paper examines the spoken narratives of the three languages mentioned above with a…

This paper deals with the use of participial constructions in Hindi as discourse strategies for cohesion in speech. The data from the "Analyzing Narratives" project indicates that participial constructions are used fairly extensively as discourse connectors. The conjunctive participle is used more extensively than the others. Some of the major…

The aim of this paper is to discuss some of the productive discourse devices and markers noted in 50 spoken narratives elicited from Telugu native speakers. Since most of them are college students and residents of Hyderabad, they are also exposed to English as well as Hindi-Urdu (Dakkhini). After presenting certain salient features of Telugu…

The history of the evolution of language assessments for children and adults with language disorders is described briefly. This is followed by a discussion on language assessment of the clinical population with an emphasis on linguistic profiling, illustrated through the Linguistic Profile Test. Discourse analysis, in particular, is highlighted…

This study attempts to investigate politeness in the requests produced by a sample of Jordanian students. The study deals with how they request, the main and supportive strategies and the influence of status, degree of imposition and the difficulty of the task between the requester and the requestee on selecting request expressions and strategies…