Recent researches have focused on the use of address and reference terms in several social settings. The present study contributes to these works by examining the use of address terms in classroom interactions at the University of Cape Coast. Using a face-to-face interview and audio recording, this work examined address terms used among students and lecturers in real time situations. A total of 35 recorded lectures, coupled with interviews, were obtained and transcribed for the analysis. The analysis showed that students usually used title + last names (TLN), honorifics (Hon), and sometimes avoidance strategies when addressing lecturers in class. On the other hand, lecturers usually use first names (FN), nicknames, and also sometimes avoidance strategies when addressing students. The study has shown that the T/V distinction argued by Brown and Gilman (1960) is present in tertiary address systems in Ghana. In general, this work has pedagogical implications for sociolinguistic studies and other internal academic policies.

Traditional rhetoric theory regards metaphor and metonymy as two literary rhetoric devices. Modern cognitive linguistics believes that metaphor does not only exist in the field of literature. Metaphor is not only a rhetorical device but also a way of thinking. However, the current research on metaphor and metonymy is still limited to the English language world. Hence, there is a lack of knowledge and research on metaphor and metonymy across languages and cultures. This paper begins with an overview of metaphor from the perspective of modern cognitive linguistics. Then, it expounds on the differences between metaphor and metonymy from two aspects of structure and function. Besides, this paper analyzes the differences between metaphor and metonymy with examples based on the Chinese cultural background.

The article compares phraseological words and their equivalents in the Kyrgyz, Russian and English languages by examples from those people worldviews, life outlooks, and environmental perceptions depending on their lifestyle. In most cases, phraseological units are not translated directly into another language, so only their equivalents can be found in other languages. Here, examples of regular expressions of the same meaning in each language specific to that people have been found and compared. Particular attention was made to the emergence of idioms in language and their analysis. The relevance in this work is to compare national and cultural experience through the phraseological units in the Kyrgyz, Russian and English languages due to insufficient research results. The purpose of this study is to introduce readers with the formation of regular phraseological expressions based on the lifestyles of the above mentioned people, and their equivalents in Kyrgyz, Russian and English languages. The practical implication is the existence of equivalents reflected customs and habits of the above mentioned people since phraseologies are not translating verbally.

This study investigated how 16 English as a Foreign Language writers constructed meaning from texts through reading and for texts through writing in responding to a source-based writing task. Results showed that most of the writers engaged in selecting, organising and connecting processes during task completion. The participants not only selected information from source materials, but they also searched for ideas from their prior knowledge in order to generate links or new meaning. Organising processes were found before the participants started to write, although they were more prone to construct the structure of the source materials and their own text concurrently during writing. Evidence from the participants' eye movements and verbal recalls proved that connecting and generating are not a one-off act, but an extended and ongoing process that may occur at different phase of reading and writing.

Developmental Language Disorder (DLD), previously known as Specific Language Impairment (SLI), is a common developmental disorder that affects both preschool and school aged children. The language characteristics of children with DLD vary considerably with the main challenge being the learning of language structures and morphosyntactic and lexical limitations (Leonard, 2014). Research has shown that when it comes to bilinguals with language deficits caution should be taken, since they may arise from impairment due to DLD but can also be caused by insufficient exposure to and limited knowledge of the target language (Reilly, Losh, Bellugi, & Wulfeck, 2004). A method that has often been used to investigate the language features of monolingual and monolingual children with DLD is to examine their narrative abilities, since narratives provide a quasi-naturalistic measure of children’s spontaneous language and reflect distinctive structural linguistic changes through childhood and adolescence. The objective of this paper is to conduct a systematic review of recent studies on the narrative skills of monolingual and bilingual pre-school and primary school children with DLD. Therefore, it focuses on 13 research articles published since 2010 until present that met the inclusion criteria set in this review. The selected studies fell under three main areas: 1) studies assessing the narrative skills of monolingual children with DLD/SLI, 2) studies comparing bilingual children of typical development and bilinguals with DLD/SLI and 3) studies comparing monolingual and bilingual children with DLD/SLI. The majority of studies reported significant differences in the narrative performance between monolinguals with and without DLD and between bilinguals with and without DLD. No significant difference is observed in the performance between monolinguals and bilinguals of typical language development, yet performance differences are noted between monolinguals with DLD and bilinguals with the same language impairment. Microstructure seems to be greatly affected by DLD with macrostructure being affected the less.

The present study was aiming at examining the effect of adaptive learning on improving argumentative essay of English majors students at Shaqra’ University, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia. The researchers followed the quasi-experimental approach. The sample of the study was consisted of thirty-six students purposively selected, representing the total of the class. The instruments of the study were the pre-posttest, adaptive learning questionnaire and a follow-up interview. The data was analyzed statistically using SPSS. The results indicated that there was a difference in writing argumentative essay of the posttest in favor of the experimental group due to adaptive learning. Moreover, the results of the questionnaire indicated that the students preferred adaptive learning techniques and had positive attitude towards it rather than the traditional methods. Findings proved that adaptive learning was effective in enhancing students’ argumentative essay writing.

In this paper, we analyze, contrastively, Akan and Hebrew euphemistic expressions for death using the theoretical framework of the Conceptual Metaphor Theory espoused by Lakoff and Johnson (1980). This cognitive approach enables to demonstrate the mitigating power of metaphors used as a dynamic source for euphemistic reference with the ability to conceal offensive and taboo aspects of the target domain. We have put various Akan and Hebrew euphemisms into five categories of death metaphors with the aim to contrastively establish similarities and differences in the conceptualization of death in the two languages. Our intention is to demonstrate how metaphors are employed as euphemistic device for speaking indirectly, unprovocatively and respectfully about death. This study specifically reveals how the Akan and Hebrew cultures, defined by their respective languages, share the same attitude to death.

WhatsApp messaging has emerged as one of the major ways that people mostly use for communication purposes in conjunction with fast changes in Internet and computer technologies. Linguistic structures with emoticons/emoji enrich the quality of communication in the environment, which has created a digital language. One of the significant purposes of using such a digital language is obviously to persuade the receiver and send feedback to the sender of the message. On the one hand, persuasive communication is almost indispensable for people who use WhatsApp. On the other hand, persuasion is a real and intentional cognitive process based on preferring certain linguistic style, decision making and providing motivational feedback. In this regard, this work aims at clarifying and exploring persuasive messages with emoticons/emoji based on digital language styles with non-standard writing. The study particularly investigates persuasive digital language used in the WhatsApp messages in terms of the following aspects: 1) languages which are used by the participants in social media platforms, 2) purposes of the participants in using social media platforms, 3) choices of persuasive language by the participants in social media platforms, 4) words that the participants initiate to start persuasive conversations in WhatsApp messages and 5) types of sentences the participants mostly produce in WhatsApp messages. It has been observed that Wh-adverbs (WRB) and Wh-pronouns (WP) are often used in initiation of persuasive language patterns. Female participants more frequently choose emoticons, photos, abbreviations, question/question marks, fiend’s names and pictures of the events than male participants do. The participants mostly preferred to use interrogatives during production of persuasive language patterns in WhatsApp messages.

Introduction: Reading impairment in children with dyslexia stems from either a phonological awareness deficit or a deficit in rapid automatized naming. Both deficits constitute the double deficit hypothesis of dyslexia. The aim of the present study was to assess phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming in a group of Greek-speaking children with dyslexia and to correlate their performance in phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming with reading fluency (accuracy and comprehension) scores. Method: Participants were 23 children with a formal diagnosis of dyslexia and 27 typically-developing children with no other learning difficulties or dyslexia. All children were monolingual speakers of Greek and they were administered a naming speed test, a fluency test, a phonological awareness test and reading accuracy and comprehension tasks. Results: Students with dyslexia scored worse in most phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading fluency measures in comparison to their non-dyslexic peers. In addition, students with dyslexia needed more time to complete the rapid automatized naming tests. Positive correlations were found between phonological awareness, rapid automatized naming and reading fluency tests for both groups of students. Specifically, rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness explained 9.3% and 21.8%, respectively, of the variance in the reading fluency of students with dyslexia, while the respective contributions of rapid automatized naming and phonological awareness to the reading fluency for non-dyslexic students were 2% and 9.3%, respectively. Discussion and Conclusion: Phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming can be reliable predictors of reading fluency even in orthographically consistent languages (i.e., Greek), offering support to the double deficit hypothesis. In addition, combining phonological awareness and rapid automatized naming tests seems to be a quick and reliable way to early identify children at risk of reading difficulties in the first grades of primary school.

This work presents a detailed comparison and analysis of the usage of cohesive devices by three Machine Translation systems from Chinese to English, in both SMT and NMT situations. By both a general analysis of sentence length as well as cohesive devices and detailed analysis of a sentence translation in SMT and NMT with human translation as a reference, it is shown that, compared with SMT, NMT system is better at handling cohesive ties such as additive, adverbs and pronouns; however, both SMT and NMT underperform at dealing with demonstratives and lexical cohesion. This suggests an evidence of improved translation quality and the necessity of pre-editing and post-editing cohesive devices in MT translations.