This book has been shortlisted for an ESSE book award 2012 in English Language and Linguistics, Junior Scholars. This volume approaches the analysis of variation in English from diachronic, diatopic, and contrastive/comparative perspectives. The individual case studies, all closely interrelated, are organized into three parts or sections. Part I (Diachronic Studies) applies a variationist methodology to the analysis of developments in the use of the courtesy marker please, adverbs in -ly, the s- genitive and a number of phrasal combinations with the verb get. It also examines Early Modern English regional dialect vocabulary. Part II (Diatopic Studies) is concerned with the analysis of several morphological and phonological features in different varieties of English, namely Standard English, Modern Scottish English, Galwegian English, and Black South-African English. Part III (Contrastive Studies) contains four chapters dealing with the contrastive analysis of a number of morphosyntactic features, such as the use of modifiers of adjectives by advanced learners of English, the acquisition and use of aspect by advanced EFL learners with different mother-tongue backgrounds, a comparison of the tempo-aspectual categories of English and Italian, and some of the problems encountered by researchers when compiling and analysing learner corpora of spoken language.

This volume has its origin in a selection of the papers presented at the Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics (ELC2), held at the University of Vigo in October 2009 and designed and organised by postgraduate students belonging to the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela. The purpose of the conference was to allow young professional researchers to share and survey their current views on linguistic research. Four of the ten chapters included address the diachronic change undergone by particular lexical items, namely the morphosemantic change illustrated by the development of the morpheme punk, the historical evolution of including and included, the origin and semantics of the expletive form adsheartlikins, and the structure and distribution of nominalisations referring to actions or processes. Variation is also approached from a diatopic perspective in the study of expressions of obligation and necessity (must and have to) in New Englishes, the distribution and functions of the discourse marker eh in Channel Island English, and regional variability of vowel phonology in Scottish Standard English. Lastly, three studies address semantics and culture in the field of L2 learning. These contributions focus on the assessment of Lexical Frequency Profile applications in the analysis of Romanian learner English, the role of cultural knowledge in the learning process of English as an International Language, and L1 typicality effects in L2 vocabulary learning.

This volume comprises a selection of papers delivered at the Fourth ELC International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC4). The eleven papers collected here pertain to different areas of linguistics as varied as diachronic linguistics, syntax, pragmatics or psycholinguistics.

This volume offers a representative selection of the papers presented at the Third ELC International Postgraduate Conference on Language and Cognition (ELC3), held in Santiago de Compostela, 21–22 September 2012. The book is structured into four parts. Part I comprises syntactic studies on the auxiliary verb get in Indian English, the grammar of verbs capable of occurring with or without an object in Contemporary English, and isolated if-clauses. Part II includes two papers dealing with word formation patterns and with crosslinguistic influences on motion expression in English and Spanish. The studies in Part III discuss topics related to second language acquisition, such as the difficulties encountered by Spanish speakers in learning English pronunciation, verbal morphology production by Japanese learners of English, and the effects of elicitation on students’ production of English past tense forms. The papers in Part IV revolve around discourse analysis and psycholinguistics, addressing topics such as automatic sentiment detection, perspectival construal patterns in language and cognition, and the effect of emotional valence on disambiguation processes.

This is a comprehensive overview of research methodology in applied linguistics which describes the various stages of qualitative and quantitative investigations, from collecting the data to reporting the results.

Applying a sociophonetic research paradigm, this volume presents an investigation of variation and change in the Scottish Standard English accent. Based on original audio recordings made in Edinburgh, it provides detailed acoustic and auditory analyses of selected accent features. In contrast to other studies of English in Scotland, the focus is on the extent to which certain characteristics of middle-class speech are susceptible (or immune) to the influence of Southern Standard British English, or vary in ways unrelated to that influence. Beyond the fine-grained patterns of variation that are revealed, the study highlights innovative methodological approaches to sociophonetic variation and contributes to a better general understanding of the status and function of Scottish Standard English. The book will be of general interest to sociolinguists and sociophoneticians, and of particular interest to researchers or students concerned with phonetic or phonological aspects of Scottish English.

Language teaching approaches, methods and procedures are constantly undergoing reassessment. New ideas keep emerging as the growing complexity of the means of communication and the opportunities created by technology put language skills to new uses. In addition, the political, social and economic impact of globalisation, the new demands of the labour market that result from it, the pursuit of competitiveness, the challenges of intercultural communication and the diversification of culture have opened new perspectives on the central role that foreign languages have come to play in the development of contemporary societies. This book provides an insight into the latest developments in the field and discusses the new trends in foreign language teaching in four major areas, namely methods and approaches, teacher training, innovation in the classroom, and evaluation and assessment.