A number of disparate approaches to language, ranging from cognitive linguistics to stochastic implementations of optimality theory, have challenged the classical distinction between knowledge of language and use of language. Supporters of such approaches point to the functional motivation of grammatical structure, language users’ sensitivity to the frequency of occurrence of grammatical elemen...

the present study deals with exploring the concept of syntactic devices and surveys its development by the traditional and modern syntacticians. syntax expert have related this concept to other notions such as rhetorical devices and some other recent grammarians have included it in parts of speech, a point which old grammarians neglected. however, the results of scholarly research have helped t...

the most important and practical phase of analyzing the linguistic errors of second language learners is to find the solutions to decrease these errors. to that end, the present study examined translation strategy to decrease the number of grammatical and lexical errors of chinese language learners learning persian. twelve chinese language learners were asked to write a text in two stages. firs...

This article considers recent literature on contemporary urbanization in Africa that is united in its 'post-normative' orientation, firmly discarding the 'expectations' of modernization that so deeply shaped twentieth-century research on African cities. Best typified by the work of urban anthropologists such as Abdoumaliq Simone, this scholarship instead focuses on the 'vernacularization' of ur...

The notion of a “thematic role” has been an important one in linguistic theories concerning the syntax/semantics interface (Fillmore, 1968), but their effects on high-level cognition remain relatively unexplored. Thematic roles,like AGENT and PATIENT, are said to be linked with specific grammatical positions like that of “subject” and “direct object”. Here we ask if the link between grammatical...

The focus of this study is to investigate the comparative effect of teaching grammar through interpretation tasks and pictorial clues on EFL learners’ writing accuracy. The participants were 60 female intermediate EFL learners with age range of 21-35 who were divided into two experimental groups after being homogenized by a piloted PET test. In the piloted researcher-made pre-test, the research...

In most published work on bilingual data from aligned corpora (variously called parallel corpora, translated corpora, bi-texts or corpora of parallel texts), it is the lexicon that has been studied (cf. Klavans and Tzoukermann (1990), Church and Gale (1991), Marinai et al. (1991), Isabelle et al. (1993)). In this paper, I am concerned with corpus-based contrastive studies of grammatical feature...