The journal editors and the Department of English Studies at the Universitat Jaume I wish to pay tribute to our colleague, friend and teacher, Dr. Xavier Campos Vilanova who passed away earlier this year. Xavier showed a passionate enthusiasm for the study of the history of the English language and literature, but also for everything he did. From taking photographs, researching on the meaning o...

Over the past two decades or so, Multi-Word Expressions (MWEs; also called Multi-word Units) have been an increasingly important concern for Computational Linguistics and Natural Language Processing (NLP). The term MWE has been used to refer to various types of linguistic units and expressions, including idioms, noun compounds, phrasal verbs, light verbs and other habitual collocations. However...

This study investigated whether verbs in figurative language activate different types of associations than do verbs in literal language. In a sentence-priming experiment, we compared sentences featuring verbs in idiomatic phrases with control sentences in which the same verbs were meant literally. Participants made lexical decisions about nouns that were associated with either the verb’s litera...

Sentences with embedding are more complex than sentences without embedding, because they contain more syntactic layers in their phrasal architecture. Until now, neuroimaging studies tested embedded sentences that also included syntactic movement. To explore which cortical areas are specifically involved in the processing of syntactic layers, we used embedded sentences that did not include synta...

There is a profusion of labels used for the phenomenon of multiword units (MU’s), yet they are notoriously underrepresented in handbooks of both grammatical and dictionary type alike. After an illustration of both, problems of criteria which delimit MU’s are raised up, together with an number of open issues and necessity of a functional approach is stressed. As three major issues, stableness, t...