The expanding role of English as the language of international communication has important implications for English language pedagogy. Statistics show that speakers of English as a second and foreign language worldwide largely outnumber the speakers of English as a first language, so that International English can no longer be considered the ‘exclusive property’ of its native speakers (Ferguson...

We define projective GIT quotients, and introduce toric varieties from this perspective. We illustrate the definitions by exploring the relationship between toric varieties and polyhedra. Geometric invariant theory (GIT) is a theory of quotients in the category of algebraic varieties. Let X be a projective variety with ample line bundle L, and G an algebraic group acting on X, along with a lift...

The present study investigates the realization of informationseeking yes-no questions in two contact varieties, Olivenza Portuguese and Olivenza Spanish, in comparison with Castilian Spanish. We aim to: (1) describe the use of prenuclear pitch accents and nuclear configurations and the durational properties of prenuclear, nuclear, and IP-final syllables in this sentence type; (2) compare the in...

The framework of C-varieties, introduced by the third author, extends the scope of Eilenberg’s variety theory to new classes of languages. In this paper, we first define C-varieties of actions, which are closely related to automata, and prove their equivalence with the original definition of C-varieties of stamps. Next, we complete the study of the wreath product initiated by Ésik and Ito by ex...

the present article arises from a three-year cross sectional investigation into english language teaching (elt) in secondary schools in iran and the role of communicative pedagogy within this. the study has examined the extent of communicative pedagogy within the iranian national elt curriculum, the elt programme and to some extent the english language coursebooks used in secondary schools. wha...

Corpus resources for Spanish have proved invaluable for a number of applications in a wide variety of fields. However, a majority of resources are based on formal, written language and/or are not built to model language variation between varieties of the Spanish language, despite the fact that most language in ‘everyday’ use is informal/ dialogue-based and shows rich regional variation. This pa...

Dutch is a language spoken by about 20 million people in the Netherlands and Belgium. This region is not only characterised by a complex dialect situation, but also by the use of two institutionalised varieties of the Standard language: Netherlandic Dutch is spoken in the Netherlands and is documented in Collins & Mees (1982), Mees & Collins (1983) and Gussenhoven (1999), while Belgian Dutch is...