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This research investigates cross-linguistic influence in the comprehension of L3 French past tense. A close examination was made on the L1 (Chinese) and L2 (English) transfer patterns among 20 English majors in their early acquisition of L3 French passé compose (PC). Data were collected through introspective think-aloud protocol in a comprehension task and a retrospective interview immediately afterwards. In addition, a grammar test on English past and perfect tenses was conducted as a comparison with their knowledge in the French PC. A significant positive correlation was found between positive transfer in tense and aspect from English and the scores of test on English past and perfect tenses, but no relationship was detected between transfer in tense and aspect and general L2 proficiency. Even though a general positive picture of influence from L2 English to L3 French comprehension was observed, a smaller percentage of negative transfer in tense and aspect also received extensive discussion, which provided concrete evidence and implications for the necessity of including L2-L3 contrastive knowledge or translanguaging in L3 instruction as also advocated in recent literature.

Low German, once the dominant language in northern Germany, has been massively eroding since the middle of the last century. Although its final demise has been predicted and feared for over a century, there are currently still more than 2.5 million active Low German speakers in northern Germany (Möller, 2008). It is commonly assumed that Low German—at the most—retains some marginal functions as a language, (e.g., is spoken at unofficial situations or among family members and friends). This paper discusses the results of a socio-linguistic field study that I conducted in early 2012 in northwestern Germany (in the counties Grafschaft Bentheim and Emsland) to investigate if and to what degree Low German is used in official situations, specifically in and by local businesses and administrations. My findings show that Low German, despite its image as an uncultivated language, is frequently used as a professional register by a wide range of businesses and administrations.

Corruption is a social phenomenon which has eaten deep into the fabric of the Cameroonian society as the various annual reports of Transparency International (see the reports of 2008, 2011, 2012 and 2013) and National Commission for the Fight against Corruption (CONAC) indicate. The phenomenon has become so rife in this country that it has surfaced in the linguistic productions of Cameroonians, as the various linguistic tools used to this effect testify. Using a structural-functional framework, this paper aims at studying the various linguistic hallmarks which characterize the language of corruption in the spoken and written productions of Cameroonians. After analyzing the data, which were obtained from participant observation, interviews, online sources as well as printed materials, the findings reveal that the language of corruption is essentially metaphoric and euphemistic and is characterized by linguistic features such as semantic shifts, borrowing, affixation, idiomatic formation and stereotyped sentences. It is also found that the language of corruption in Cameroon draws its lexico-semantic constructions from English, Cameroon-Pidgin English, home languages and French, language from which the most sizeable proportion of them originate. This imbalanced proportion is attributed to the dominance of the French language in the Cameroonian administration system.

English learners have more access to communicate with different purposeful audiences across the Three Concentric Circles of English (Kachu, 1985): the Inner Circle, the Outer Circle and the Expanding Circle. However, young language learners’ purposeful audience as a focus of communication has not been emphasized as much as other linguistic features in English language learning and teaching methodology. This study examines young Chinese English learners’ perceptions of purposeful audiences in the context of English native speakers and non-native speakers. Data for the study were collected through a questionnaire that was sent to students (N = 120) at a public senior high school in China. The study found that Chinese English learners’ perceptions of purposeful audiences were influenced by public English education, private language training school, and English language media. This article concludes with some recommendations for young EFL learners across a variety of native languages in their English education development.

Ferdowsi's mythological epic--The Shahnameh--is a treasure of original Persian words and expressions. Centuries after its production, it still has enough merit to be researched and re-discovered. Many scholars have researched the different literary and linguistic aspects of it, but none to our knowledge has scrutinized the book from the perspective of 'semantic shift' yet. This paper aims at showing how the Persian expression 'sang bar cebu zadan' (meaning 'stoning the jar') has gone through a diachronic semantic shift whereby losing its original meaning with which it was first used in Ferdowsi's epic--The Shahnameh. To expatiate upon the original meaning of the expression, we resort to the story of Saiavash's 'passage through fire' as the test of his innocence.

Thematic progression is a salient aspect in the study of Systemic Functional Linguistics as it can function as a cohesive tie. The study of thematic progression has been vastly conducted for various purposes (including revealing the thematic progression in newspaper editorials and in translation texts) revealing the role of thematic progression in cultural (academic) writing system. This research focuses on investigating the pattern of thematic progression of the texts of the opinion section of The Jakarta Post in an attempt at revealing those patterns and relating them to the patterns of argumentative texts. The findings of this investigation indicate that the most frequent type of themes and thematic progression patterns are topical theme and simple linear theme. The results of this study may be facilitative in composing coherent and cohesive texts.

The objectives of this study are to examine the themes, culture-bound terms of daliken si telu clauses, and to explore the strategies of translating them into English. The researcher applied qualitative research as the framework for this study, and Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) was used to analyze the clauses of daliken si telu. Newmark’s translation methods and his translation procedures were used to translate the cultural texts of daliken si telu into English. Nida and Taber’s process of translating was used in the process of translation. The results showed that from eight of Newmark’s translation methods, two (i.e., they are literal translation and semantic translation methods) were applicable to translating daliken si telu clauses into the target language, and from his 14 translation procedures, six (i.e., transference, descriptive equivalence, transposition, couplets, paraphrase, and notes) could be applied in resolving the problems which arose in translating daliken si telu clauses into English.

This interview was conducted with Professor Keith Allan with the aim of providing a brief but informative summary of the state of the art of pragmatics. In providing answers to the interview questions, Professor Allan begins with a definition of pragmatics as it is practiced today, i.e., the study of the meanings of utterances with attention to the context in which the utterances are made. He further notices that discourse analysis, pragmatics, semantics, semiotics, and the philosophy of language are related disciplines, but unlike some other scholar, he does not distinguish ‘texts’ from ‘discourses’ in that he sees texts to be the interesting products of discourse. Later, in the course of the interview, he accepts the interviewers’ chronological approach to pragmatics, but suggests that any historian of pragmatics would have his or her own version. Further, in his response to a question concerning Mey’s Pragmatic Act Theory (PAT), Professor Allan quotes from Mey (2001) to presents a view of pragmemes and practs. He further suggests that there is no bound on the number of possible hypotheses (theories) of language structure and usage, and that all theories are worthy of consideration provided that rational grounds can be advanced for the assessment of different hypotheses. The future direction of pragmatics, in Professor Allan’s view, will rely on corpora in that corpora provide bodies of naturally occurring texts which can be used to test any theoretical claims in pragmatics.