Academic discourse is the product of agreement negotiation among members in academic communities. The primary rhetorical function of academic discourse is to persuade the readers into agreeing upon the writers’ claims. This rhetorical function can be embodied through textual linking and stance expressing realized by linguistic devices. Metadiscursive nouns, as an extension and supplementation of metadiscourse, combine these two functions and contribute to the cohesion of textual organization and the conveying of writers’ stance. This study explores the difference in the employment of this linguistic device in PhD dissertation written by Chinses advanced English learners as novice writers and research articles published in international journals written by expert writers in the field of foreign linguistics and applied linguistics. The purpose of this study is to reveal the different ways of knowledge construction by means of metadiscursive nouns in the two genres and the interactional conventions embedded in the academic communities. Explicit instruction strategies are provided to enhance the pedagogical practice in academic writing.

This paper attempted to analyze the effectiveness of cross-linguistic influence on the EFL learners’ production of English dative constructions by using a written corpus. Dative constructions – double object (DO, e.g., Tom gave Mary the book) and prepositional dative (PD, e.g., Tom gave the book to Mary) construction – have attracted much attention in the domain of SLA and cross-linguistic influence due to their distinctions across many languages (Whong-Barr & Schwartz, 2002). In particular, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese EFL learners’ corpus were chosen in the present research because the syntactic and semantic perspectives on the dative structures of their L1s are varied. To reach the aims of this study, the frequency of English DO and PD structures in EFL learners’ and English native speakers’ written corpus (ICNALE) was compared. The results indicated that (ⅰ) Chinese group used significantly more DO constructions than Korean and Japanese groups; (ⅱ) Korean and Japanese groups showed no significant difference in using English dative structures, addressing their infrequent use of DO construction in L1s; (ⅲ) only Chinese group showed native-like use of English dative constructions. These findings suggested that cross-linguistic influence affects the acquisition and production of English dative structures of EFL learners and they involved the pedagogical implication.

This article takes a variational pragmatic approach to formulae of apology in Irish English by comparing the speech of the speakers from Northern Ireland and that of the speakers from the Republic of Ireland. Using the Irish component of the International Corpus of English (ICE-Ireland) as a basis, the analysis centers on the different patterns of apology between these two regions not only in the frequency of occurrence and the types of apology, but also in the contextual constraints on the use of apology. Results indicate that there is no significant difference between the two regions whether in the frequency of occurrence or in the types of apology formulae. However, contexts are found to exert significant effect on the use of apology formulae. In public and institutional contexts, particularly those related to legal and political systems, the formulae of apology are much more frequently used in Northern Ireland than in the Republic of Ireland, which supports the hypothesis that political borders influence the choice of language use as proposed in previous studies.

This study explores whether the usage patterns of English resultative constructions in argumentative essays written by Korean EFL learners follow the usage-based perspectives. The present study used two corpus-based analysis to investigate the usage patterns of four types of English resultatives among different proficiency levels as well as the range and frequency of verbs that learners used in the target constructions. Multiple Chi-square analyses showed that the usage of both transitive and intransitive resultative constructions gradually increases as learner's proficiency increases. Also, it is indicated that EFL learners were more likely to produce the resultatives denoting change of property with increasing proficiency. In addition, results showed that as learners’ proficiency was higher, they employed less frequent and more varied types of verbs in the target construction. The overall results obtained from the current study suggest that L2 development of English resultative constructions reflects a usage-based developmental tendency similar to that of L1 children.