The Double Entendre of Paul’s Trade as σκηνοποιός (Acts 18:3)

The word σκηνοποιός (Acts 18:3), a hapax legomenon, has been the subject of intense scrutiny because it may disclose the socio-economic nature of Paul’s trade. However, attempts to reconstruct historically his trade have not confidently identified its accurate historical reference. Since this difficulty derives from Luke’s choice of vocabulary—he uses a word that is very rare in the canon of Greco-Roman literature—this study attends to the word’s rhetorical setting that may explain Luke’s lexical choice. This choice would enhance the word’s symbolic value although weakening its referential value. Σκηνοποιός is plausibly an instance of Lukan etymological wordplay that draws on the continued symbolism of σκηνή in Luke-Acts—a term that captures Luke’s restoration eschatology.

The Reconstruction of Plastic Surgery: A Historical Perspective on the Etymology of Plastic and Reconstructive Surgery

Although the origins of procedures now falling under the scope of modern plastic surgery date back thousands of years, it was only fairly recently that these were grouped under the umbrella term “plastic” surgery. However, mainly due to the industrialization period, the popular understanding of the term “plastic” would soon change—making way for the addition of the term “reconstructive” to the specialty's name. Through a careful look at historical trends, the authors illustrate how this unintentionally led to an ideological divide between the aesthetic and reconstructive portions of our work, prompting a recent push to unify the field under the one, original, lexical choice: “plastic” surgery.

Phrasal verb vs. Simplex pairs in legal-lay discourse: the Late Modern English period in focus

The present paper attempts to describe the divergences between nearly synonymous phrasal verb/simplex pairs from court trials dating back to the Late Modern English period (LModE). The intention was to evaluate the effects that each verb form might exert in discourse, interpreting the lexical choice as functionally linked to the contents of the legal-lay discourse, that is the discourse between lay people and professionals in the courtroom (Heffer 2005: xv). Research to date has highlighted how the choice of one form or another needs to be explained in terms of register and degree of expressiveness (Bolinger 1971: 172; McArthur 1989: 40; Hiltunen 1999: 161; Claridge 2000: 221). However, no studies have yet evaluated the difference between phrasal verbs and simplexes from a phraseological perspective, or reflected on how their use is functionally linked to the communicative needs in courtroom settings. The study was conducted on the Late Modern English-Old Bailey Corpus (LModE-OBC), a self-compiled corpus that covers the century 1750–1850 and that includes a selection of trials drawn from The Proceedings of the Old Bailey, London’s Central Criminal Court.

The trappings of order

This study builds off of previous research into Caribbean Standard Englishes (which has largely used newspaper genres) by comparing the rates of features found in corpora of Bahamian, Jamaican, British, and American administrative writing, paying particular attention to whether and how the noted formality of Caribbean Standard Englishes manifests itself in administrative writing. The study employs expanded versions of ICE administrative subcorpora for the analysis. Features analyzed include lexis, orthography, as well as different morphosyntactic constructions such as be-passives and modals of obligation and necessity. The study finds that the contemporary British administrative writing corpus contains the most informal lexical choice of the national corpora studied, problematizing a Caribbean folk narrative that associates formality in administrative language and practice with Britishness.

A Literature Study Investigating the Relationship between Language and Gender

Present the literature review focused on the true pictures of language and gender research conducted by scholars abroad and home. The current thesis aims at the differences and similarities in presenting female and male from lexical perspective and through lexicon related discourse analysis explores the connection between the vocabulary and the dominant gender ideologies of the magazine. There are differences and similarities in lexical choice. Reports on men and women both tend to use words, such as children, spouse, and business. Female images constructed by target lexicon differ from men’ and female were regarded as the second gender which is sealed in discourse.

The Impact of Translation Strategies on Second Language Writing

This paper seeks to demonstrate the importance of translation strategies as informed by Translation Studies in the foreign language (FL) classroom. The current study aims to map how translation, as perceived in Translation Studies, can be beneficial for students’ writing skills in the FL classroom. It focuses on undergraduate students in three French Composition classes: a control class in fall 2014, a second control class in fall 2015, and an experimental class in spring 2016, and explores how the students’ writing in the latter class improved after being exposed to translation strategies, such as explicitation, amplification, modulation, and approaches, such as Skopos theory. To determine whether translation strategies enable students to improve naturalness in L2 writing, their compositions and summaries were error coded using Kobayashi/Rinnert’s (1992) method of awkward form and wrong lexical choice, McCarthy’s collocation search, and Owen’s (1988) native speaker input. Statistical analyses were also performed. Results show that translation strategies are a useful tool to help students understand the foreign language and write more naturally.

Anti-racist Text and Talk: A Critical Discourse Studies Approach to Black Feminism

While racist discourse has received much attention in Critical Discourse Studies (CDS), there is a dearth of scholarship on the anti-racist text and talk. A critical observation is that the anti-racist movement, and hence, discourse, often exclude women. With the goal of contributing to this gap in the CDS literature, the current analysis examines Black women's discourses concerning anti-Black racism in general and Black Feminism in particular. Four YouTube videos that feature both conference talks and news programs surrounding the topic of Black Feminism are analysed for recurring themes using thematic analysis and discourse structures from the perspective of critical discourse analysis. Findings reveal that the primary themes that emerged are the inclusion of Black women, Police brutality and unaccountability, and Black Feminism Defined, with various subthemes. In addition, the discourse structures examined are lexical choice, presupposition, pronominal choice, and the use of tag questions, among others. This study serves to further our understanding of the linguistic manifestation of ideologies through discourse concerning anti-racism and Black Feminism.

Processing Non-at-Issue Meanings of Conditional Connectives: The wenn/falls Contrast in German

Logical connectives in natural language pose challenges to truth-conditional semantics due to pragmatics and gradience in their meaning. This paper reports on a case study of the conditional connectives (CCs) wenn/falls ‘if/when, if/in case’ in German. Using distributional evidence, I argue that wenn and falls differ in lexical pragmatics: They express different degrees of speaker commitment (i.e., credence) toward the modified antecedent proposition at the non-at-issue dimension. This contrast can be modeled using the speaker commitment scale (Giannakidou and Mari, 2016), i.e., More committed<WENN p, FALLS p>Less committed. Four experiments are reported which tested the wenn/falls contrast, as well as the summary of an additional one from Liu (2019). Experiment 1 tested the naturalness of sentences containing the CCs (wenn or falls) and conditional antecedents with varying degrees of likelihood (very likely/likely/unlikely). The starting prediction was that falls might be degraded in combination with very likely and likely events in comparison to the other conditions, which was not borne out. Experiment 2 used the forced lexical choice paradigm, testing the choice between wenn and falls in the doxastic agent’s conditional thought, depending on their belief or disbelief in the antecedent. The finding was that subjects chose falls significantly more often than wenn in the disbelief-context, and vice versa in the belief-context. Experiment 3 tested the naturalness of sentences with CCs and an additional relative clause conveying the speaker’s belief or disbelief in the antecedent. An interaction was found: While in the belief-context, wenn was rated more natural than falls, the reverse pattern was found in the disbelief-context. While the results are mixed, the combination of the findings in Experiment 2, Experiment 3 and that of Experiment 4a from Liu (2019) that falls led to lower speaker commitment ratings than wenn, provide evidence for the CC scale. Experiment 4b tested the interaction between two speaker commitment scales, namely, one of connectives (including weil ‘because’ and wenn/falls) and the other of adverbs (factive vs. non-factive, Liu, 2012). While factive and non-factive adverbs were rated equally natural for the factive causal connective, non-factive adverbs were preferred over factive ones by both CCs, with no difference between wenn and falls. This is discussed together with the result in Liu (2019), where the wenn/falls difference occurred in the absence of negative polarity items (NPIs), but disappeared in the presence of NPIs. This raises further questions on how different speaker commitment scales interact and why.

‘The wickede secte of Saracenys’ – Lexico-semantic means of strengthening the English Christian Self in texts from the Middle English period

This paper focuses on the conceptual category of the Saracen as portrayed in medieval English texts, and the semantic potentials of lexical units used to refer to this ethnic and religious out-group. On the basis of references gathered from broader contexts provided by the Corpus of Middle English Prose and Verse, both the frequency of usage of relevant referring expressions will be looked into. From a historio-pragmatic perspective, it shall be shown that the selected samples present one of many strategies used to strengthen the image of the Christian self by systematically decomposing the image of the ‘misbelieving’ other by means of lexical choice.

Confronting Lexical Choice and Error Distribution in Written French: New Insights into the Linguistic Insecurity of Students with Dyslexia

The main goal of this paper is to analyze written texts produced by monolingual French university students, with and without dyslexia. More specifically, we were interested in the linguistic characteristics of the words used during a written production and of the type of word errors. Previous studies showed that students with dyslexia have difficulties in written production, whether in terms of the number of spelling errors, some syntactic aspects, identification of errors, confusion of monosyllabic words, omissions of words in sentences, or utilization of unexpected or inappropriate vocabulary. For this present study, students with dyslexia and control students were asked to produce written and spoken narrative and expository texts. The written texts (N = 86) were collected using Eye and Pen© software with digitizing tablets. Results reveal that students with dyslexia do not censor themselves as regards the choice of words in their written productions. They use the same types of words as the control students. Nevertheless, they make many more errors than the control students on all types of words, regardless of their linguistic characteristics (length, frequency, grammatical classes, etc.). Finally, these quantitative analyses help to target a rather unexpected subset of errors: short words, and in particular determiners and prepositions.