Address forms are among the most culturally oriented linguistic features in communicative practice. Yet socio-pragmatic research on address forms in non-Western cultures remains limited, especially where local practices do not fit existing theoretical frameworks. This paper offers an exploratory account of self-reported address practices in Nigerian English academic discourse. It identifies forms of address reported by Nigerian university students in student-teacher interaction and analyses their pragmatic and sociocultural meanings. The material was collected mainly by questionnaires completed by 190 Nigerian university students, supplemented by ethnographic observation of academic settings and semi-structured interviews. The data were analysed qualitatively and descriptively, using selected scholarship on address research, politeness theory, pragmatics, cultural studies, and the World Englishes paradigm. The findings show that respondents reported both traditional English address categories, especially honorifics and academic titles, and culture-specific ones, including kinship terms, religious terms, local titles and hybrid forms. The reported choices appear to be influenced by institutional rank, age and seniority, as well as socio-cultural factors and understanding of politeness. They are expressed both in English and in local languages. The study suggests that Nigerian English academic address practices adapt English forms to locally meaningful ways of expressing respect, hierarchy, seniority, family orientation, communal affiliation and relational closeness, while the findings remain exploratory and not nationally generalisable.

In recent years, corpus linguistics has provided new opportunities for studying language contact using quantitative and data-driven techniques. For the Kazakh language, situated in a multilingual setting involving Kazakh, Russian, and English, lexical interference represents an important sociolinguistic issue. This study investigates lexical competition from quantitative and functional standpoints, with particular attention to frequency, distribution, and variation in Kazakh-language mass media under Kazakh-Russian language contact. Using corpus methods, the study shows that large collections of texts make it possible to identify borrowed lexemes and competing equivalent forms. Borrowed items may coexist with native equivalents, producing measurable differences in frequency and stylistic preference. In some instances, foreign lexemes are more frequent than standardised national alternatives in the analysed corpus, although established Kazakh norms may continue to coexist with such borrowings. To address this issue, the study introduces the Lexical Competition Coefficient (LCC), a descriptive numerical indicator that measures the relative frequency of competing lexical equivalents in corpus data. When the Kazakh item predominates, the LCC exceeds one (k > 1), indicating that the Kazakh variant is more frequent in the corpus. By contrast, a coefficient below one (k < 1) indicates that the borrowed variant is more frequent. The findings indicate that lexical competition in Kazakh-language media is uneven across lexical pairs, with some borrowed forms substantially outnumbering Kazakh equivalents while other Kazakh variants remain dominant in corpus usage. The study combines scholarship on language contact and quantitative corpus analysis and proposes a systematic procedure for assessing lexical competition in corpus data.

This study investigates terminological asymmetry in institutional consumer health question-answer discourse through a quantitative corpus-based analysis of MedQuAD. Grounded in Register Theory, it tests how medical terminology differs between two linked parts of the same communicative unit: the consumer-oriented question and the institutional answer. The full MedQuAD XML collection was downloaded, and the final analytic corpus contained 16,359 non-empty, non-duplicate question-answer pairs. Medical terminology was identified through longest-match-first lexical matching against Medical Subject Headings (MeSH), yielding 609,813 term matches. The study measured term density, term retention, answer-introduced terminology, question-only terminology, terminological expansion, explanation-marker proximity, and source-group variation. Results showed that answers contained far more medical terms in absolute counts than questions, but they did not show significantly higher normalised term density: question density was 188.42 terms per 1,000 tokens and answer density was 187.83. Answers retained 15,891 terms from questions, introduced 334,852 terms, and left 5,727 question terms unrepeated. Introduced terms strongly outnumbered retained and question-only terms. Contrary to expectation, introduced terms were not more strongly linked to surface explanation markers than retained terms; retained terms had the higher marker rate. Source groups differed significantly for all tested variables. The findings show that register contrast in paired medical Q&A discourse is expressed through textual expansion, term retention, term introduction, and source-specific variation, rather than increased normalised terminological density alone.

This study examines visual–verbal blending as a mechanism through which social advertising compresses complex environmental and humanitarian problems into concise multimodal messages. Drawing on conceptual integration theory and corpus-oriented multimodal analysis, it analyses 196 static advertising cases published or circulated between 2020 and 2025: 98 environmental and 98 humanitarian campaigns. It traces how visual input spaces, verbal input spaces, generic spaces, and blended spaces interact in constructing cognitively dense and ethically oriented meanings. The findings indicate that environmental campaigns tend to compress global, delayed, and systemic risks into visible threat, embodied natural vulnerability, future-oriented warning, and responsibility-oriented positioning. Humanitarian campaigns more often compress distant suffering into moral proximity, absence, disrupted everyday life, vulnerability, and the need for ethical recognition or response. High or medium visual-verbal interdependence was found across the corpus, indicating that interpretative orientation is encoded through the joint processing of visual and verbal modes, not through either mode alone. The study contributes to multimodal discourse analysis by offering an applied framework for tracing how social advertising distributes meaning across semiotic resources, condenses large-scale crises into blended configurations, and positions the addressee either as a potential subject of preventive action or as a subject of moral recognition and response. Because the study does not measure audience reception, the identified effects are interpreted as projected viewer positions, not as empirically verified psychological responses.

As professional communication becomes increasingly globalised, systematic understanding of the intersection between intercultural communicative competence (ICC) and English for Specific Purposes (ESP) remains limited. This study maps ICC-ESP research from 2003 to 2023 in order to identify publication trends, theoretical orientations, and pedagogical gaps. Using co-citation analysis, keyword co-occurrence mapping, and burst detection with VOSviewer and Bibliometrix, the study analysed 387 peer-reviewed articles indexed in Scopus and Web of Science. The findings indicate three predominant thematic clusters: ICC in business and medical settings (45%), theoretical adaptations of the Byram framework (28%), and technology-mediated virtual exchange (18%). The results show a highly skewed distribution across domains: Business and Medical ESP account for 76% of the corpus, whereas Engineering, Legal, and Agricultural ESP remain under-represented. The corpus also shows a marked geographical imbalance, with a large majority of publications produced in high-income countries and limited representation from the Global South. The study further identifies a persistent theory-practice gap, reflected in the limited availability of validated assessment instruments and longitudinal pedagogical interventions. The study offers a systematic account of the domain coverage and geographical distribution of ICC-ESP research and examines the shift from deficit-oriented framings towards translanguaging and postcolonial approaches. It also considers implications for pedagogical practice in under-researched professional domains.

The adoption of English medium instruction (EMI) in non-Anglophone higher education contexts has intensified concerns about how students develop disciplinary literacy and how English for Academic Purposes (EAP) pedagogy supports this process. Although research on EMI, EAP, and disciplinary literacy has expanded, existing studies remain conceptually and methodologically fragmented, making it difficult to synthesise findings and identify transferrable pedagogical practices. To address this gap, this scoping review examined 36 empirical studies published between 2005 and 2025 to map how EAP and disciplinary literacy have been conceptualised, operationalised, and investigated as interconnected constructs in non-Anglophone EMI higher education. This review synthesised corpus characteristics, methodological orientations, disciplinary coverage, and theoretical/conceptual underpinnings. The findings show that studies are concentrated in Asia, with limited representation from South Asia, Latin America, and Africa. Disciplinary coverage was strongest in STEM, followed by Business, Social Sciences, and Arts and Humanities. Qualitative research was the most prevalent (n = 15; 41.7%), followed by mixed methods (n = 13; 36.1%) and quantitative studies (n = 8; 22.2%). The theoretical underpinnings were not tied to any fixed methodological orientation; rather, similar constructs were operationalised through different forms of evidence, including learner needs, disciplinary writing, language skills, content learning, and stakeholder perspectives. This review points to the need for closer correspondence between theoretical constructs and research methods, alongside more transparent reporting of disciplinary literacy and EAP pedagogy. It also calls for more context-sensitive research in underrepresented non-Anglophone EMI settings, particularly studies examining how EAP provision, disciplinary teaching, and institutional conditions may support aspects of disciplinary literacy development.

Understanding how EFL learners process figurative language, an important component of communicative competence, is relevant to effective language acquisition and communication. This study examines whether embodied metaphors are easier to comprehend than non-embodied metaphors for Arabic-speaking EFL learners and whether gender moderates comprehension. Eighty advanced students (40 male, 40 female) from the University of Jordan completed a multiple-choice test, which was developed for this study and refined through a pilot study, grounded in Extended Conceptual Metaphor Theory, followed by semi-structured interviews. Quantitative analyses showed significantly higher accuracy for the specific embodied metaphors tested (M = 7.14) compared to non-embodied metaphors (M = 4.33) across genders, yielding a large effect size (d = 1.22); however, no significant gender effect emerged in overall scores. Qualitative interviews provided illustrative evidence of possible differences in how some participants explained their interpretations, including references to visualisation, lexical reasoning, contextual inference, and L1 knowledge. These findings are interpreted in relation to universal embodied cognition and positive L1 transfer and are discussed in relation to potential working memory differences and the varying cognitive demands theorised for conceptual integration networks (single- vs. double-scope). Pedagogical implications concern the possible sequencing of embodied metaphors in figurative language curricula, targeted scaffolding for culturally specific non-embodied items, especially those that showed lower comprehension in this study, and utilising assessment designs that distinguish metaphor types and underlying comprehension strategies. The study discusses implementation in EFL courses, teacher training, and curriculum policy, alongside directions for replication across proficiency levels.

Although intercultural aspects of language learning have received increasing attention, learner differences remain comparatively underexamined. To address this gap, the present study examined goal orientation as a classroom-relevant source of learner variation and tested its association with intercultural sensitivity (ICS) and speaking performance. The initial sample included 212 intermediate-level EFL learners at the University of Jeddah, who completed goal-orientation and ICS scales. From this pool, 19 learners completed two recorded face-to-face interview tasks, one administered by a nonnative-speaker interviewer and the other by a native-speaker interviewer. The MANOVA results showed a significant association between goal orientation and ICS, F = 19.14, p < .001, η² = .60. Item-level ANOVAs for the ICS scale were also significant, with F values ranging from 53.85 to 106.10. In the speaking-performance analysis, goal orientation had a significant multivariate effect, F = 29.05, p < .001, η² = .84. Follow-up ANOVAs showed significant group differences for speech rate, dysfluency, subordination, and lexical density. The HMLP group showed higher subordination (M = 1.05) and lexical density (M = 47.70), whereas the LMHP group showed higher speech rate (M = 2.35) and fewer dysfluency markers (M = 8.73). Task-condition effects for the NS/NNS comparison were not significant. The findings indicate that goal orientation is associated with ICS and with distinct fluency-complexity profiles in EFL speaking performance.

Hoffmann and Turner’s Creative Construction Grammar is a compact, ambitious intervention in construction grammar and cognitive linguistics. Its purpose is to give construction grammar a fuller account of how speakers create, combine, learn, and alter form-meaning pairings in live use. The book begins from a familiar construction-grammar premise: linguistic knowledge consists not of a lexicon plus independent syntactic rules, but of learned pairings of form and meaning, ranging from words and idioms to argument-structure patterns and multimodal routines. Its distinctive claim is that construction grammar has not yet said enough about the mental work that permits speakers to put such pairings together in new utterances. Hoffmann and Turner propose that the missing account is blending theory.