This study conducts a comprehensive lexico-semiotic analysis of the social media signage employed by selected Pentecostal churches in Livingstone, Zambia. A qualitative descriptive design was adopted, utilizing a dual theoretical framework of Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG) and Kress and van Leeuwen's Visual Social Semiotics (VSS). Data from Instagram, Facebook, and church websites were scrutinized to decode... more

Despite ongoing sociological research, there is no clear consensus on gender-based differences in language use, particularly in terms of lexical choices. This gap underscores the need for further research. The present study aims to contribute to this area by examining gender differences in the use of lexis among students at the National University of Lesotho.... more

Despite extensive research on news discourse, limited attention has been given to how pragmatic strategies function in digital news to shape meaning and guide audience interpretation. Analysing a corpus of news articles from various online sources—such as The Guardian, BBC News, and The New York Times—the study aims to examine how pragmatic strategies are employed... more

Language is a critical consideration for practitioners working with Latino children and their families. These families display a wide range of linguistic backgrounds—from recent immigrants with limited English proficiency, to extended families who speak only Spanish, to bilingual households, to those who primarily speak non-standard ethnic English with some Spanish influence. In this review article,... more

This study investigates cultural identity formation through comparative analysis of somatic metaphors in Russian and Japanese proverbs and their transformation in animated film. Drawing on 347 Russian proverbs from Vladimir Dal's dictionary and 298 Japanese proverbs from the Nihon Kokugo Daijiten, the research examines how bodily imagery encodes cultural meaning and how this paremiological heritage... more

Humor is essential in daily life and as linguistic research advances, its mechanisms have attracted increasing scholarly attention. Metaphor as a fundamental way humans conceptualize the world plays a key role in constructing humor. And stand-up comedy, combining verbal artistry with social critique, offers rich naturalistic data for linguistic analysis. To better understand how humor... more

The study aims to explore the metalinguistic judgments of English syllable structures and lexical stress patterns perceived by Odki English as a Second Language (ESL) adult learners. The paper lays emphasis on phonological adjustments in Pakistan English spoken by the native Odki speakers and especially in their word stress and syllabification. The study examines syllables... more

This theoretical paper (1) defines linguistic geoengineering as a theoretical framework, (2) distinguishes its unique characteristics from established theories of language and power, and (3) analyzes its implications for public persuasion and democratic engagement. Linguistic geoengineering, a novel framework for analyzing language, power, and public influence, is defined as the deliberate, systematic restructuring of discourse... more

Sem-phrases in Hungarian are negative indefinites accompanied by the negative emphatic particle sem ‘neither’. Preverbal sem-phrases differ from postverbal ones in that the former behave as negative quantifiers (NQs), while the latter resemble s-words, which are negative concord items (NCIs) like senki ‘nobody’. By adopting Ladusaw’s distinction between syntactic vs. semantic licensing, the paper offers... more

Arabic and South African languages contain rich idiomatic expressions, many of which are based on body-related metaphors that play an important role in everyday communication. This study compares body-part idioms in Arabic and South African to examine how physical body concepts are used to express abstract meanings. Most previous research has primarily focused on English... more