master thesis topics in applied linguistics

Syntax and Semantics

• The Tok Pisin noun phrase
• Towards an investigation of socially-conditioned semantic variation
• Definite article reduction in a religious community of practice
• The definiteness effect in Chinese 'you'-existential constructions: A corpus based study
• Topics and pronouns in the clausal left periphery in Old English
• Scalar implicatures in polar (yes/no) questions
• Quantification, alternative semantics and phases
• The syntax and semantics of V2 – 'weil' in German 
• An analysis of Chinese quantifiers 'ge', 'dou' and 'quan' and their co-occurrence
• Distribution and licensing condititions of Negative Polarity Items in Mandarin Chinese
• The NP/DP Distinction in Slavic: A comparative approach
• A complex predicational analysis of the 'ba'-construction in Mandarin Chinese
• Two types of raising in Korean
• Serial verb constructions in Mandarin Chinese
• From Turncoats to Backstabbers:  How headedness and word order determine the productivity of agentive and instrumental compounding in English

Forensic Phonetics

• An Investigation into the Perceived Similarity of the Speech of Identical Twins and Same Sex Siblings
• Detecting Authenticity of Audio Files Compressed by Social Media Platforms
• Investigating Changes from Neutral to Soft and Whispered Speech and their Impact on Automatic Speaker Recognition
• The Effect of Anger and Fear on Forensic Authomatic Speaker Recognition System Performance
• The Impact of Face Coverings on Speech Comprehension and Perceptions of Speaker Attributes
• Tracking Linguistic Differences in the Ultrasound Images of the Tongue in Spoken and Silent Speech Conditions Using Pose Estimation

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Linguistics Department Dissertations Collection

Current students, please follow this link to submit your dissertation.

Dissertations from 2023 2023

Long(er) Object Movement in Turkish , Duygu Göksu, Linguistics

'You' Will Always Have 'Me': A Compositional Theory of Person , Kaden T. Holladay, Linguistics

Associative Plurals , Sherry Hucklebridge, Linguistics

Counterdirectionality in the Grammar: Reversals and Restitutions , Jyoti Iyer, Linguistics

The Online Processing of Even's Likelihood Presupposition , Erika Mayer, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2022 2022

On the Semantics of Verbal and Nominal Tense in Mvskoke (Creek) , Kimberly C. Johnson, Linguistics

Restrictive Tier Induction , Seoyoung Kim, Linguistics

DIRECTIONAL HARMONIC SERIALISM , Andrew Lamont, Linguistics

TENSE IN CONDITIONALS: INS AND OUTS , Zahra Mirrazi, Linguistics

Phonotactic Learning with Distributional Representations , Max A. Nelson, Linguistics

The Linearization of V(P)-doubling Constructions , Rong Yin, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2021 2021

Shifting the Perspectival Landscape: Methods for Encoding, Identifying, and Selecting Perspectives , Carolyn Jane Anderson, Linguistics

There and Gone Again: Syntactic Structure In Memory , Caroline Andrews, Linguistics

The Event Structure of Attitudes , Deniz Özyıldız, Linguistics

LEARNING PHONOLOGY WITH SEQUENCE-TO-SEQUENCE NEURAL NETWORKS , Brandon Prickett, Linguistics

The Syntactic and Semantic Atoms of the Spray/load Alternation , Michael A. Wilson, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2020 2020

Representing Context: Presupposition Triggers and Focus-sensitivity , Alexander Goebel, Linguistics

Person-based Prominence in Ojibwe , Christopher Hammerly, Linguistics

Emergent Typological Effects of Agent-Based Learning Models in Maximum Entropy Grammar , Coral Hughto, Linguistics

TALKING ABOUT HER(SELF): AMBIGUITY AVOIDANCE AND PRINCIPLE B. A Theoretical and Psycholinguistic Investigation of Romanian Pronouns , Rudmila-Rodica Ivan, Linguistics

THE EMPTINESS OF THE PRESENT: FRONTING CONSTRUCTIONS AS A WINDOW TO THE SEMANTICS OF TENSE , Petr Kusliy, Linguistics

Optimal Linearization: Prosodic displacement in Khoekhoegowab and Beyond , Leland Kusmer, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2019 2019

Computing Agreement in a Mixed System , Sakshi Bhatia, Linguistics

Binding and Coreference in Vietnamese , Thuy Bui, Linguistics

Divorce Licensing: Separate Criteria for Predicate and Clausal Ellipsis , Tracy Conner, Linguistics

Effects of Phonological Contrast on Within-Category Phonetic Variation , Ivy Hauser, Linguistics

Phrasal and Clausal Exceptive-Additive Constructions Crosslinguistically , Ekaterina Vostrikova, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2018 2018

Typology of bizarre ellipsis varieties , David Erschler, Linguistics

The Head-Quarters of Mandarin Arguments , Hsin-Lun Huang, Linguistics

ATTITUDES DE SE AND LOGOPHORICITY , Yangsook Park, Linguistics

Responding to questions and assertions: embedded Polar Response Particles, ellipsis, and contrast , Jeremy Pasquereau, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2017 2017

The Form and Acquisition of Free Relatives , Michael Clauss, Linguistics

Amount Relatives Redux , Jon Ander Mendia, Linguistics

Movement and the Semantic Type of Traces , Ethan Poole, Linguistics

Preferential early attribution in segmental parsing , Amanda Rysling, Linguistics

When errors aren't: How comprehenders selectively violate Binding Theory , Shayne Sloggett, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2016 2016

Building Meaning in Navajo , Elizabeth A. Bogal-Allbritten, Linguistics

Probes and their Horizons , Stefan Keine, Linguistics

Anaphora, Inversion, and Focus , Nicholas J. LaCara, Linguistics

The Representation of Probabilistic Phonological Patterns: Neurological, Behavioral, and Computational Evidence from the English Stress System , Claire Moore-Cantwell, Linguistics

Extending Hidden Structure Learning: Features, Opacity, and Exceptions , Aleksei I. Nazarov, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2015 2015

Experiencing in Japanese: The Experiencer Restriction across Clausal Types , Masashi Hashimoto, Linguistics

Rightward Movement: A Study in Locality , Jason Overfelt, Linguistics

Investigating Properties of Phonotactic Knowledge Through Web-Based Experimentation , Presley Pizzo, Linguistics

Phonologically Conditioned Allomorphy and UR Constraints , Brian W. Smith, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2014 2014

Contrastive Topic: Meanings and Realizations , Noah Constant, Linguistics

The Grammar of Individuation and Counting , Suzi Lima, Linguistics

Comprehending Each Other: Weak Reciprocity and Processing , Helen Majewski, Linguistics

Computational Modeling of Learning Biases in Stress Typology , Robert D. Staubs, Linguistics

Fragments and Clausal Ellipsis , Andrew Weir, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2013 2013

Gapping in Farsi: A Crosslinguistic Investigation , Annahita Farudi, Linguistics

The Parsing and Interpretation of Comparatives: More than Meets the Eye , Margaret Ann Grant, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2012 2012

Syntax-Prosody Interactions in Irish , Emily Elfner, Linguistics

Processing Perspectives , Jesse Aron Harris, Linguistics

Exhaustivity In Questions & Clefts; And The Quantifier Connection: A Study In German And English , Tanja Heizmann, Linguistics

Phonological And Phonetic Biases In Speech Perception , Michael Parrish Key, Linguistics

The Role of Contextual Restriction in Reference-Tracking , Andrew Robert McKenzie, Linguistics

Stress in Harmonic Serialism , Kathryn Ringler Pruitt, Linguistics

Roots of Modality , Aynat Rubinstein, Linguistics

Goals, Big and Small , Martin Walkow, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2011 2011

Quantification, misc. , Jan Anderssen, Linguistics

Anchoring Pragmatics In Syntax And Semantics , Maria Biezma, Linguistics

Constraining Interpretation: Sentence Final Particles in Japanese , Christopher M. Davis, Linguistics

Cumulative constraint interaction in phonological acquisition and typology , Karen Christine Jesney

Cumulative Constraint Interaction In Phonological Acquisition And Typology , Karen Christine Jesney, Linguistics

Competing Triggers: Transparency And Opacity In Vowel Harmony , Wendell A Kimper, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2010 2010

Topics In The Nez Perce Verb , Amy Rose Deal, Linguistics

Concealed Questions. In Search Of Answers , Ilaria Frana, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2009 2009

Phonological Trends In The Lexicon: The Role Of Constraints , Michael Becker, Linguistics

Natural Selection and the Syntax of Clausal Complementation , Keir Moulton, Linguistics

Two Types of Definites in Natural Language , Florian Schwarz, Linguistics

The Role Of Lexical Contrast In The Perception Of Intonational Prominence In Japanese , Takahito Shinya, Linguistics

The Emergence of DP in the Partitive Structure , Helen Stickney, Linguistics

Optionality and Variability: Syntactic Licensing Meets Morphological Spell-Out , Cherlon Ussery, Linguistics

Word, Phrase, And Clitic Prosody In Bosnian, Serbian, And Croatian , Adam Werle, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2008 2008

Optimal interleaving: Serial phonology -morphology interaction in a constraint-based model , Matthew Adam Wolf

Dissertations from 2007 2007

The sources of phonological markedness , Kathryn Gilbert Flack

The emergence of phonetic naturalness , Shigeto Kawahara

Biases and stages in phonological acquisition , Anne-Michelle Tessier

Acquisition of scalar implicatures , Anna VerBuk

Dissertations from 2006 2006

Disjunction in alternative semantics , Luis Alonso-Ovalle

Acquisition of a natural versus an unnatural stress system , Angela C Carpenter

Asymmetries in the acquisition of consonant clusters , Della Chambless

Telicity and the syntax-semantics of the *object and *subject , Miren J Hodgson

Variables in Natural Language , Meredith Landman, Linguistics

Dissertations from 2005 2005

On the Accessiblity of Possible Worlds: The Role of Tense and Aspect , Ana Cristina Arregui

Perception of foreignness , Ben Gelbart

Prosody and LF interpretation: Processing Japanese wh -questions , Masako Hirotani

The grammar of choice , Paula Menendez-Benito

Mediated *modification: Functional structure and the interpretation of modifier position , Marcin Morzycki

Dissertations from 2004 2004

What it means to be a loser: Non -optimal candidates in optimality theory , Andries W Coetzee

Scope: The View from Indefinites , Ji-Yung Kim

Event-structure and the internally headed relative clause construction in Korean and Japanese , Min-Joo Kim

Spain or bust? Assessment and student perceptions of out-of-class contact and oral proficiency in a study abroad context , Vija Glazer Mendelson

On the articulation of aspectual meaning in African -American English , Jules Michael Eugene Terry

Dissertations from 2003 2003

Deriving Economy: Syncope in Optimality Theory , Maria Gouskova

Gestures and segments: Vowel intrusion as overlap , Nancy Elizabeth Hall

The development of phonological categories in children's perception of final voicing in dialects of English , Caroline Jones

Argument structure and the lexicon /syntax interface , Eva Juarros

Contrast preservation in phonological mappings , Anna Lubowicz

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Recent Submissions

Unpacking the history of middle chinese *ɣu- in the yue dialects in guangdong: a dialect geographical analysis , perception and production of singular they in british english , cross-dialect variation in dinka tonal morphology , morphophonological interactions in shilluk: an investigation into the tone system and suffixation patterns in the gar dialect , vowel duration in the standard english of scotland , linguicide or linguistic suicide: a case study of indigenous minority languages in france , combining translation into the second language and second language learning : an integrated computational approach , post-critical period age of arrival and its relationship to ultimate attainment in a second language , hci for development: does sense of agency affect the adoption of a mobile health insurance service in tanzania , language policy and planning in xinjiang uygur autonomous region of china , comparable structural priming from comprehension and production: evidence against error-based learning of syntactic structure , developing educational games for teaching children with special educational needs , variation in the speech of university students from edinburgh: the cases of /x/ and // , a diachronic constructional investigation into the adverse avertive schema in chinese , onset consonants and the perceptions of tone and voicing in thai , simulating the interaction between mindreading and language in development and evolution , in task-oriented dyadic dialogue, how do non-native speakers of english align with each other in terms of lexical choices , native english speakers' music ability and their perception and production of l2 mandarin tones , a study of cmc language switching in china , the cognitive processes involved with hitting a fastball and why the baseball axiom "keeping your eye on the ball" is an exercise in futility .

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Recent projects, theses, and dissertations

The following are recently completed PhD dissertations and MA Linguistics/MA Applied Linguistics theses, as well as MILR projects and theses. You can access any of these  UVic's Research and Learning repository (UVicSpace) .

PhD Dissertations

Yu, Chen. 2023.  The perception and production of Mandarin citation tones by prelingually deaf adults.

Khatri, Raj. 2022.  Supporting B.C.’s expanding international education: The efficacy of academic reading strategy instruction among adult English-as-an-additional-language students.

Deng, Jie. 2022.  L2, L3 and Heritage Acquisition of Chinese T3 Sandhi: Comprehensibility and Accentedness

Friesen, Dianne. 2022.  A Grammar of Relationship: How Mi’kmaw verbs indicate the relationship between participants in a sentence.

Yousefi, Marziyeh. 2020.  Investigating the Effect of Corrective Feedback on Second Language Pragmatics: Face-to Face vs. Technology-Mediated Communication.

Anisman, Adar. 2019.  When 'if' is 'when' and 'when' is 'then': The particle nı̨dè in Tłı̨chǫ.

Hart-Blundon, Patricia. 2019.   Learning Standard English in addition to a Local English Variety.

Ceong, Hailey Hyekyeong. 2019.   The morphosyntax of clause typing: single, double periphrastic, and multifunctional complementizers in Korean.

Liu, Jianxun. 2019.  The syntax of V-V resultatives in Mandarin Chinese .

Leonard, Janet. 2019.  The Phonological Representation and Distribution of Vowels in SENĆOŦEN (Saanich).

Alkutbi, Douaa. 2018.  Bridging the Gap: A Study of Academic Language-Learning Needs of Saudi International Students.

Onosson, D. Sky. 2018.  An Acoustic Study of Canadian Raising in Three Dialects of North American English.

Lucarevschi, Claudio Rezende. 2018.  The Role of Storytelling in the Development of Pronunciation of Brazilian Learners of English as a Foreign Language.

Qian, Xiaojuan. 2017. Novice, Paraprofessional, and Professional Translators' Strategy Use in Chinese-English Translation Processes: Retrospective Reflections, Concurrent Screen-capturing, and Key-stroke Logging.

Travers, Nicholas. 2017. English-as-an-Additional-Language Job Interviews: Pragmatics Training for Candidates and Analyzing Performance on Both Sides of the Table.

Nogita, Akitsugu. 2016. L2 Letter-Sound Correspondence: Mapping Between English Vowel Graphemes and Phonomes by Japanese EAL Learners.

Luo, Shan. 2015. Gestural overlap across word boundaries: Evidence from English and Mandarin speakers.

Li, Ya. 2015. Timing and Melody: An Acoustic Study of Rhythmic Patterns of Chinese Dialects .

Karim, Khaled. 2013. The Effects of Direct and Indirect Corrective Feedback (CF) on English-as-a-Second-Language (ESL) Students' Revision Accuracy and Writing Skills.

Nicolson, Marianne. 2013. Yexa Uḱwine’, yexa Gukw, dłuwida Awinagwis” The Body, the House, and the Land: The Conceptualization of Space in Kwakwaka’wakw Language and Culture   [INTD: Linguistics and Anthropology]

Moisik, Scott. 2013. The Epilarynx in Speech .

Lee, Sunghwa. 2013. Multiple Exponence in Non-inflectional Morphology.

Robertson, David Douglas. 2012. Kamloops Chinuk Wawa, Chinuk pipa, and the vitality of pidgins .

Tian, Jun. 2012. The Effects of peer editing versus co-writing on writing in Chinese-as-a-foreign language .

Pytlyk, Carolyn. 2012. Expanding the scope of orthographic effects: evidence from phoneme counting in first, second, and unfamiliar languages .

MA Linguistics Theses

Farr, Chloë. 2024.  Unmasking ChatGPT: The Challenges of Using Artificial Intelligence for Learning Vocabulary in English as an Additional Language.

Li, Mitchell, 2024.  Statistical Power for Small Effect Sizes: An investigation of backward priming in Mandarin-English bilinguals.

Campbell, Jessalyn. 2023.  Serial Verb Constructions in SENĆOŦEN.

Loughlin, Aiden. 2022.  Who is they? Pronoun use across time and social structure.

Allen, Caroline. 2022.  GET over time: a longitudinal variationist analysis of passive voice in contemporary English.

Moser, Christiana. 2021.  Heterogeneity in the structure of Icelandic -st figure reflexives.

Buaillon, Emmanuelle. 2021.  À Paris/sur Paris: A Variationist Account of Prepositional Alternation Before City Names in Hexagonal French.

Fortier, Kyra. 2019.  An Acoustic Investigation of Vowel Variation in Gitksan .

Comeau, Emily. 2018.  Literacy and Language Revitalization: Leaving a Visible Trace.

Dworak, Catherine. 2018.  Limxhl Hlgu Wo'omhlxw Song of the Newborn: Knowledge and Stories Surrounding Pregnancy, Childbirth, and the Newborn. A Collaborative Language Project.

Richards, Matthew. 2018.  Prosodic Structure of the Foxtrot.

Hilderman, Dustin. 2018.  Codeswitching in the Multilingual Mind.

Nolan, Tess. 2017. A Phonetic Investigation of Vowel Variation in Lekwungen.

Enriquez Garcia, Ildara. 2017.  Variation and Clitic Placement among Galician Neofalantes.

Jenni, Barbara. 2017. Self-Narrative Following Acquired Brain Injury: An Exploration of Linguistic, Subjective, and Other Associated Factors.

Hildebrand-Edgar, Nicole. 2016. Creaky Voice: An Interactional Resource for Indexing Authority.

Huijsmans, Marianne. 2015. Linearization and Prosodic Phrasing: The Case of SENĆOŦEN Second-Position Clitics.

Saunders, Susan Jane. 2015. A Language Survey of Northern Metis Languages: A Community-Based Language Revitalization Project.

Litvin, Natalia. 2014.  An Ultrasound Investigation of Secondary Velarization in Russian.

Xing, Nan. 2014. English /l/s as Produced by Native English and Mandarin Chinese Speakers.

McKishnie, Andrew. 2013.  Depictives and Wh-Movement of Depictives in East Slavic.

McCreery, Dale. 2013. Challenges and Solutions in Adult Acquisition of Cree as a Second Language .

Liu, Jianxun. 2012. An applicative approach to “oblique object” constructions and DOCs in Chinese.

Ceong, Hailey Hyekyeong. 2012. The Syntax of Korean polar alternative questions: A-not-A.

MA Applied Linguistics Theses

Mao, Siyu (Rain). 2024.  Chinese-as-a-First-Language (CL1) and English-as-a-First-Language (EL1)Undergraduate Students' Business Writing in Canadian Universities:A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study of Linguistic Features.

Somerville, Matthew. 2023.  Nihonjin Kyoushi Dake?: The Perceptions and Beliefs of a Non-Native Speaking Teacher in a High-intermediate Japanese Language Class.

O'Toole, Erin. 2023.  A critical examination of Core French curriculum, teaching methods, and learning motivational factors in British Columbia.

Aleassa, Lana. 2023.  Apology Strategies in High vs. Low Context Cultures.

Cervantes, Eloisa. 2023.  Heritage Language Anxiety in Canadian Post-Secondary Learners of Spanish.

Serpas, Gill. 2023.  Mainly English, Some Japanese: Exploring the Opinions of EFL Students and EFL Teachers on Using Translanguaging in EFL Classrooms in Japan.

Shirani, Reza. 2020.  Explicit versus Implicit Corrective Feedback During Videoconferencing: Effects on the Accuracy and Fluency of L2 Speech.

Blackstone, Pam. 2019.   An investigation of pedagogical approaches and methods used in a French university French-as-a-foreign-language program: teacher and student perspectives.

Bagherbeigi, Vahid. 2019.  The Impact of Computer-mediated Communication on EFL Learners' Oral Performance.

Kim, Keun. 2019. The efficacy of lexical stress diacritics in the English comprehensibility and accentedness of Korean speakers.

Zhang, Yiran. 2018.  A Comparative Study of the Language Content of Employment-Related Units in Government-Funded Language Programs for Newcomers in Canada and Australia.

Suessenbach, Lisa. 2018.  A Phonetic and Phonological Investigation of North American English (NAE) Segments in the Interlanguage Grammar of a Native Speaker of German (SHG).

Romig, Silas. 2017. The Production and Perception of English Vowels by Native Speakers of Brazilian Portuguese Living in Victoria, Canada.

Thompson Wagner, Christiani Pinheiro. Preliminary Study of the Role of Eye Contact, Gestures, and Smiles Produced by Chinese-as-a-First-Language Test-Takers on Ratings Assigned by English-as-a-First-Language Examiners During IELTS Speaking Tests.

Hill, Carrie. 2015. Exploring Mandarin-speaking English-as-an-Additional-Language graduate students' academic reading strategies in three reading modes: paper, e-reading without hypertext, and e-reading with embedded hypertext.

Zariski, Ross. 2014. World of Warcraft as a medium for Intermediate-Level English Language Acquisition: Leveling up Accuracy, Fluency, and Lexical Complexity.

Cai, Mengyue. 2014. Undergraduate EAL (English-as-an-Additional-Language) Students' Reported Use of Vocabulary Learning Strategies and its Relationship vis-a-vis Language Proficency, Vocabulary Size, and Gender.

Kim, Jongmin. 2014. Incidental Focus-on-Form and Learner Extraversion.

Parker, Aliana Violet. 2013. Learning the language of the land .

Malec, Alesia. 2013. Examining emotional responses to written feedback and the role emotions play on second language writing performance .

Chen, Sibo. 2013. Genre Features of Personal Statements by Chinese English-as-an-Additional-Language Writers: A Corpus-Driven Study .

Hannigan, Patricia. 2013. Promoting awareness and regulation of social and affective behaviours during L2 speaking tasks through written reflection .

Park, Seon-Young. 2012 . Korean parents', kindergarten teachers', and kindergarten students' perceptions of early English-language education .

Yu, Zhaoru. 2012. The production and the perception of English vowels by Mandarin speakers .

Fu, Tingfen. 2012. Corrective feedback and learner uptake in a Chinese as a foreign language class: do perceptions and the reality match?

Guo, Xiaoqian. 2012. L1 and L2 writing strategies: a study of Chinese graduate writers using concurrent think-aloud.

Kaneko, Kyoko. 2012. A comparative study of the use of request strategies by learners and native speakers of Japanese.

Fan, Yanan. 2012. Articulatory timing of English consonant clusters in the coda positions: a study of Chinese-English interlanguage.

MA Applied Linguistics Non-Thesis

Aalam, Niloofar. 2019. The role of playing collabortive online games in mediating vocabulary learning.

Cathers, Bryan. 2019.  A Survey of Michif Language Use and Attitudes of Métis in Victoria .

Sinha, Tara-Shankar. 2017. ESL Learners' Perception and the Efficacy of Written Corrective Feedback.

MILR Projects and Theses

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CUNY Academic Works

Home > Dissertations, Theses & Capstones Projects by Program > Linguistics Master's Theses

Linguistics Master's Theses

Theses from 2024 2024.

Consonant (De)gradation in Ingrian? , Andrea M. Harrison

How Do We Learn What We Cannot Say? , Daniel Yakubov

Theses from 2023 2023

Applying Linguistics to the Adult ESOL Classroom: A Guide for ESOL Teachers in Community Centers , Lenore Costello

Towards Interpretable Machine Reading Comprehension with Mixed Effects Regression and Exploratory Prompt Analysis , Luca Del Signore

Neural Network vs. Rule-Based G2P: A Hybrid Approach to Stress Prediction and Related Vowel Reduction in Bulgarian , Maria Karamihaylova

Topics for He but not for She: Quantifying and Classifying Gender Bias in the Media , Tyler J. Lanni

Language of the Enemy: Impacts of the 2022 Russo-Ukrainian War on Linguistic and National Identity Paradigms in Ukraine , Julia Panter

A Sentiment Analysis of "Filipinx" on Twitter Using a Multinomial Naïve Bayes Classification Model , Clarisse Taboy

Pronunciation Ambiguities in Japanese Kanji , Wen Zhang

Theses from 2022 2022

The Realization of the Null Subject Parameter in Greek-American Children and Adults: Anaphora Resolution Patterns in Ambiguous Sentential Structures , Maria Elekidou

Does a Neural Network Inflect Spanish Verbs in a Human-Like Way? , Elizabeth Garza

A Study of Entrainment in Speech as a Possible Predictor of Perceived Trust , Mariana Graterol Fuenmayor

Gender-Informed Features of Film Reviews: A Statistical Linguistic Analysis , Matthew Kadish

A Machine Learning Approach to Text-Based Sarcasm Detection , Lara I. Novic

Covert Determiners in Appalachian English Narrative Declarative Sentences , William Oliver

From Sesame Street to Beyond: Multi-Domain Discourse Relation Classification with Pretrained BERT , Isaac R. Raff

Methods in Reverse Transliteration of English Loanwords in Japanese , Yuying Ren

Predicting Stress in Russian using Modern Machine-Learning Tools , John Schriner

Examining the Linguistic Ideology "Throaty Sounds Are Bad for Performers": The History of Negative Attitudes Towards Glottal Stops and Laryngealization in English , Dayle M. Towarnicky

Expanding the Pronominal Account of Tense: A Reexamination of the Double Access Reading in English , Brynne E. Wilkinson

Theses from 2021 2021

Evaluating the Role of Gender in Dementia-Related Language Deficiencies , Kelsey Bourque

Predicting Stock Price Movements Using Sentiment and Subjectivity Analyses , Andrew Kirby

From an Art to a Science: Features and Methodology in Computational Authorship Identification , Jonathan I. Manczur

The Production of Russian Vowels /i/ and /ɨ/ by Russian-English Bilingual Children , Evgeniya Maryutina

When Misclassification Is Misgendering: Gender Prediction in the Context of Trans Identities , Sean Miller

A Computational Study in the Detection of English–Spanish Code-Switches , Yohamy C. Polanco

Detection and Morphological Analysis of Novel Russian Loanwords , Yulia Spektor

Computational Representation of Russian Aspectual Morphology with a Focus on Perfective Prefixation , Natalia Tyulina

Theses from 2020 2020

From the Unspoken to the Verbalized: Different Ways of Communication and their Relationship to Culture in a Traditional Lakota Narrative "Ikto na wičhá ha kiŋ”, or “Ikto and the Racoon Skin” , Liliana R. Boladz-Nekipelov

Does the Word "Chien" Bark? Representation Learning in Neural Machine Translation Encoders , Emily Campbell

Processing Coercion in a First, Non-Dominant Language: Mandarin-English Heritage Bilinguals , Christina N. Dadurian

Doing Away With Defaults: Motivation for a Gradient Parameter Space , Katherine Howitt

Genderlects in Social Media , Alina Korovatskaya

Inferring Research Fields in Administrative Records Using Text Data , Ekaterina Levitskaya

Tones in Shupamem Reduplication , Magdalena Markowska

Cot in the Act: Ethnicity and Age Affects Phonemic Perception of the Low-Back Merger in New York City English , Omar Ortiz

Acquisition Orders and Instructional Sequences: A Case Study of Russian Textbooks , Olga Ozhiganova

On the Temporal Interpretation of Epistemic Modals: Evidence from Palestinian Arabic , Alaa M. Sharif

Testing the Perceptual Magnet Effect in Monolinguals and Bilinguals , Michael C. Stern

Phonologically-Informed Speech Coding for Automatic Speech Recognition-based Foreign Language Pronunciation Training , Anthony J. Vicario

Ghost Peppers: Using Ensemble Models to Detect Professor Attractiveness Commentary on RateMyProfessors.com , Angie Waller

Mitigating Gender Bias in Neural Machine Translation Using Counterfactual Data , Alan Wong

Knowledge of the Present Perfect by Albanian/English Bilinguals , Erjon Xholi

Analysis of PRO-drop Errors in L2 English by L1 Spanish Speakers , Marcos R. Ynoa

Theses from 2019 2019

The Effects of Language Background and Foreign Accent on Listening Comprehension , Sita Carraturo

Demographic Factors as Domains for Adaptation in Linguistic Preprocessing , Sara Morini

Generative Adversarial Networks and Word Embeddings for Natural Language Generation , Robert D. Schultz Jr

Heritage Speaker and Late Bilingual L2 Relative Clause Processing and Language Dominance Effects , LeeAnn S. Stevens

The Perception of Mandarin Tones in "Bubble" Noise by Native and L2 Listeners , Mengxuan Zhao

Theses from 2018 2018

Describing Doggo-Speak: Features of Doggo Meme Language , Jennifer Bivens

Purepecha Aspirated Consonants and Their Phonetic Variants , Lluvia Camacho Cervantes

The Social Perception of Three Features of New York City English , Giacomo Castronovo Jr.

Speech Perception in “Bubble” Noise: Korean Fricatives and Affricates By Native and Non-native Korean Listeners , Jiyoung Choi

English Influence on L2 Speakers’ Production of Palatalization and Velarization , Jennifer C. Gabriele

Recursive Neural Networks for Semantic Sentence Representation , Liam S. Geron

Input and Output in the Acquisition of Russian as a Heritage Language During the Third Year of Life , Ekaterina V. Kistanova

Intergroup Variability in Personality Recognition , Arundhati Sengupta

Revisiting Lockhart: A Case for a Conditional Operator , Eric J. Tsai

Theses from 2017 2017

Aspects of Quantifier Float in Thai , Khanin Chaiphet

Spatial Prepositions in Spanish , Carolina Fraga

From Rochel to Rose and Mendel to Max: First Name Americanization Patterns Among Twentieth-Century Jewish Immigrants to the United States , Jason H. Greenberg

A Sentiment Analysis of Language & Gender Using Word Embedding Models , Ellyn Rolleston Keith

Contesting Victimhood: A Linguistic and Legal Anthropological Analysis of Defendant Experiences in New York’s Human Trafficking Intervention Courts , Mark T. Romig

ES-ESA: An Information Retrieval Prototype Using Explicit Semantic Analysis and Elasticsearch , Brian D. Sloan

A Discussion of Delimitative in Mandarin Chinese , Qi Zhang

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Infixer: A Method for Segmenting Non-Concatenative Morphology in Tagalog , Steven R. Butler

Processing Filler-Gap Dependencies in Mandarin Chinese: An Effect of Language Exposure? , Stanley Chen

Nondescript: A Web Tool to Aid Subversion of Authorship Attribution , Robin Davis

Utilizing Linguistic Context To Improve Individual and Cohort Identification in Typed Text , Adam Goodkind

An Evaluation of POS Taggers for the CHILDES Corpus , Rui Huang

Event Parsing In Narrative: Trials And Tribulations Of Archaic English Fairy Tales , Rebecca Lovering

An ERP Study of Sensory-Linguistic Processing in the Context of ASD Research , Larissa R. Miller

An Examination of Cross-Domain Authorship Attribution Techniques , Maxwell B. Schwartz

Voicing the Other: Mock AAVE on Social Media , Hanna L. Smokoski

Theses from 2015 2015

/n/:/r/ Correspondences in Albanian Dialects: Understanding the n>r Sound Change , Katie Albany

Techniques for Automatic Normalization of Orthographically Variant Yiddish Texts , Yakov Peretz Blum

Vocabulary Through Affixes and Word Families - A Computer-Assisted Language Learning Program for Adult ELL Students , Magdalena Kieliszek

Syntactic Constraints and Social Uses of Greek-English Intrasentential Codeswitching , Despina Stefanou Malliaroudakis

Obstruent Voicing and Tone in Siklis Gurung , Danielle Ronkos

The Incidence and Evolution of Palatalized Consonants in Latvian , Linda Zalite

Theses from 2014 2014

The Influence of Pseudo-relatives on Attachment Preferences in Spanish , David Branco-Moreno

The Inner Workings of Text Summarization Systems , Hope Cotton

HUU-FA THESIS DAT?: A Syntactic Analysis of Possessive Jamaican Creole Possessive WH-elements , Toni Ashlie Foster

Canvas: A fast and accurate geometric sentence alignment system using lexical cues within complex misalignment settings , Hussein M. Ghaly

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Some complexities in English article use and acquisition , Victoria Somogyi

Understanding Doubly Center-Embedded Sentences Through Contrastive Focus , Ashley Caroline Thorne

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Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: A bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers

Associated data.

The datasets presented in this study can be found in online repositories. The names of the repository/repositories and accession number(s) can be found in the article/ supplementary material .

High citations most often characterize quality research that reflects the foci of the discipline. This study aims to spotlight the most recent hot topics and the trends looming from the highly cited papers (HCPs) in Web of Science category of linguistics and language & linguistics with bibliometric analysis. The bibliometric information of the 143 HCPs based on Essential Citation Indicators was retrieved and used to identify and analyze influential contributors at the levels of journals, authors, and countries. The most frequently explored topics were identified by corpus analysis and manual checking. The retrieved topics can be grouped into five general categories: multilingual-related , language teaching , and learning related , psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related , methods and tools-related , and others . Topics such as bi/multilingual(ism) , translanguaging , language/writing development , models , emotions , foreign language enjoyment (FLE) , cognition , anxiety are among the most frequently explored. Multilingual and positive trends are discerned from the investigated HCPs. The findings inform linguistic researchers of the publication characteristics of the HCPs in the linguistics field and help them pinpoint the research trends and directions to exert their efforts in future studies.

1. Introduction

Citations, as a rule, exhibit a skewed distributional pattern over the academic publications: a few papers accumulate an overwhelming large citations while the majority are rarely, if ever, cited. Correspondingly, the highly cited papers (HCPs) receive the greatest amount of attention in the academia as citations are commonly regarded as a strong indicator of research excellence. For academic professionals, following HCPs is an efficient way to stay current with the developments in a field and to make better informed decisions regarding potential research topics and directions to exert their efforts. For academic institutions, government and private agencies, and generally the science policy makers, they keep a close eye on and take advantage of this visible indicator, citations, to make more informed decisions on research funding allocation and science policy formulation. Under the backdrop of ever-growing academic outputs, there is noticeable attention shift from publication quantity to publication quality. Many countries are developing research policies to identify “excellent” universities, research groups, and researchers ( Danell, 2011 ). In a word, HCPs showcase high-quality research, encompass significant themes, and constitute a critical reference point in a research field as they are “gold bullion of science” ( Smith, 2007 ).

2. Literature review

Bibliometrics, a term coined by Pritchard (1969) , refers to the application of mathematical methods to the analysis of academic publications. Essentially this is a quantitative method to depict publication patterns within a given field based on a body of literature. There are many bibliometric studies on natural and social sciences in general ( Hsu and Ho, 2014 ; Zhu and Lei, 2022 ) and on various specific disciplines such as management sciences ( Liao et al., 2018 ), biomass research ( Chen and Ho, 2015 ), computer sciences ( Xie and Willett, 2013 ), and sport sciences ( Mancebo et al., 2013 ; Ríos et al., 2013 ), etc. In these studies, researchers tracked developments, weighed research impacts, and highlighted emerging scientific fronts with bibliometric methods. In the field of linguistics, bibliometric studies all occurred in the past few years ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ; Lei and Liao, 2017 ; Gong et al., 2018 ; Lei and Liu, 2018 , 2019 ). These bibliometric studies mostly examined a sub-area of linguistics, such as corpus linguistics ( Liao and Lei, 2017 ), translation studies ( van Doorslaer and Gambier, 2015 ), the teaching of Chinese as a second/foreign language ( Gong et al., 2018 ), academic journals like System ( Lei and Liu, 2018 ) or Porta Linguarum ( Sabiote and Rodríguez, 2015 ), etc. Although Lei and Liu (2019) took the entire discipline of linguistics under investigation, their research is exclusively focused on applied linguistics and restricted in a limited number of journals (42 journals in total), leaving publications in other linguistics disciplines and qualified journals unexamined.

Over the recent years, a number of studies have been concerned with “excellent” papers or HCPs. For example, Small (2004) surveyed the HCPs authors’ opinions on why their papers are highly cited. The strong interest, the novelty, the utility, and the high importance of the work were among the most frequently mentioned. Most authors also considered that their selected HCPs are indeed based on their most important work in their academic career. Aksnes (2003) investigated the characteristics of HCPs and found that they were generally authored by a large number of scientists, often involving international collaboration. Some researchers even attempted to predict the HCPs by building mathematical models, implying “the first mover advantage in scientific publication” ( Newman, 2008 , 2014 ). In other words, papers published earlier in a field generally are more likely to accumulate more citations than those published later. Although many papers addressed HCPs from different perspectives, they held a common belief that HCPs are very different from less or zero cited papers and thus deserve utmost attention in academic research ( Aksnes, 2003 ; Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Yan et al., 2022 ).

Although an increased focus on research quality can be observed in different fields, opinions diverge on the range and the inclusion criterion of excellent papers. Are they ‘highly cited’, ‘top cited’, or ‘most frequently cited’ papers? Aksnes (2003) noted two different approaches to define a highly cited article, involving absolute or relative thresholds, respectively. An absolute threshold stipulates a minimum number of citations for identifying excellent papers while a relative threshold employs the percentile rank classes, for example, the top 10% most highly cited papers in a discipline or in a publication year or in a publication set. It is important to note that citations differ significantly in different fields and disciplines. A HCP in natural sciences generally accumulates more citations than its counterpart in social sciences. Thus, it is necessary to investigate HCPs from different fields separately or adopt different inclusion criterion to ensure a valid comparison.

The present study has been motivated by two considerations. First, the sizable number of publications of varied qualities in a scientific field makes it difficult or even impossible to conduct any reliable and effective literature research. Focusing on the quality publications, the HCPs in particular, might lend more credibility to the findings on trends. Second, HCPs can serve as a great platform to discover potentially important information for the development of a discipline and understand the past, present, and future of the scientific structure. Therefore, the present study aims to investigate the hot topics and publication trends in the Web of Science category of linguistics or language & linguistics (shortened as linguistics in later references) with bibliometric methods. The study aims to answer the following three questions:

• Who are the most productive and impactful contributors of the HCPs in WoS category of linguistics or language & linguistics in terms of publication venues, authors, and countries?
• What are the most frequently explored topics in HCPs?
• What are the general research trends revealed from the HCPs?

3. Materials and methods

Different from previous studies which used an arbitrary inclusion threshold (e.g., Blessinger and Hrycaj, 2010 ; Hsu and Ho, 2014 ), we rely on Essential Science Indicator (ESI) to identify the HCPs. Developed by Clarivate, a leading company in the areas of bibliometrics and scientometrics, ESI reveals emerging science trends as well as influential individuals, institutions, papers, journals, and countries in any scientific fields of inquiry by drawing on the complete WoS databases. ESI has been chosen for the following three reasons. First, ESI adopts a stricter inclusion criterion for HCPs identification. That is, a paper is selected as a HCP only when its citations exceed the top 1% citation threshold in each of the 22 ESI subject categories. Second, ESI is widely used and recognized for its reliability and authority in identifying the top-charting work, generating “excellent” metrics including hot and highly cited papers. Third, ESI automatically updates its database to generate the most recent HCPs, especially suitable for trend studies for a specified timeframe.

3.1. Data source

The data retrieval was completed at the portal of our university library on June 20, 2022. The methods to retrieve the data are described in Table 1 . The bibliometric indicators regarding the important contributors at journal/author/country levels were obtained. Specifically, after the research was completed, we clicked the “Analyze Results” bar on the result page for the detailed descriptive analysis of the retrieved bibliometric data.

Retrieval strategies.

Several points should be noted about the search strategies. First, we searched the bibliometric data from two sub-databases of WoS core collection: Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI). There is no need to include the sub-database of Science Citation Index Expanded (SCI-EXPANDED) because publications in the linguistics field are almost exclusively indexed in SSCI and A&HCI journals. WoS core collection was chosen as the data source because it boasts one of the most comprehensive and authoritative databases of bibliometric information in the world. Many previous studies utilized WoS to retrieve bibliometric data. van Oorschot et al. (2018) and Ruggeri et al. (2019) even indicated that WoS meets the highest standards in terms of impact factor and citation counts and hence guarantees the validity of any bibliometric analysis. Second, we do not restrict the document types as HCPs selection informed by ESI only considers articles and reviews. Third, we do not set the date range as the dataset of ESI-HCPs is automatically updated regularly to include the most recent 10 years of publications.

The aforementioned query obtained a total of 143 HCPs published in 48 journals contributed by 352 authors of 226 institutions. We then downloaded the raw bibliometric parameters of the 143 HCPs for follow-up analysis including publication years, authors, publication titles, countries, affiliations, abstracts, citation reports, etc. A complete list of the 143 HCPs can be found in the Supplementary Material . We collected the most recent impact factor (IF) of each journal from the 2022 Journal Citation Reports (JCR).

3.2. Data analysis

3.2.1. citation analysis.

A citation threshold is the minimum number of citations obtained by ranking papers in a research field in descending order by citation counts and then selecting the top fraction or percentage of papers. In ESI, the highly cited threshold reveals the minimum number of citations received by the top 1% of papers from each of the 10 database years. In other words, a paper has to meet the minimum citation threshold that varies by research fields and by years to enter the HCP list. Of the 22 research fields in ESI, Social Science, General is a broad field covering a number of WoS categories including linguistics and language & linguistics . We checked the ESI official website to obtain the yearly highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Science , General as shown in Figure 1 ( https://esi.clarivate.com/ThresholdsAction.action ). As we can see, the longer a paper has been published, the more citations it has to receive to meet the threshold. We then divided the raw citation numbers of HCPs with the Highly Cited Thresholds in the corresponding year to obtain the normalized citations for each HCP.

Highly cited thresholds in the research field of Social Sciences, General.

3.2.2. Corpus analysis and manual checking

To determine the most frequently explored topics in these HCPs, we used both corpus-based analysis of word frequency and manual checking. Specifically, the more frequently a word or phrase occurs in a specifically designed corpus, the more likely it constitutes a research topic. In this study, we built an Abstract corpus with all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs, totaling 24,800 tokens. The procedures to retrieve the research topics in the Abstract corpus were as follows. First, the 143 pieces of abstracts were saved as separate .txt files in one folder. Second, AntConc ( Anthony, 2022 ), a corpus analysis tool for concordancing and text analysis, was employed to extract lists of n-grams (2–4) in decreasing order of frequency. We also generated a list of individual nouns because sometimes individual nouns can also constitute research topics. Considering our small corpus data, we adopted both frequency (3) and range criteria (3) for topic candidacy. That is, a candidate n-gram must occur at least 3 times and in at least 3 different abstract files. The frequency threshold guarantees the importance of the candidate topics while the range threshold guarantees that the topics are not overly crowded in a few number of publications. In this process, we actually tested the frequency and range thresholds several rounds for the inclusion of all the potential topics. In total, we obtained 531 nouns, 1,330 2-grams, 331 3-grams, and 81 4-grams. Third, because most of the retrieved n-grams cannot function as meaningful research topics, we manually checked all the candidate items and discussed extensively to decide their roles as potential research topics until full agreements were reached. Finally, we read all the abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. In the end, we got 118 topic items in total.

4.1. Main publication venues of HCPs

Of the 48 journals which published the 143 HCPs, 17 journals have contributed at least 3 HCPs ( Table 2 ), around 71.33% of the total examined HCPs (102/143), indicating that HCPs tend to be highly concentrated in a limited number of journals. The three largest publication outlets of HCPs are Bilingualism Language and Cognition (16), International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism (11), and Modern Language Journal (10). Because each journal varies greatly in the number of papers published per year and the number of HCPs is associated with journal circulations, we divided the total number of papers (TP) in the examined years (2011–2021) with the number of the HCPs to acquire the HCP percentage for each journal (HCPs/TP). The three journals with the highest HCPs/TP percentage are Annual Review of Applied Linguistics (2.26), Modern Language Journal (2.08), and Bilingualism Language and Cognition (1.74), indicating that papers published in these journals have a higher probability to enter the HCPs list.

Top 17 publication venues of HCPs.

N: the number of HCPs in each journal; N%: the percentage of HCPs in each journal in the total of 143 HCPs; TP: the total number of papers in the examined timespan (2011–2021); N/TP %: the percentage of HCPs in the total journal publications in the examined time span; TC/HCP: average citations of each HCP; R: journal ranking for the designated indicator; IF: Impact Factor in the year of 2022.

In terms of the general impact of the HCPs from each journal, we divided the number of HCPs with their total citations (TC) to obtain the average citations for each HCP (TC/HCP). The three journals with the highest TC/HCP are Journal of Memory and Language (837.86), Computational Linguistics (533.75), and Journal of Pragmatics (303.75). It indicates that even in the same WoS category, HCPs in different journals have strikingly different capability to accumulate citations. For example, the TC/HCP in System is as low as 31.73, which is even less than 4% of the highest TC/HCP in Journal of Memory and Language .

In regards to the latest journal impact factor (IF) in 2022, the top four journals with the highest IF are Computational Linguistics (7.778) , Modern Language Journal (7.5), Computer Assisted Language Learning (5.964), and Language Learning (5.24). According to the Journal Citation Reports (JCR) quantile rankings in WoS category of linguistics , all the journals on the list belong to the Q 1 (the top 25%), indicating that contributors are more likely to be attracted to contribute and cite papers in these prestigious high impact journals.

4.2. Authors of HCPs

A total of 352 authors had their names listed in the 143 HCPs, of whom 33 authors appeared in at least 2 HCPs as shown in Table 3 . We also provided in Table 3 other indicators to evaluate the authors’ productivity and impact including the total number of citations (TC), the number of citations per HCP, and the number of First author or Corresponding author HCPs (FA/CA). The reason we include the FA/CA indicator is that first authors and corresponding authors are usually considered to contribute the most and should receive greater proportion of credit in academic publications ( Marui et al., 2004 ; Dance, 2012 ).

Authors with at least 2 HCPs.

N: number of HCPs from each author; FA/CA: first author or corresponding author HCPs; TC: total citations of the HCPs from each author; C/HCP: average citations per HCP for each author.

In terms of the number of HCPs, Dewaele JM from Birkbeck Univ London tops the list with 7 HCPs with total citations of 492 (TC = 492), followed by Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci & Technol (#HCPs = 5; TC = 215) and Saito K from UCL (#HCPs = 5; TC = 576). It is to be noted that both Li C and Saito K have close academic collaborations with Dewaele JM . For example, 3 of the 5 HCPs by Li C are co-authored with Dewaele JM . The topics in their co-authored HCPs are mostly about foreign language learning emotions such as boredom , anxiety , enjoyment , the measurement , and positive psychology .

In regards to TC, Li, W . from UCL stands out as the most influential scholar among all the listed authors with total citations of 956 from 2 HCPs, followed by Norton B from Univ British Columbia (TC = 915) and Vasishth S from Univ Potsdam (TC = 694). The average citations per HCP from them are also the highest among the listed authors (478, 305, 347, respectively). It is important to note that Li, W.’ s 2 HCPs are his groundbreaking works on translanguaging which almost become must-reads for anyone who engages in translanguaging research ( Li, 2011 , 2018 ). Besides, Li, W. single authors his 2 HCPs, which is extremely rare as HCPs are often the results from multiple researchers. Norton B ’s HCPs are exploring some core issues in applied linguistics such as identity and investment , language learning , and social change that are considered the foundational work in its field ( Norton and Toohey, 2011 ; Darvin and Norton, 2015 ).

From the perspective of FA/CA papers, Li C from Huazhong Univ Sci and Technol is prominent because she is the first author of all her 5 HCPs. Her research on language learning emotions in the Chinese context is gaining widespread recognition ( Li et al., 2018 , 2019 , 2021 ; Li, 2019 , 2021 ). However, as a newly emerging researcher, most of her HCPs are published in the very recent years and hence accumulate relatively fewer citations (TC = 215). Mondada L from Univ Basel follows closely and single authors her 3 HCPs. Her work is mostly devoted to conversation analysis , multimodality , and social interaction ( Mondada, 2016 , 2018 , 2019 ).

We need to mention the following points regarding the productive authors of HCPs. First, when we calculated the number of HCPs from each author, only the papers published in the journals indexed in the investigated WoS categories were taken in account ( linguistics; language & linguistics ), which came as a compromise to protect the linguistics oriented nature of the HCPs. For example, Brysbaert M from Ghent University claimed a total of 8 HCPs at the time of the data retrieval, of which 6 HCPs were published in WoS category of psychology and more psychologically oriented, hence not included in our study. Besides, all the authors on the author list were treated equally when we calculated the number of HCPs, disregarding the author ordering. That implies that some influential authors may not be able to enter the list as their publications are comparatively fewer. Second, as some authors reported different affiliations at their different career stages, we only provide their most recent affiliation for convenience. Third, it is highly competitive to have one’s work selected as HCPs. The fact that a majority of the HCPs authors do not appear in our productive author list does not diminish their great contributions to this field. The rankings in Table 3 does not necessarily reflect the recognition authors have earned in academia at large.

4.3. Productive countries of HCPs

In total, the 143 HCPs originated from 33 countries. The most productive countries that contributed at least three HCPs are listed in Table 4 . The USA took an overwhelming lead with 59 HCPs, followed distantly by England with 31 HCPs. They also boasted the highest total citations (TC = 15,770; TC = 9,840), manifesting their high productivity and strong influence as traditional powerhouses in linguistics research. In regards to the average citations per HCP, Germany , England and the USA were the top three countries (TC/HCP = 281.67, 281.14, and 267.29, respectively). Although China held the third position with 19 HCPs published, its TC/HCP is the third from the bottom (TC/HCP = 66.84). One of the important reasons is that 13 out of the 19 HCPs contributed by scholars in China are published in the year of 2020 or 2021. The newly published HCPs may need more time to accumulate citations. Besides, 18 out of the 19 HCPs in China are first author and/or corresponding authors, indicating that scholars in China are becoming more independent and gaining more voice in English linguistics research.

Top 18 countries with at least 3 HCPs.

Two points should be noted here as to the productive countries. First, we calculated the HCP contributions from the country level instead of the region level. In other words, HCP contributions from different regions of the same country will be combined in the calculation. For example, HCPs from Scotland were added to the HCPs from England . HCPs from Hong Kong , Macau , and Taiwan are put together with the HCPs from Mainland China . In this way, a clear picture of the HCPs on the country level can be painted. Second, we manually checked the address information of the first author and corresponding author for each HCP. There are some cases where the first author or the corresponding author may report affiliations from more than one country. In this case, every country in their address list will be treated equally in the FA/CA calculation. In other word, a HCP may be classified into more than one country because of the different country backgrounds of the first and/or the corresponding author.

4.4. Top 20 HCPs

The top 20 HCPs with the highest normed citations are listed in decreasing order in Table 5 . The top cited publications can guide us to better understand the development and research topics in recent years.

Top 20 HCPs.

To save space, not full information about the HCPs is given. Some article titles have been abbreviated if they are too lengthy; for the authors, we report the first two authors and use “et al” if there are three authors or more; RC: raw citations; NC: normalized citations

By reading the titles and the abstracts of these top HCPs, we categorized the topics of the 20 HCPs into the following five groups: (i) statistical and analytical methods in (psycho)linguistics such as sentimental analysis, sentence simplification techniques, effect sizes, linear mixed models (#1, 3, 4, 6, 9, 14), (ii) language learning/teaching emotions such enjoyment, anxiety, boredom, stress (#11, 15, 16, 18, 19), (iii) translanguaging or multilinguilism (#5, 13, 20, 17), (iv) language perception (#2, 7, 10), (v) medium of instruction (#8, 12). It is no surprise that 6 out of the top 20 HCPs are about statistical methods in linguistics because language researchers aspire to employ statistics to make their research more scientific. Besides, we noticed that the papers on language teaching/learning emotions on the list are all published in the year of 2020 and 2021, indicating that these emerging topics may deserve more attention in future research. We also noticed two Covid-19 related articles (#16, 19) explored the emotions teachers and students experience during the pandemic, a timely response to the urgent need of the language learning and teaching community.

It is of special interest to note that papers from the journals indexed in multiple JCR categories seem to accumulate more citations. For example, Journal of Memory and Language , American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology , and Computational Linguistics are indexed both in SSCI and SCIE and contribute the top 4 HCPs, manifesting the advantage of these hybrid journals in amassing citations compared to the conventional language journals. Besides, different to findings from Yan et al. (2022) that most of the top HCPs in the field of radiology are reviews in document types, 19 out of the top 20 HCPs are research articles instead of reviews except Macaro et al. (2018) .

4.5. Most frequently explored topics of HCPs

After obtaining the corpus based topic items, we read all the titles and abstracts of the 143 HCPs to further validate their roles as research topics. Table 6 presents the top research topics with the observed frequency of 5 or above. We grouped these topics into five broad categories: bilingual-related, language learning/teaching-related, psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related, methods and tools-related, and others . The observed frequency count for each topic in the abstract corpus were included in the brackets. We found that about 34 of the 143 HCPs are exploring bilingual related issues, the largest share among all the categorized topics, testifying its academic popularity in the examined timespan. Besides, 30 of the 143 HCPs are investigating language learning/teaching-related issues, with topics ranging from learners (e.g., EFL learners, individual difference) to multiple learning variables (e.g., learning strategy, motivation, agency). The findings here will be validated by the analysis of the keywords.

Categorization of the most explored research topics.

N: the number of the HCPs in each topic category; ELF: English as a lingua franca; CLIL: content and language integrated learning; FLE: foreign language enjoyment; FLCA: foreign language classroom anxiety

Several points should be mentioned regarding the topic candidacy. First, for similar topic expressions, we used a cover term and added the frequency counts. For example, multilingualism is a cover term for bilinguals, bilingualism, plurilingualism, and multilingualism . Second, for nouns of singular and plural forms (e.g., emotion and emotions ) or for items with different spellings (e.g., meta analysis and meta analyses ), we combined the frequency counts. Third, we found that some longer items (3 grams and 4 grams) could be subsumed to short ones (2 grams or monogram) without loss of essential meaning (e.g., working memory from working memory capacity ). In this case, the shorter ones were kept for their higher frequency. Fourth, some highly frequent terms were discarded because they were too general to be valuable topics in language research, for example, applied linguistics , language use , second language .

5. Discussion and implications

Based on 143 highly cited papers collected from the WoS categories of linguistics , the present study attempts to present a bird’s eye view of the publication landscape and the most updated research themes reflected from the HCPs in the linguistics field. Specifically, we investigated the important contributors of HCPs in terms of journals, authors and countries. Besides, we spotlighted the research topics by corpus-based analysis of the abstracts and a detailed analysis of the top HCPs. The study has produced several findings that bear important implications.

The first finding is that the HCPs are highly concentrated in a limited journals and countries. In regards to journals, those in the spheres of bilingualism and applied linguistics (e.g., language teaching and learning) are likely to accumulate more citations and hence to produce more HCPs. Journals that focus on bilingualism from a linguistic, psycholinguistic, and neuroscientific perspective are the most frequent outlets of HCPs as evidenced by the top two productive journals of HCPs, Bilingualism Language and Cognition and International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism . This can be explained by the multidisciplinary nature of bilingual-related research and the development of cognitive measurement techniques. The merits of analyzing publication venues of HCPs are two folds. One the one hand, it can point out which sources of high-quality publications in this field can be inquired for readers as most of the significant and cutting-edge achievements are concentrated in these prestigious journals. On the other hand, it also provides essential guidance or channels for authors or contributors to submit their works for higher visibility.

In terms of country distributions, the traditional powerhouses in linguistics research such as the USA and England are undoubtedly leading the HCP publications in both the number and the citations of the HCPs. However, developing countries are also becoming increasing prominent such as China and Iran , which could be traceable in the funding and support of national language policies and development policies as reported in recent studies ( Ping et al., 2009 ; Lei and Liu, 2019 ). Take China as an example. Along with economic development, China has given more impetus to academic outputs with increased investment in scientific research ( Lei and Liao, 2017 ). Therefore, researchers in China are highly motivated to publish papers in high-quality journals to win recognition in international academia and to deal with the publish or perish pressure ( Lee, 2014 ). These factors may explain the rise of China as a new emerging research powerhouse in both natural and social sciences, including English linguistics research.

The second finding is the multilingual trend in linguistics research. The dominant clustering of topics regarding multilingualism can be understood as a timely response to the multilingual research fever ( May, 2014 ). 34 out of the 143 HCPs have such words as bilingualism, bilingual, multilingualism , translanguaging , etc., in their titles, reflecting a strong multilingual tendency of the HCPs. Multilingual-related HCPs mainly involve three aspects: multilingualism from the perspectives of psycholinguistics and cognition (e.g., Luk et al., 2011 ; Leivada et al., 2020 ); multilingual teaching (e.g., Schissel et al., 2018 ; Ortega, 2019 ; Archila et al., 2021 ); language policies related to multilingualism (e.g., Shen and Gao, 2018 ). As a pedagogical process initially used to describe the bilingual classroom practice and also a frequently explored topic in HCPs, translanguaging is developed into an applied linguistics theory since Li’s Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of Language ( Li, 2018 ). The most common collocates of translanguaging in the Abstract corpus are pedagogy/pedagogies, practices, space/spaces . There are two main reasons for this multilingual turn. First, the rapid development of globalization, immigration, and overseas study programs greatly stimulate the use and research of multiple languages in different linguistic contexts. Second, in many non-English countries, courses are delivered through languages (mostly English) besides their mother tongue ( Clark, 2017 ). Students are required to use multiple languages as resources to learn and understand subjects and ideas. The burgeoning body of English Medium Instruction literature in higher education is in line with the rising interest in multilingualism. Due to the innate multidisciplinary nature, it is to be expected that, multilingualism, the topic du jour, is bound to attract more attention in the future.

The third finding is the application of Positive Psychology (PP) in second language acquisition (SLA), that is, the positive trend in linguistic research. In our analysis, 20 out of 143 HCPs have words or phrases such as emotions, enjoyment, boredom, anxiety , and positive psychology in their titles, which might signal a shift of interest in the psychology of language learners and teachers in different linguistic environments. Our study shows Foreign language enjoyment (FLE) is the most frequently explored emotion, followed by foreign language classroom anxiety (FLCA), the learners’ metaphorical left and right feet on their journey to acquiring the foreign language ( Dewaele and MacIntyre, 2016 ). In fact, the topics of PP are not entirely new to SLA. For example, studies of language motivations, affections, and good language learners all provide roots for the emergence of PP in SLA ( Naiman, 1978 ; Gardner, 2010 ). In recent years, both research and teaching applications of PP in SLA are building rapidly, with a diversity of topics already being explored such as positive education and PP interventions. It is to be noted that SLA also feeds back on PP theories and concepts besides drawing inspirations from it, which makes it “an area rich for interdisciplinary cross-fertilization of ideas” ( Macintyre et al., 2019 ).

It should be noted that subjectivity is involved when we decide and categorize the candidate topic items based on the Abstract corpus. However, the frequency and range criteria guarantee that these items are actually more explored in multiple HCPs, thus indicating topic values for further investigation. Some high frequent n-grams are abandoned because they are too general or not meaningful topics. For example, applied linguistics is too broad to be included as most of the HCPs concern issues in this research line instead of theoretical linguistics. By meaningful topics, we mean that the topics can help journal editors and readers quickly locate their interested fields ( Lei and Liu, 2019 ), as the author keywords such as bilingualism , emotions , and individual differences . The examination of the few 3/4-grams and monograms (mostly nouns) revealed that most of them were either not meaningful topics or they could be subsumed in the 2-grams. Besides, there is inevitably some overlapping in the topic categorizations. For example, some topics in the language teaching and learning category are situated and discussed within the context of multilingualism. The merits of topic categorizations are two folds: to better monitor the overlapping between the Abstract corpus-based topic items and the keywords; to roughly delineate the research strands in the HCPs for future research.

It should also be noted that all the results were based on the retrieved HCPs only. The study did not aim to paint a comprehensive and full picture of the whole landscape of linguistic research. Rather, it specifically focused on the most popular literature in a specified timeframe, thus generating the snapshots or trends in linguistic research. One of the important merits of this methodology is that some newly emerging but highly cited researchers can be spotlighted and gain more academic attention because only the metrics of HCPs are considered in calculation. On the contrary, the exclusion of some other highly cited researchers in general such as Rod Ellis and Ken Hyland just indicates that their highly cited publications are not within our investigated timeframe and cannot be interpreted as their diminishing academic influence in the field. Besides, the study does not consider the issue of collaborators or collaborations in calculating the number of HCPs for two reasons. First, although some researchers are regular collaborators such as Li CC and Dewaele JM, their individual contribution can never be undermined. Second, the study also provides additional information about the number of the FA/CA HCPs from each listed author, which may aid readers in locating their interested research.

We acknowledge that our study has some limitations that should be addressed in future research. First, our study focuses on the HCPs extracted from WoS SSCI and A&HCI journals, the alleged most celebrated papers in this field. Future studies may consider including data from other databases such as Scopus to verify the findings of the present study. Second, our Abstract corpus-based method for topic extraction involved human judgement. Although the final list was the result of several rounds of discussions among the authors, it is difficult or even impossible to avoid subjectivity and some worthy topics may be unconsciously missed. Therefore, future research may consider employing automatic algorithms to extract topics. For example, a dependency-based machine learning approach can be used to identify research topics ( Zhu and Lei, 2021 ).

Data availability statement

Author contributions.

SY: conceptualization and methodology. SY and LZ: writing-review and editing and writing-original draft. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

This work was supported by Humanities and Social Sciences Youth Fund of China MOE under the grant 20YJC740076 and 18YJC740141.

Conflict of interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Publisher’s note

All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article, or claim that may be made by its manufacturer, is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

Supplementary material

The Supplementary material for this article can be found online at: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1052586/full#supplementary-material

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For Dora Woodruff, it’s math or bust. 

“I don’t really have a backup plan,” said the graduating mathematics concentrator, who was drawn by the beauty and abstraction of numbers from a young age.

Woodruff arrived at Harvard from New York City knowing she wanted to dive deeply into pure mathematics and stretch herself into subfields such as topology, combinatorics, and extremal graph theory. She’s also been able to explore nonmathematical interests, taking courses in literature and linguistics, and playing oboe in the Harvard Bach Society and Harvard College Opera.

Yet it’s through mathematics that Woodruff accesses her most creative side. “To make any kind of progress in math, you have to have original ideas and be inventive,” she said.

Her senior thesis explored “equivariant topology and its combinatorial applications.” As the recipient of the department’s Friends Prize, Woodruff was invited to give a thesis seminar.

“For me, this thesis was an opportunity to read a ton of papers that I wanted to read — and would have had fun reading anyway — and then explain them to someone else,” she said. “It was also a way for me to learn a lot more advanced techniques around topology and do so in a fun way.”

“To make any kind of progress in math, you have to have original ideas and be inventive.”

Woodruff will next pursue a Ph.D. at MIT in algebraic combinatorics, a branch of mathematics that applies methods found in abstract algebra to discrete counting problems. The way she explains it: “The motivation behind algebraic combinatorics is to take problems from other areas, like algebraic geometry, or representation theory, and try to translate them into combinatorial problems, and then use combinatorics to solve them.” She loves the interplay between different ways of thinking about solutions and breaking big problems into more manageable bites.

“One of my favorite ways to solve a problem is to kind of start with small cases, small examples, and see if patterns that I notice generalize,” she said.

Unearthing connections between fields via the common language of combinatorics aligns with Woodruff’s desire to be a public ambassador for math. At Harvard, she has most appreciated moments in which mathematics communities have been “inclusive on purpose”; she’s found most of her professors to be hyper-conscious about creating welcoming environments.

Even so, the lingering effects of mathematics as traditionally male-dominated are pervasive and subtle — so much so that Woodruff suspects many think such problems don’t exist anymore. “Microaggressions are definitely a thing,” she said. She recalls well-meaning distant family members who, upon finding out she was interested in math, assumed she wanted to teach elementary school math.

Among her efforts to promote equity in the mathematics community, Woodruff served as co-president of Harvard Undergraduate Gender Inclusivity in Mathematics. The group has hosted events from department town halls to seminars about research experience opportunities for undergraduates.

Woodruff herself participated in multiple undergraduate research projects over three summers at different institutions, resulting in co-authorship on three research papers now under review.

She also served on the department’s Community Committee, launched by Michael Hopkins, Math Department chair and George Putnam Professor of Pure and Applied Mathematics. The goal was to address longstanding culture issues within the department.

“[Dora] was extremely insightful about things we might need to do to change,” said Hopkins, who was also her thesis adviser. He was impressed by the leadership roles Woodruff took on atop her challenging coursework and teaching. “Brilliant, humble, gracious, and inclusive” was how he described her.

Woodruff worked as a course assistant for Math 55, a first-year honors course in algebra and analysis with a reputation for being extremely difficult. “I think the legendary status is maybe a little bit overhyped,” said Woodruff. “I think anyone with a proof-based background and a real desire to spend a lot of time on math can do well in the class. And honestly, I feel like I’ve taken classes that were a little bit crazier.”

Woodruff has been a course assistant nearly every semester — in ring theory, algebraic topology, and others. Revisiting material as a teacher has helped her nail down concepts in her own head. “Having to explain it to other people in a clear way helps me clarify it for myself, too,” she said.

After her four years at Harvard, Woodruff found that her conception of being “good at math” has evolved.

 “I think I’ve gotten better at not getting discouraged when I don’t immediately get something,” she said. “I think building up resilience is important. As a mathematician, especially when you’re doing research, a lot of being ‘good’ at math is not giving up on a really hard problem and being willing to think about the same thing over and over again for many days. It’s just really loving it. I think those are qualities I have.”

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