Vocabulary and the Four Skills, edited by Jon Clenton and Paul Booth, reports on very recent research closely examining the relationship between lexis and each of the four classical skills of listening, reading, speaking, and writing. A whole section is dedicated to each skill, and these four sections are arranged in a parallel fashion: an introductory chapter summing up the current state of research is followed by longer presentations of two empirical studies, and a short chapter on possible future directions of research in the respective area completes each section. Brief introduction and conclusion chapters written by the two coeditors surround these four main parts. The contributors of the studies themselves comprise more and less renowned experts on research on these skills from various countries all over the world including Canada, China, Japan, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Saudi Arabia, and the United Kingdom, and also people from different professional...

How Vocabulary is Learned by Stuart Webb and Paul Nation focusses on key issues underlying the learning and teaching of vocabulary both from a theoretical perspective and with a strong emphasis on actually putting things into practice. Generally speaking, it is an absolute pleasure to read what these two extremely experienced writers have to say about this vital topic, which constitutes an essential component of language teaching and is thus part and parcel of any language instructor’s everyday teaching requirements. Chapter 1 starts out by addressing the question of which words should be learnt, unsurprisingly stressing the importance of teaching high-frequency words along with technical and academic vocabulary occurring within various types of discourse, as well as introducing the reader to a number of frequency lists and suggesting a concrete testing format to check effectiveness afterwards. Chapter 2 then deals with the learning burden involved in studying words, putting the central focus on how to reduce this burden and also providing practical hands-on suggestions for teaching, in particular with respect to introducing opposites, synonyms and members of lexical sets.

This paper argues that clausal comparatives are completely unattested in Turkish and thus verifies the need for a genuinely phrasal analysis of comparison constructions in this language. It develops such a syntactic and semantic analysis that differs considerably from "standard" analyses commonly suggested for languages like English and also shows that this phrasal analysis derives the correct predictions for the scopal behaviour of quantified DPs and the comparative operator. It furthermore argues that phrasal comparatives are the "basic" and potentially universal type of comparatives, in contrast to what has been hypothesised previously, and speculates on how this phrasal analysis might even be applied to solve problems for analysis with English comparatives.

This paper presents parallel sets of data on comparison constructions from 14 languages. On the basis of the crosslinguistic differences we observe, we propose three parameters of language variation. The first parameter concerns the question of whether or not a language’s grammar has incorporated scales into the meanings of gradable predicates. The second parameter differentiates between languages that allow quantification over degrees in the syntax and those that do not. Finally, we propose a syntactic parameter that concerns options for syntactically filling the degree argument position of a gradable predicate.

Based on new findings from a large-scale empirical study on comparison constructions in Turkish as well as particular instantiations of comparatives in English, this abstract verifies the need for a genuinely phrasal syntactic and semantic analysis of all comparative constructions in the former and some comparatives in the latter language. It has often been suggested (cf. e.g. Pinkham [1982], McCawley [1988], Bierwisch [1989] and especially Lechner [2004], among others) that phrasal comparatives like