research paper topic for linguistics

How It Works
PhD thesis writing
Master thesis writing
Bachelor thesis writing
Dissertation writing service
Dissertation abstract writing
Thesis proposal writing
Thesis editing service
Thesis proofreading service
Thesis formatting service
Coursework writing service
Research paper writing service
Architecture thesis writing
Computer science thesis writing
Engineering thesis writing
History thesis writing
MBA thesis writing
Nursing dissertation writing
Psychology dissertation writing
Sociology thesis writing
Statistics dissertation writing
Buy dissertation online
Write my dissertation
Cheap thesis
Cheap dissertation
Custom dissertation
Dissertation help
Pay for thesis
Pay for dissertation
Senior thesis
Write my thesis

211 Research Topics in Linguistics To Get Top Grades

Many people find it hard to decide on their linguistics research topics because of the assumed complexities involved. They struggle to choose easy research paper topics for English language too because they think it could be too simple for a university or college level certificate.

All that you need to learn about Linguistics and English is sprawled across syntax, phonetics, morphology, phonology, semantics, grammar, vocabulary, and a few others. To easily create a top-notch essay or conduct a research study, you can consider this list of research topics in English language below for your university or college use. Note that you can fine-tune these to suit your interests.

Linguistics Research Paper Topics

If you want to study how language is applied and its importance in the world, you can consider these Linguistics topics for your research paper. They are:

An analysis of romantic ideas and their expression amongst French people
An overview of the hate language in the course against religion
Identify the determinants of hate language and the means of propagation
Evaluate a literature and examine how Linguistics is applied to the understanding of minor languages
Consider the impact of social media in the development of slangs
An overview of political slang and its use amongst New York teenagers
Examine the relevance of Linguistics in a digitalized world
Analyze foul language and how it’s used to oppress minors
Identify the role of language in the national identity of a socially dynamic society
Attempt an explanation to how the language barrier could affect the social life of an individual in a new society
Discuss the means through which language can enrich cultural identities
Examine the concept of bilingualism and how it applies in the real world
Analyze the possible strategies for teaching a foreign language
Discuss the priority of teachers in the teaching of grammar to non-native speakers
Choose a school of your choice and observe the slang used by its students: analyze how it affects their social lives
Attempt a critical overview of racist languages
What does endangered language means and how does it apply in the real world?
A critical overview of your second language and why it is a second language
What are the motivators of speech and why are they relevant?
Analyze the difference between the different types of communications and their significance to specially-abled persons
Give a critical overview of five literature on sign language
Evaluate the distinction between the means of language comprehension between an adult and a teenager
Consider a native American group and evaluate how cultural diversity has influenced their language
Analyze the complexities involved in code-switching and code-mixing
Give a critical overview of the importance of language to a teenager
Attempt a forensic overview of language accessibility and what it means
What do you believe are the means of communications and what are their uniqueness?
Attempt a study of Islamic poetry and its role in language development
Attempt a study on the role of Literature in language development
Evaluate the Influence of metaphors and other literary devices in the depth of each sentence
Identify the role of literary devices in the development of proverbs in any African country
Cognitive Linguistics: analyze two pieces of Literature that offers a critical view of perception
Identify and analyze the complexities in unspoken words
Expression is another kind of language: discuss
Identify the significance of symbols in the evolution of language
Discuss how learning more than a single language promote cross-cultural developments
Analyze how the loss of a mother tongue affect the language Efficiency of a community
Critically examine how sign language works
Using literature from the medieval era, attempt a study of the evolution of language
Identify how wars have led to the reduction in the popularity of a language of your choice across any country of the world
Critically examine five Literature on why accent changes based on environment
What are the forces that compel the comprehension of language in a child
Identify and explain the difference between the listening and speaking skills and their significance in the understanding of language
Give a critical overview of how natural language is processed
Examine the influence of language on culture and vice versa
It is possible to understand a language even without living in that society: discuss
Identify the arguments regarding speech defects
Discuss how the familiarity of language informs the creation of slangs
Explain the significance of religious phrases and sacred languages
Explore the roots and evolution of incantations in Africa

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

You may as well need interesting Linguistics topics based on sociolinguistic purposes for your research. Sociolinguistics is the study and recording of natural speech. It’s primarily the casual status of most informal conversations. You can consider the following Sociolinguistic research topics for your research:

What makes language exceptional to a particular person?
How does language form a unique means of expression to writers?
Examine the kind of speech used in health and emergencies
Analyze the language theory explored by family members during dinner
Evaluate the possible variation of language based on class
Evaluate the language of racism, social tension, and sexism
Discuss how Language promotes social and cultural familiarities
Give an overview of identity and language
Examine why some language speakers enjoy listening to foreigners who speak their native language
Give a forensic analysis of his the language of entertainment is different to the language in professional settings
Give an understanding of how Language changes
Examine the Sociolinguistics of the Caribbeans
Consider an overview of metaphor in France
Explain why the direct translation of written words is incomprehensible in Linguistics
Discuss the use of language in marginalizing a community
Analyze the history of Arabic and the culture that enhanced it
Discuss the growth of French and the influences of other languages
Examine how the English language developed and its interdependence on other languages
Give an overview of cultural diversity and Linguistics in teaching
Challenge the attachment of speech defect with disability of language listening and speaking abilities
Explore the uniqueness of language between siblings
Explore the means of making requests between a teenager and his parents
Observe and comment on how students relate with their teachers through language
Observe and comment on the communication of strategy of parents and teachers
Examine the connection of understanding first language with academic excellence

Language Research Topics

Numerous languages exist in different societies. This is why you may seek to understand the motivations behind language through these Linguistics project ideas. You can consider the following interesting Linguistics topics and their application to language:

What does language shift mean?
Discuss the stages of English language development?
Examine the position of ambiguity in a romantic Language of your choice
Why are some languages called romantic languages?
Observe the strategies of persuasion through Language
Discuss the connection between symbols and words
Identify the language of political speeches
Discuss the effectiveness of language in an indigenous cultural revolution
Trace the motivators for spoken language
What does language acquisition mean to you?
Examine three pieces of literature on language translation and its role in multilingual accessibility
Identify the science involved in language reception
Interrogate with the context of language disorders
Examine how psychotherapy applies to victims of language disorders
Study the growth of Hindi despite colonialism
Critically appraise the term, language erasure
Examine how colonialism and war is responsible for the loss of language
Give an overview of the difference between sounds and letters and how they apply to the German language
Explain why the placement of verb and preposition is different in German and English languages
Choose two languages of your choice and examine their historical relationship
Discuss the strategies employed by people while learning new languages
Discuss the role of all the figures of speech in the advancement of language
Analyze the complexities of autism and its victims
Offer a linguist approach to language uniqueness between a Down Syndrome child and an autist
Express dance as a language
Express music as a language
Express language as a form of language
Evaluate the role of cultural diversity in the decline of languages in South Africa
Discuss the development of the Greek language
Critically review two literary texts, one from the medieval era and another published a decade ago, and examine the language shifts

Linguistics Essay Topics

You may also need Linguistics research topics for your Linguistics essays. As a linguist in the making, these can help you consider controversies in Linguistics as a discipline and address them through your study. You can consider:

The connection of sociolinguistics in comprehending interests in multilingualism
Write on your belief of how language encourages sexism
What do you understand about the differences between British and American English?
Discuss how slangs grew and how they started
Consider how age leads to loss of language
Review how language is used in formal and informal conversation
Discuss what you understand by polite language
Discuss what you know by hate language
Evaluate how language has remained flexible throughout history
Mimicking a teacher is a form of exercising hate Language: discuss
Body Language and verbal speech are different things: discuss
Language can be exploitative: discuss
Do you think language is responsible for inciting aggression against the state?
Can you justify the structural representation of any symbol of your choice?
Religious symbols are not ordinary Language: what are your perspective on day-to-day languages and sacred ones?
Consider the usage of language by an English man and someone of another culture
Discuss the essence of code-mixing and code-switching
Attempt a psychological assessment on the role of language in academic development
How does language pose a challenge to studying?
Choose a multicultural society of your choice and explain the problem they face
What forms does Language use in expression?
Identify the reasons behind unspoken words and actions
Why do universal languages exist as a means of easy communication?
Examine the role of the English language in the world
Examine the role of Arabic in the world
Examine the role of romantic languages in the world
Evaluate the significance of each teaching Resources in a language classroom
Consider an assessment of language analysis
Why do people comprehend beyond what is written or expressed?
What is the impact of hate speech on a woman?
Do you believe that grammatical errors are how everyone’s comprehension of language is determined?
Observe the Influence of technology in language learning and development
Which parts of the body are responsible for understanding new languages
How has language informed development?
Would you say language has improved human relations or worsened it considering it as a tool for violence?
Would you say language in a black populous state is different from its social culture in white populous states?
Give an overview of the English language in Nigeria
Give an overview of the English language in Uganda
Give an overview of the English language in India
Give an overview of Russian in Europe
Give a conceptual analysis on stress and how it works
Consider the means of vocabulary development and its role in cultural relationships
Examine the effects of Linguistics in language
Present your understanding of sign language
What do you understand about descriptive language and prescriptive Language?

List of Research Topics in English Language

You may need English research topics for your next research. These are topics that are socially crafted for you as a student of language in any institution. You can consider the following for in-depth analysis:

Examine the travail of women in any feminist text of your choice
Examine the movement of feminist literature in the Industrial period
Give an overview of five Gothic literature and what you understand from them
Examine rock music and how it emerged as a genre
Evaluate the cultural association with Nina Simone’s music
What is the relevance of Shakespeare in English literature?
How has literature promoted the English language?
Identify the effect of spelling errors in the academic performance of students in an institution of your choice
Critically survey a university and give rationalize the literary texts offered as Significant
Examine the use of feminist literature in advancing the course against patriarchy
Give an overview of the themes in William Shakespeare’s “Julius Caesar”
Express the significance of Ernest Hemingway’s diction in contemporary literature
Examine the predominant devices in the works of William Shakespeare
Explain the predominant devices in the works of Christopher Marlowe
Charles Dickens and his works: express the dominating themes in his Literature
Why is Literature described as the mirror of society?
Examine the issues of feminism in Sefi Atta’s “Everything Good Will Come” and Bernadine Evaristos’s “Girl, Woman, Other”
Give an overview of the stylistics employed in the writing of “Girl, Woman, Other” by Bernadine Evaristo
Describe the language of advertisement in social media and newspapers
Describe what poetic Language means
Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing on Mexican Americans
Examine the use of code-switching and code-mixing in Indian Americans
Discuss the influence of George Orwell’s “Animal Farm” on satirical literature
Examine the Linguistics features of “Native Son” by Richard Wright
What is the role of indigenous literature in promoting cultural identities
How has literature informed cultural consciousness?
Analyze five literature on semantics and their Influence on the study
Assess the role of grammar in day to day communications
Observe the role of multidisciplinary approaches in understanding the English language
What does stylistics mean while analyzing medieval literary texts?
Analyze the views of philosophers on language, society, and culture

English Research Paper Topics for College Students

For your college work, you may need to undergo a study of any phenomenon in the world. Note that they could be Linguistics essay topics or mainly a research study of an idea of your choice. Thus, you can choose your research ideas from any of the following:

The concept of fairness in a democratic Government
The capacity of a leader isn’t in his or her academic degrees
The concept of discrimination in education
The theory of discrimination in Islamic states
The idea of school policing
A study on grade inflation and its consequences
A study of taxation and Its importance to the economy from a citizen’s perspectives
A study on how eloquence lead to discrimination amongst high school students
A study of the influence of the music industry in teens
An Evaluation of pornography and its impacts on College students
A descriptive study of how the FBI works according to Hollywood
A critical consideration of the cons and pros of vaccination
The health effect of sleep disorders
An overview of three literary texts across three genres of Literature and how they connect to you
A critical overview of “King Oedipus”: the role of the supernatural in day to day life
Examine the novel “12 Years a Slave” as a reflection of servitude and brutality exerted by white slave owners
Rationalize the emergence of racist Literature with concrete examples
A study of the limits of literature in accessing rural readers
Analyze the perspectives of modern authors on the Influence of medieval Literature on their craft
What do you understand by the mortality of a literary text?
A study of controversial Literature and its role in shaping the discussion
A critical overview of three literary texts that dealt with domestic abuse and their role in changing the narratives about domestic violence
Choose three contemporary poets and analyze the themes of their works
Do you believe that contemporary American literature is the repetition of unnecessary themes already treated in the past?
A study of the evolution of Literature and its styles
The use of sexual innuendos in literature
The use of sexist languages in literature and its effect on the public
The disaster associated with media reports of fake news
Conduct a study on how language is used as a tool for manipulation
Attempt a criticism of a controversial Literary text and why it shouldn’t be studied or sold in the first place

Finding Linguistics Hard To Write About?

With these topics, you can commence your research with ease. However, if you need professional writing help for any part of the research, you can scout here online for the best research paper writing service.

There are several expert writers on ENL hosted on our website that you can consider for a fast response on your research study at a cheap price.

As students, you may be unable to cover every part of your research on your own. This inability is the reason you should consider expert writers for custom research topics in Linguistics approved by your professor for high grades.

130+ Original Linguistics Research Topics: Ideas To Focus On

Linguistics is an exciting course to learn. Unfortunately, writing a research paper or essay or write my thesis in linguistics is not as easy. Many students struggle to find a good research topic to write about. Finding a good research topic is crucial because it is the foundation of your paper. It will guide your research and dictate what you write.

Creative Language Research Topics

Argumentative research titles about language, english language research topics for stem students, social media research topics about language, the best quantitative research topics about language, more creative sociolinguistics research topics, research topics in english language education for students, top thesis topics in language, creative language and gender research topics, language education research topics on social issues, research title about language acquisition.

Most students turn to the internet to find research paper topics. Sadly, most sources provide unoriginal and basic topics. For this reason, this article provides some creative sample research topics for English majors.

Linguistics is a fascinating subject with so many research topic options. Check out the following creative research topics in language

How you can use linguistic patterns to locate migration paths
Computers and their effect on language creation
The internet and its impacts on modern language
Has text messages helped create a new linguistic culture?
Language and change; how social changes influence language development
How language changes over time
How effective is non-verbal communication in communicating emotions?
Verbal communication and emotional displays: what is the link?
The negative power of language in internet interactions
How words change as society develops
Is the evolution of languages a scientific concept?
Role of technology in linguistics

Argumentative essay topics should state your view on a subject so you can create content to defend the view and convince others that it is logical and well-researched. Here are some excellent language research titles examples

Society alters words and their meanings over time
Children have a better grasp of new language and speech than adults
Childhood is the perfect time to develop speech
Individuals can communicate without a shared language
Learning more than one language as a child can benefit individuals in adulthood
Elementary schools should teach students a second language
Language acquisition changes at different growth stages
The impact of technology on linguistics
Language has significant power to capitalize on emotions
The proper use of language can have positive impacts on society

Research topics for STEM students do not differ much from those for college and high school students. However, they are slightly more targeted. Find an excellent research title about language for your paper below:

How does language promote gender differences?
Music and language evolution: the correlation
Slang: development and evolution in different cultures
Can language create bonds among cross-cultural societies?
Formal vs informal language: what are the differences?
Age and pronunciation: what is the correlation?
How languages vary across STEM subjects
Are STEM students less proficient in languages?
The use of language in the legal sector
The importance of non-verbal communication and body language
How politeness is perceived through language choices and use
The evolution of English through history

Did you know you can find excellent social media research topics if you do it right? Check out the following social media language research titles:

The role of the internet in promoting language acquisition
A look at changes in languages since social media gained traction
How social media brings new language
How effective are language apps in teaching foreign languages?
The popularity of language applications among learners
A study of the impact of the internet on the spreading of slang
Social media as a tool for promoting hate language
Free speech vs hate speech: what is the difference?
How social media platforms can combat hate language propagation
How can social media users express emotions through written language?
Political censorship and its impact on the linguistics applied in the media
The differences between social media and real-life languages

A language research title can be the foundation of your quantitative research. Find some of the best examples of research topics for English majors here:

Language barriers in the healthcare sector
What percentage of kids below five struggle with languages?
Understanding the increase in multilingual people
Language barriers and their impact on effective communication
Social media and language: are language barriers existent in social media?
Bilingualism affects people’s personalities and temperaments
Can non-native teachers effectively teach local students the English language?
Bilingualism and its impact on social perceptions
The new generative grammar concept: an in-depth analysis
Racist language: its history and impacts
A look into examples of endangered languages
Attitudes toward a language and how it can impact language acquisition

You can choose a research topic about language based on social issues, science concerns like biochemistry topics , and much more. Sociolinguistics is the study of the correlation between language and society and the application of language in various social situations. Here are some excellent research topics in sociolinguistics:

An analysis of how sociolinguistics can help people understand multi-lingual language choices
An analysis of sociolinguistics through America’s color and race background
The role of sociolinguistics in children development
Comparing sociolinguistics and psycholinguistics
Sociolinguistics and gender empowerment: an analysis of their correlation
How media houses use sociolinguistics to create bias and gain a competitive advantage
The value of sociolinguistics education in the teaching of discipline
The role played by sociolinguistics in creating social change throughout history
Research methods used in sociolinguistics
Different sociolinguistics and their role in English evolution
Sociolinguistics: an in-depth analysis
What is sociolinguistics, and what is its role in language evolution?

A good research topic in English will serve as the guiding point for your research paper. Find a suitable research topic for English majors below:

Types of indigenous languages
Language s an essential element of human life
Language as the primary communication medium
The value of language in society
The negative side of coded language
School curriculums and how they influence languages
Linguistics: a forensic language
Elements that influence people’s ability to learn a new language
The development of the English language
How the English language borrows from other languages
Multilingualism: an insight
The correlation between metaphors and similes

Many students struggle to find good thesis topics in language and linguistics. As you read more on the thesis statement about social media , make sure you also understand every thesis title about language from the following examples:

The classification of human languages
The application of different tools in language identification
The role of linguists in language identification
The contributions of Greek philosophers to language development
The origin of language: early speculations
The history of language through the scope of mythology
Theories that explain the origin and development of language
Is language the most effective form of communication
The impact of brain injuries on language
Language impacts on sports
Linguistics intervention that won’t work in this century
Language as a system of symbols

Just like economic research paper topics , gender and language topics do not have to stick to the norms or the standards by which all students write. You can exercise some creativity when creating your topic. Discover a topic about language and gender from this list:

Language and gender: what is the correlation?
How different genders perceive language
Does a kid’s gender influence their grasp of languages?
Men vs Women: a statistical overview of their multilingual prowess.
The perception of language from the female standpoint
The difference between female and male language use
The use of language as a tool for connection between females and males
Does gender have an impact on efficient communication
Does gender impact word choices in conversations?
Females have an easier time learning two or more languages
What makes female and male language choices differ?
Are females better at communicating using spoken language?

There are many social issues related to language education that you can cover in your research paper. Check out the following topics about language related to social issues research topics for your research:

Language translation: what makes it possible
How does the mother tongue influence pronunciation?
Issues that encourage people to learn different languages
Sign language: origin and more
Role of language in solving conflicts
Language and mental health: a vivid analysis
The similarities between English and French languages
Language disorders: an overview
Common barriers to language acquisition
The impact of mother tongue on effective communication
Reasons you should learn two or more languages
The benefits of multilingualism in the corporate world
Language and identity: what is the correlation?

Language acquisition is the process by which people gain the ability to understand and produce language. Like anatomy research paper topics , language acquisition is a great area to focus your linguistics research. Here are some research questions that bring the focus of the study of linguistic and language acquisition:

Language acquisition: an overview
What attitudes do people have about language acquisition
How attitude can impact language acquisition
The evolution of language acquisition over time
Language and ethnicity: their correlation
Do native English speakers have an easier time acquiring new languages?
A case study on political language
Why is language acquisition a key factor in leadership
Language acquisition and mother tongue pronunciation: the link
Ambiguity as a barrier to language acquisition
How words acquire their meanings

While a good topic can help capture the reader and create a good impression, it is insufficient to earn you excellent grades. You also need quality content for your paper to get perfect grades. However, creating a high-quality research paper takes time, effort, and skill, which most students do not have.

For these reasons, we offer quality research paper writing services for all students. We guarantee quality papers, timely deliveries, and originality. Reach out to our writers for top linguistics research papers today!

Language and linguistics articles from across Nature Portfolio

Latest research and reviews, the reduction of netspeak in mandarin computer-mediated communication: a least effort motivation at the utterance level.

Analyzing “Jayu” in South Korean presidential rhetoric: a comprehensive study from 1948–2023 with a focus on the Yoon Suk Yeol administration

Seungwoo Han

A gothic Taoism and its dual facets: possible worlds in The Haunted Monastery

Excavating sexual difference in language and thinking.

Syntactic bootstrapping as a mechanism for language learning

Young children learn the meanings of the words from limited information. In this Review, Babineau and colleagues synthesize the word-learning research landscape and detail the role of syntactic bootstrapping and related learning mechanisms.

Mireille Babineau
Monica Barbir
Anne Christophe

Applying large language models for automated essay scoring for non-native Japanese

News and Comment

Language evolution in China

The impetus behind the development of various Chinese dialects is as yet unknown. In a comprehensive quantitative coanalysis of linguistic and genetic data across China, Yang et al. find evidence to suggest that demographic diffusion, cultural diffusion and linguistic assimilation all contributed to the expansive diversity of Chinese dialects.

Chuan-Chao Wang

Time to revise the terminology we use to regulate water management practices

Paul Jeffrey
Heather Smith
Francis Hassard

Is boredom a source of noise and/or a confound in behavioral science research?

Behavioral researchers tend to study behavior in highly controlled laboratory settings to minimize the effects of potential confounders. Yet, while doing so, the artificial setup itself might unintentionally introduce noise or confounders, such as boredom. In this perspective, we draw upon theoretical and empirical evidence to make the case that (a) some experimental setups are likely to induce boredom in participants, (b) the degree of boredom induced might differ between individuals as a function of differences in trait boredom, (c) boredom can impair participants’ attention, can make study participation more effortful, and can increase the urge to do something else (i.e., to disengage from the study). Most importantly, we argue that some participants might adjust their behavior because they are bored. Considering boredom’s potential for adding noise to data, or for being an unwanted confound, we discuss a set of recommendations on how to control for and deal with the occurrence and effects of boredom in behavioral science research.

Maria Meier
Corinna S. Martarelli
Wanja Wolff

Exploration of the social and philosophical underpinning of ‘the patient’—what this means for people with a long-term condition

Should healthcare professionals use the term ‘patient’? A patient is a social construct, in a biomedical model, in which each actor has their role to play. This model has been criticised as belonging to an era of medical hegemony and (mis)represents an individual seeking healthcare as one who is simply a passive participant and recipient of care. The ‘Language Matters’ campaign, for people living with diabetes, has sought to address the role of language in interactions between healthcare providers. A key point raised in the campaign is whether someone who feels well, but has ongoing healthcare input, should be referred to as a patient? In this article, we address the concept of a patient and how its use can belie a particular mindset (or ‘discourse’) in which power is established in a relationship and can lead to individuals being defined by their condition. However, for some linguistic communities (such as nurses and doctors), a patient may be considered less as one over whom they have dominion, but rather someone for whom they have specific responsibilities and duty of care. Drawing upon the philosophical theories of language—that the meaning and inference of a word is dependent on its use—we argue that the context in which use of the term patient occurs is crucial. Without more fundamental cultural disruption of the biomedical model, word substitution, in itself, will not change perception.

M. B. Whyte

Approaching the neuroscience of language

Marika Gobbo

Neural evidence of word prediction

Jane Aristia

Quick links

Explore articles by subject
Guide to authors
Editorial policies

100+ Linguistic Topics for Excellent Research Papers

13 December, 2021

12 minutes read

Author: Donna Moores

Linguistics is an English language category that deals with logical dialectal analysis and interpretation. It seeks to reveal the form, meaning, and context of language. While most college students may perceive linguistics as a simple subject, it is pretty complex. English tutors might issue topics in linguistics in various disciplines like phonology or semantics, which leaves many learners grappling to tackle the research papers.

When analyzing language, you should write a paper that clarifies the nature, classification, and proper identification tools. Therefore, your linguistics topics must be relevant and within the research purpose. It is essential to pick an appropriate topic to allow the audience to understand the fundamental research.

With numerous dialects across the globe, identifying a worthy topic should be a simple task. We have compiled lists of engaging topic ideas to help you craft an outstanding research paper and inspire your academic projects.

Linguistics Research Paper: Definition, Explanation, Examples

Any linguistics paper should comprise an in-depth analysis of language development and acquisition. The subject explores various aspects of different dialects and their meanings. It also covers style and form to develop comprehensive arguments under various contexts.

That is why English professors test students with various academic projects to measure their comprehension levels. Thus, learners should ensure they select good linguistics research paper topics. Here is an overview example of the paper structure.

Introduction

Background information.
Hypothesis.
Literature review.

Methodology

Data sources.
Data organization.
Analysis/Findings.
Paraphrase hypothesis.
Significance of the study.
Recommendations.

Therefore, ensure your paper meets the specified academic standards. You must read the requirements keenly to craft an outstanding paper that meets the tutor’s expectations. If you encounter challenges, you can research further online or seek clarification from your professor to know how you will approach the research question.

Choosing A Good Linguistic Topic Isn’t Hard – Here’s How To Do It

Struggling to pick a relevant topic for your research paper? Fret not. We will help you understand the steps to identify an appropriate topic. Most students often underestimate the significance of the pre-writing stages, which entails topic selection. It is a vital phase where you need to choose relevant linguistics topics for your research paper. Hence, ensure you read the research question carefully to understand its requirements.

Carry out an extensive brainstorming session to identify relatable themes within the subject area. Avoid selecting a broad theme, but if you do, break it into minor sub-topics. This will help you during the research phase to get adequate information. Use different websites to get verifiable academic sources and published papers from reputable scholars.

Don’t forget to make your linguistics research paper topics catchy and exciting to capture your readers’ attention. No one wants to read a dull paper.

Finally, follow all the academic requirements for research paper writing – proper grammar, style, correct citation, etc. College tutors often award well-written, original papers.

However, if you still find it challenging to move beyond topic selection, you can reach out to one of our subject-oriented experts for assistance.

We are here to offer the following:

Quality-approved papers.
100% authentic papers.
One-on-one personalized learning.
Efficient support services.
Complete confidentiality and data privacy.

Therefore, do not endure the academic pressure alone. Talk to us we will help you select unique linguistic research topics.

15 Interesting Sociolinguistics Topic Ideas

Need help with your sociolinguistics research paper? Here are interesting topics in linguistics to jumpstart your writing.

An in-depth theoretical analysis of language development.
Explore dialect as a communication tool.
How brain injuries influence language and speech.
Language is a symbolic system: Discuss.
Examine the different linguistic disorders and challenges.
The impact of mother tongue on effective communication.
The importance of learning more than one dialect.
Evaluate mother tongue pronunciation and language fluency.
Compare and contrast the English and French languages.
Why do people communicate in different languages?
The role of Greek philosophers in language formation.
Language origination as an unfathomable issue.
Discuss language as a national identity in a multicultural nation.
Is there a difference between adult and child language acquisition?
Discuss the challenges in language development.

15 Good Applied Linguistics Topics

Applied linguistics is an essential discipline that allows learners to comprehend effective communication. Below are interesting linguistics topics to help you during writing.

What is applied linguistics?
Evaluate applied linguistics in a technological environment.
Discuss the intricacies of spoken and written language.
Explore bilingualism and multilingualism.
An analysis of communication barriers in delivering health services.
The influence of identity in a multicultural society.
Discuss dialect barriers in social media networks.
An in-depth analysis of hate speech.
The importance of applied linguistics development.
The adverse effects of social media on effective communication.
The impact of culture on multilingualism.
An in-depth evaluation of applied linguistics.
The influence of politics on linguistic media.
An analysis of practical research methods on linguistics.
How bilingualism enhances human personality.

15 Computational Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Computational linguistics involves technology in translation and other language-enhancing tools. Below are compelling linguistics thesis topics for your research compositions.

What is computational linguistics?
The impact of technology in speech recognition.
The evolution of the translation industry in enhancing communication.
Does translation cause communication barriers?
An analysis of audiovisual translation.
Discuss the effectiveness of supervised learning.
An analysis of effective programs for phonetic comparison of dialects.
Speech recognition: description of dialect performance.
An analysis of linguistic dimensions using technology.
Effective methods of text extraction.
Discuss the reasons for learning computational linguistics.
The influence of modern communication on computational linguistics.
Discuss the different approaches to effective learning.
An analysis of speech synthesis.
Discuss the benefits of machine translation.

15 Engaging Comparative Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Looking for winning research topics in linguistics? Search no more. Here are impressive comparative topic ideas for your research compositions:

Compare and contrast English and Latin.
A comparative study of speech physiology and anatomy.
An evaluation of the Ape language.
What is folk speech?
An analysis of historical linguistics.
An in-depth study of ethnographic semantics.
The connection between culture and linguistics.
A comparative analysis of phonetics in linguistics.
The influence of computers on dialect development.
Analyze communication in a paralinguistic dialect.
English popularity: A comparative study of the world.
Does accent fluency boost effective communication?
Neologism: An analysis of UK English.
Discuss the idioms of Australian English compared to American.
A comparative study of the Anglo-Saxon dialects.

15 Interesting Historical Linguistics Topic Ideas

Let us explore historical linguistics essay topics that will translate into remarkable papers with impressive literary arguments.

Discuss the significance of the Greek philosophers in language development.
An analysis of the preserved cuneiform writings.
Evaluate the origin of language theories.
Discuss the history of language in mythology.
An analysis of language translation.
A critical analysis of language development.
How speech impacts human interaction.
An analysis of modern communication evolution.
Discuss the history of written communication.
Analyze the different linguistics theories.
Why some dialects are challenging to learn.
What is structuralism in linguistics?
The effectiveness of mother tongue in linguistics.
The ancient relationship between French and English.
Is English considered indigenous?

15 Compelling Stylistics Linguistics Research Paper Topics

The following are interesting linguistics topics to help in crafting unique research papers. Peruse and pick one that suits your paper’s requirements.

Analyze the stylistic features of a business letter.
A comparative study of newspaper advertisement style.
An analysis of public speeches style
The forms and function of legal documents.
Discuss the functions of different newspaper genres.
The influence of ethnicity on linguistics.
Explore the effectiveness of spoken vs. written communication.
How effective is language translation?
Persuasive linguistics: An analysis of different strategies in politics.
The pros and cons of colonialism and the effects on African languages.
Discuss practical strategies for language acquisition.
Evaluate the social factors impacting language variation.
Discuss the various attitudes in society to language.
The impact of language on cultural identity.
The role of linguistics in different communities.

Having Problems with Your Paper? Our Experts Are Available 24/7

Research paper writing requires dedication in terms of time and effort. Most learners get stuck because of a lack of time and complex topics to handle. But with the correct strategy, you can simplify the entire composition. Let us look at some of the tips and tricks to help you compose an exceptional paper.

Read the essay prompt carefully

Take adequate time to acquaint yourself with the research prompt. What does your tutor expect from you? Read the assignment carefully before moving ahead with the research writing.

Choose a topic

Identify an appropriate topic through an extensive brainstorming exercise. It is pretty simple once you have the required themes in place.

Conduct comprehensive research

Carry out intense research on the topic you have selecting taking careful consideration about the relevant information. Use multiple trusted sources to extract adequate research content regarding the theme.

Develop a thesis

Organize your research and develop a powerful thesis statement. It gives your target audience an idea of the paper’s direction.

Design an outline

As per your paper requirements, design an appropriate outline that captures your entire research logically. Include an introduction, main body, and conclusion.

Writing process

Finally, start writing and make sure your arguments flow logically and clearly without any vague explanation in each paragraph.

Thorough editing and proofreading

Edit your work thoroughly and proofread for errors. Make sure it follows all the academic standard rules before turning in the paper to your tutor.

Need help with your research paper? Relax and let our qualified experts assist you in getting top-notch results. There is no need to struggle alone when our writers are available 24/7, ready to provide professional writing help. We have a team of skilled experts who are highly knowledgeable in diverse disciplines. Moreover, you will enjoy a personalized learning experience with our pro essay writers .

Whether you need help choosing linguistics anthropology research topics or composing the entire research paper, we have you covered in all aspects. No matter how complex the topic is, our experts will pull all-nighters to ensure you get your paper on time.

We are a reliable service that puts the interests of customers first. From having speedy client support to prompt deliveries, you can be sure of enjoying top-of-the-range services. We do not gamble with your academics, and that is why we promise our clients original research papers.

Therefore, contact us with detailed information about the writing service you need. Talk to us and improve your academic performance within no time.

A life lesson in Romeo and Juliet taught by death

Due to human nature, we draw conclusions only when life gives us a lesson since the experience of others is not so effective and powerful. Therefore, when analyzing and sorting out common problems we face, we may trace a parallel with well-known book characters or real historical figures. Moreover, we often compare our situations with […]

Ethical Research Paper Topics

Writing a research paper on ethics is not an easy task, especially if you do not possess excellent writing skills and do not like to contemplate controversial questions. But an ethics course is obligatory in all higher education institutions, and students have to look for a way out and be creative. When you find an […]

Art Research Paper Topics

Students obtaining degrees in fine art and art & design programs most commonly need to write a paper on art topics. However, this subject is becoming more popular in educational institutions for expanding students’ horizons. Thus, both groups of receivers of education: those who are into arts and those who only get acquainted with art […]

Research Topics in Applied Linguistics as Keywords from Authors and Keywords from Abstracts: A Bibliometric Study

First Online: 08 February 2024

Cite this chapter

William S. Pearson ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-0768-8461 3

155 Accesses

Applied linguists are increasingly looking to bibliometric analyses for top-down insights into the rapidly expanding and diversifying body of literature and to stay abreast of research trends in order to make informed decisions about what issues to research. Authors’ choices of keywords play an important role in conveying the topic of a research article, yet recent applied linguistics bibliometric analyses have largely ignored them. This study examines the author-provided keywords of 23,481 research articles across 42 high-ranking applied linguistics publications during three intervals between 2001 and 2021. It identifies (1) the prevalence of author-supplied keywords, (2) their lengths (measured in words), (3) syntactic structural patterns (e.g., noun + noun), (4) constituent word classes (e.g., noun, adjective, preposition), and, (5) the most frequent research topics as measured by keywords from authors and abstracts. The study found increasing standardisation in the provision of author keywords across research articles, especially combinations of four to six keywords that heavily featured nouns and adjectives in one to three-word phrases. The study identified several themes among topics of enduring, rising, and falling prevalence, although a notable divergence was exhibited between keywords from authors and abstracts. The implications for future bibliometric analyses that investigate research topics and other meta-research that utilises author-assigned keywords are discussed.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Available as PDF
Read on any device
Instant download
Own it forever
Available as EPUB and PDF
Durable hardcover edition
Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

On the scientometric value of full-text, beyond abstracts and titles: evidence from the business and economic literature

Avoiding obscure topics and generalising findings produces higher impact research.

The Seeds of the NEH Algorithm: An Overview Using Bibliometric Analysis

Anthony, Laurence. 2015. TagAnt [computer software] . Waseda University. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/tagant/ .

Google Scholar

———. 2018. AntConc [computer software] . Tokyo: Waseda University. https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/ .

Babaii, Esmat, and Yoones Taase. 2013. Author-assigned keywords in research articles: Where do they come from? Iranian Journal of Applied Linguistics 16 (2): 1–19. https://ijal.khu.ac.ir/article-1-1786-fa.pdf .

Benson, Phil, Alice Chik, Xuesong Gao, Jing Huang, and Wenfeng Wang. 2009. Qualitative research in language teaching and learning journals, 1997–2006. The Modern Language Journal 93 (1): 79–90. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1540-4781.2009.00829.x .

Article Google Scholar

Cheng, Stephanie W., Chih-Wei Kuo, and Chih-Hua Kuo. 2012. Research article titles in applied linguistics. Journal of Academic Language and Learning 6 (1): 1–14. https://journal.aall.org.au/index.php/jall/article/view/178 .

de Vries, Penning, B.L. Bas, Maarten van Smeden, Frits R. Rosendaal, and Rolf H.H. Groenwold. 2020. Title, abstract, and keyword searching resulted in poor recovery of articles in systematic reviews of epidemiologic practice. Journal of Clinical Epidemiology 121: 55–61. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jclinepi.2020.01.009 .

Farsani, Mohammad Amini, Hamid R. Jamali, Maryam Beikmohammadi, Babak Daneshvar Ghorbani, and Ladan Soleimani. 2021. Methodological orientations, academic citations, and scientific collaboration in applied linguistics: What do research synthesis and Bibliometrics indicate? System 100: 102547. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102547 .

Garcia, Débora Cristina, Cristiane Chaves Gattaz Ferreira, and Nilce Chaves Gattaz. 2019. The relevance of title, abstract and keywords for scientific paper writing. Revista de Administração Contemporânea 23 (3): 1–9. http://www.scielo.br/j/rac/a/KT6TxzgMBQ7WqZWTfrHKkhM/?lang=en .

Gil-Leiva, Isidoro, and Adolfo Alonso-Arroyo. 2007. Keywords given by authors of scientific articles in database descriptors. Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 58 (8): 1175–1187. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20595 .

Gillespie, John. 2020. CALL research: Where are we now? ReCALL 32 (2): 127–144. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0958344020000051 .

Gong, Yang, Boning Lyu, and Xuesong Gao. 2018. Research on teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language in and outside mainland China: A bibliometric analysis. Asia-Pacific Education Researcher 27 (4): 277–289. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40299-018-0385-2 .

Hyland, Ken, and Feng (Kevin) Jiang. 2021. A bibliometric study of EAP research: Who is doing what, where and when? Journal of English for Academic Purposes 49: 100929. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jeap.2020.100929 .

Ioannidis, John P.A. 2018. Meta-research: Why research on research matters. PLoS Biology 16 (3): e2005468. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pbio.2005468 .

Jung, Udo O.H. 2005. CALL: Past, present and future – A bibliometric approach. ReCALL 17 (1): 4–17. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0958344005000212 .

Lebrun, Jean-Luc. 2007. Scientific writing: A reader and a writer’s guide . World Scientific.

Book Google Scholar

Lei, Lei, and Dilin Liu. 2018. Research trends in applied linguistics from 2005 to 2016: A bibliometric analysis and its implications. Applied Linguistics 40 (3): 540–561. https://doi.org/10.1093/applin/amy003 .

———. 2019. The research trends and contributions of system’s publications over the past four decades (1973–2017): A bibliometric analysis. System 80: 1–13. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2018.10.003 .

Liu, Xun. 2017. Research topic, definition of. In The SAGE encyclopedia of communication research methods , ed. Mike Allen, 1463–1465. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE Publications, Inc. https://doi.org/10.4135/9781483381411.n510 .

Chapter Google Scholar

Lu, Wei, Zhifeng Liu, Yong Huang, Bu Yi, Xin Li, and Qikai Cheng. 2020. How do authors select keywords? A preliminary study of author keyword selection behavior. Journal of Informetrics 14 (4): 101066. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2020.101066 .

Mao, Jin, Kun Lu, Wanying Zhao, and Yujie Cao. 2018. How many keywords do authors assign to research articles – A multi-disciplinary analysis? In iConference 2018 Proceedings , 1–5. https://www.ideals.illinois.edu/bitstream/handle/2142/100269/Mao-Jin_20180417_V01.pdf?sequence=1 .

Meng, Rui, Sanqiang Zhao, Shuguang Han, Daqing He, Peter Brusilovsky, and Yu Chi. 2017. Deep Keyphrase Generation. ACL 2017 – 55th Annual Meeting of the Association for Computational Linguistics, Proceedings of the Conference (Long Papers) 1: 582–92. https://doi.org/10.18653/v1/P17-1054 .

Onyancha, Omwoyo Bosire. 2018. Forty-five years of LIS research evolution, 1971–2015: An Informetrics study of the author-supplied keywords. Publishing Research Quarterly 34 (3): 456–470. https://doi.org/10.1007/s12109-018-9590-3 .

Pearson, William S. 2022. The teaching English as a second language electronic journal (TESL-EJ): A bibliometric analysis of the first 99 issues. TESL-EJ 25 (3): 1–21. https://tesl-ej.org/wordpress/issues/volume25/ej100/ej100a1 .

Powner, Leanne C. 2017. From research topic to research question. In Empirical research and writing: A political science Student’s practical guide , 1–19. Sage.

Richards, Keith. 2009. Trends in qualitative research in language teaching since 2000. Language Teaching 42 (2): 147–180. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0261444808005612 .

Sun, Yachao, and Ge Lan. 2021. Research trends in ‘trans-’ studies on writing: A bibliometric analysis. System 103 (8): 102640. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.system.2021.102640 .

Swales, John M. 1990. Genre analysis: English in academic and research settings . Cambridge University Press.

Tripathi, Manorama, S.K. Sunil Kumar, and Sonker, and Parveen Babbar. 2018. Occurrence of author keywords and keywords plus in social sciences and humanities research: A preliminary study. COLLNET Journal of Scientometrics and Information Management 12 (2): 215–232. https://doi.org/10.1080/09737766.2018.1436951 .

Uddin, Shahadat, and Arif Khan. 2016. The impact of author-selected keywords on citation counts. Journal of Informetrics 10 (4): 1166–1177. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2016.10.004 .

Uddin, Shahadat, Arif Khan, and Louise A. Baur. 2015. A framework to explore the knowledge structure of multidisciplinary research fields. PLoS One 10 (4): e0123537. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0123537 .

Yan, Erjia. 2014. Research dynamics: Measuring the continuity and popularity of research topics. Journal of Informetrics 8 (1): 98–110. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.joi.2013.10.010 .

Zhang, Xian. 2020. A bibliometric analysis of second language acquisition between 1997 and 2018. Studies in Second Language Acquisition 42: 199–222. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0272263119000573 .

Download references

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

University of Exeter, St Luke’s Campus, Exeter, UK

William S. Pearson

You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Editor information

Editors and affiliations.

Department of English Language Teaching, Imam Khomeini International University, Qazvin, Iran

Hussein Meihami

Rajab Esfandiari

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Pearson, W.S. (2024). Research Topics in Applied Linguistics as Keywords from Authors and Keywords from Abstracts: A Bibliometric Study. In: Meihami, H., Esfandiari, R. (eds) A Scientometrics Research Perspective in Applied Linguistics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51726-6_5

Download citation

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-51726-6_5

Published : 08 February 2024

Publisher Name : Springer, Cham

Print ISBN : 978-3-031-51725-9

Online ISBN : 978-3-031-51726-6

eBook Packages : Education Education (R0)

Share this chapter

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Find a journal
Track your research

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Publications
Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

Advanced Search
Journal List
Front Psychol

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.

(from Clarivate Analytics Web of Science Core Collection)

Index: Social Science Citation Index (SSCI) and Arts & Humanities Citation Index (A&HCI)

Web of Science categories = linguistics or language & linguistics

Refined by: Highly Cited Papers

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.

An external file that holds a picture, illustration, etc.
Object name is fpsyg-13-1052586-g001.jpg

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	N%	TP	N/TP % (R)	TC	TC/HCP (R)	IF
16	11.19	918	1.74(3)	1,699	106.19(14)	4.763
11	7.70	829	1.33(6)	349	31.7(17)	3.165
10	7.00	480	2.08(2)	1,353	135.3(12)	7.5
7	4.90	730	0.96(10)	5,865	837.86(1)	4.521
7	4.90	1,472	0.48(15)	533	76.14(15)	4.518
6	4.20	1,040	0.58(13)	1,161	193.50(9)	4.018
6	4.20	627	0.96(10)	1,186	197.67(8)	4.155
6	4.20	509	1.18(7)	975	162.50(11)	5.24
4	2.80	281	1.42(5)	538	134.50(13)	3.063
4	2.80	354	1.13(8)	2,135	533.75(2)	7.778
4	2.80	2,122	0.19(17)	1,215	303.75(3)	1.86
4	2.80	371	1.08(9)	859	214.75(6)	4.769
4	2.80	681	0.59(12)	213	53.25(16)	3.401
4	2.80	244	1.64(4)	1,137	284.25(4)	4.158
3	2.10	133	2.26(1)	755	251.67(5)	3.87
3	2.10	588	0.51(14)	644	214.67(7)	5.964
3	2.10	813	0.37(16)	549	183.00(10)	2.842

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.

Affiliations	N	FA/CA	TC	C/HCP
Birkbeck Univ London	7	2	492	70.3
Huazhong Univ Sci & Technol	5	5	215	43
UCL	5	2	576	115.2
CUNY	3	1	543	181
Cape Breton Univ	3	2	292	97.33
Univ Basel	3	3	392	130.7
Univ British Columbia	3	1	915	305
CUNY	3	2	543	181
No Arizona Univ	3	1	676	225.3
Univ Michigan	2	1	375	187.5
Univ Auckland	2	0	98	49
UCL	2	2	956	478
York Univ	2	2	241	120.5
Karl Franzens Univ Graz	2	0	204	102
Georgetown Univ	2	1	395	197.5
Univ Potsdam	2	0	694	347
Univ Tubingen	2	1	280	140
Univ Ghent	2	1	162	81
Penn State Univ	2	2	537	268.5
Golestan Univ	2	1	77	38.5
Univ Nottingham	2	1	281	140.5
Univ New South Wales	2	1	86	43
Ningbo Univ	2	2	61	30.5
Amer Univ Sharjah	2	0	204	102
Xiamen Univ	2	2	127	63.5
Univ Potsdam	2	0	694	347
Hong Kong Polytech Univ	2	2	148	74
Univ Technol Sydney	2	2	206	103
Macquarie University	2	2	226	113
Univ Maryland	2	1	292	146
CUNY	2	2	475	237.5
UiT Arctic Univ Norway;	2	1	146	73
Univ Nottingham	2	0	124	62

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.

HCPs	HCPs %	TC	C/HCP	FA/CA
59	41.26	15,770	267.29	53
35	24.48	9,840	281.14	26
19	13.29	1,270	66.84	18
15	10.49	3,981	265.40	13
12	8.39	1,061	88.42	10
9	6.29	2,535	281.67	5
6	4.20	469	78.17	5
5	3.50	216	43.20	5
4	2.80	668	167.00	1
4	2.80	540	135.00	0
4	2.80	549	137.25	2
4	2.80	539	134.75	3
3	2.10	274	91.33	3
3	2.10	521	173.67	3
3	2.10	523	174.33	0
3	2.10	115	38.33	1
3	2.10	393	131.00	3
3	2.10	232	77.33	1

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.

#	RC	NC	Authors	Title (Publication Year)	Journals
1	4,677	38.88	Barr, D.J., et al.	Random effects structure for confirmatory hypothesis testing: keep it maximal (2013)	Journal of Memory and Language
2	519	20.24	Lee, JB & Azios, JH	Facilitator Behaviors Leading to Engagement and Disengagement in Aphasia Conversation Groups (2020)	American Journal of Speech-Language Pathology
3	583	8.57	Matuschek, H, et al.	Balancing type I error and power in linear mixed models (2017)	Journal of Memory and Language
4	1,313	8.42	Taboada, M, et al.	Lexicon-Based methods for sentiment analysis (2011)	Computational Linguistics
5	374	7.06	Li, W	Translanguaging as a Practical Theory of language (2018)	Applied Linguistics
6	136	5.44	Alva Manchego, F, et al.	Data-Driven sentence simplification: survey and benchmark (2020)	Computational Linguistics
7	693	5.22	Heritage, J	The epistemic engine: sequence organization and territories of language (2012)	Research on Language and Social Interaction
8	46	5.11	Zhang, Q; Yang, T	Reflections on the medium of instruction for ethnic minorities in Xinjiang: the case of bilingual schools in Urumqi (2021)	International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
9	560	5.08	Plonsky, L; Oswald, FL	How big is big? interpreting effect sizes in L2 research (2014)	Language Learning
10	371	4.65	Kuperberg, GR; Jaeger, TF	What do we mean by prediction in language comprehension? (2016)	Language Cognition and Neuroscience
11	41	4.56	Greenier, V, et al.	Emotion regulation and psychological well-being in teacher work engagement: a case of British and Iranian English…(2021)	System
12	240	4.49	Macaro, E, et al.	A systematic review of English medium instruction in higher education (2018)	Language Teaching
13	406	4.26	Otheguy, R, et al.	Clarifying translanguaging and deconstructing named languages:a perspective from linguistics (2015)	Applied Linguistics Review
14	107	4.24	Schad, DJ, et al.	How to capitalize on contrasts in linear(mixed) models: a tutorial (2020)	Journal of Memory and Language
15	38	4.22	Shirvan, ME; Taherian, T	Longitudinal examination of university students’ foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety…(2021)	International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
16	101	4.04	MacIntyre, PD, et al.	Language teachers’ coping strategies during the Covid-19 conversion to online…(2020)	System
17	320	4.03	Atkinson, D, et al.	A transdisciplinary framework for SLA in a multilingual world (2016)	Modern Language Journal
18	36	4.00	Jin, YX; Zhang, LJ	The dimensions of foreign language classroom enjoyment and their effect on foreign language achievement (2021)	International Journal of Bilingual Education and Bilingualism
19	35	3.89	Derakhshan, A, et al.	Boredom in online classes in the Iranian EFL contexts: sources and solutions (2021)	System
20	575	3.83	Wei, L	Moment analysis and translanguaging space: discursive construction of identities…(2011)	Journal of Pragmatics

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.

Categories	N	hot topic items
Multilingual-related	34	Multilingualism(127), translanguaging(42), heritage language/speakers/learners(31), language/education policy(6)
Language learning/teaching-related	30	Language/writing development(35), academic writing/vocabulary/publishing(22), learning strategy(20), motivation(17), individual differences(13), CLIL(11), agency(11), flipped classroom(9), self-efficacy(9), EFL learner(7), ELF (7), early language(7)
Psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related	25	Emotion(47), FLE(42), cognition(39), anxiety(35), FLCA(30), stuttering(21), anxiety/language/fluency disorder(16), boredom(14), language impairment(14), brain(11), working memory(9), speech language pathology/therapy/pathologists(7), positive psychology(6), language ideology(5)
Methods and tools-related	16	Model(67), review (35), qualitative data(14), quantitative data(8), corpus-based studies/teaching(6), longitudinal study/analysis(5), sentiment analysis(5), meta-analysis(5), eye tracking(4), mixed method(4)
Others	38	Lexical(25), identity(21), social interaction/difficulties(17), sematic models/mapping(15), Covid-19(9)

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

Aksnes D. W. (2003). Characteristics of highly cited papers . Res. Eval. 12 , 159–170. doi: 10.3152/147154403781776645 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Anthony L. (2022). AntConc (version 4.0.5) Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available at: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software (Accessed June 20, 2022).
Archila P. A., Molina J., Truscott de Mejía A.-M. (2021). Fostering bilingual scientific writing through a systematic and purposeful code-switching pedagogical strategy . Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 24 , 785–803. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2018.1516189 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Blessinger K., Hrycaj P. (2010). Highly cited articles in library and information science: an analysis of content and authorship trends . Libr. Inf. Sci. Res. 32 , 156–162. doi: 10.1016/j.lisr.2009.12.007 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Chen H., Ho Y. S. (2015). Highly cited articles in biomass research: a bibliometric analysis . Renew. Sust. Energ. Rev. 49 , 12–20. doi: 10.1016/j.rser.2015.04.060 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Clark S. (2017). Translanguaging in higher education: beyond monolingual ideologies . Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 22 , 1048–1051. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2017.1322568 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Dance A. (2012). Authorship: Who’s on first? Nature 489 , 591–593. doi: 10.1038/nj7417-591a, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Danell R. (2011). Can the quality of scientific work be predicted using information on the author’s track record? J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 62 , 50–60. doi: 10.1002/asi.21454 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Darvin R., Norton B. (2015). Identity and a model of Investment in Applied Linguistics . Annu. Rev. Appl. Linguist. 35 , 36–56. doi: 10.1017/S0267190514000191 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Dewaele J.-M., MacIntyre P. D. (2016). “ Foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety: the right and left feet of the language learner ” in Positive psychology in SLA . eds. Peter D. M., Tammy G., Sarah M. (Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters; ), 215–236. [ Google Scholar ]
Gardner R. (2010). Motivation and second language acquisition: The socio-educational model . New York: Peter Lang. [ Google Scholar ]
Gong Y., Lyu B., Gao X. (2018). Research on teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language in and outside mainland China: a bibliometric analysis . Asia Pac. Educ. Res. 27 , 277–289. doi: 10.1007/s40299-018-0385-2 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Hsu Y., Ho Y. S. (2014). Highly cited articles in health care sciences and services field in science citation index Expanded . Methods Inf. Med. 53 , 446–458. doi: 10.3414/ME14-01-0022, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lee I. (2014). Publish or perish: the myth and reality of academic publishing . Lang. Teach. 47 , 250–261. doi: 10.1017/S0261444811000504 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lei L., Liao S. (2017). Publications in linguistics journals from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau (2003–2012): a bibliometric analysis . J. Quant. Ling. 24 , 54–64. doi: 10.1080/09296174.2016.1260274 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lei L., Liu D. (2018). The research trends and contributions of System’s publications over the past four decades (1973–2017): a bibliometric analysis . System 80 , 1–13. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2018.10.003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Lei L., Liu D. (2019). Research trends in applied linguistics from 2005 to 2016: a bibliometric analysis and its implications . Appl. Linguis. 40 , 540–561. doi: 10.1093/applin/amy003 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Leivada E., Westergaard M., Duabeitia J. A., Rothman J. (2020). On the phantom-like appearance of bilingualism effects on neurocognition: (how) should we proceed? Biling. Lang. Congn. 24 , 197–210. doi: 10.1017/S1366728920000358 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li W. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain . Energy Fuel 43 , 1222–1235. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language . Appl. Linguis. 39 , 9–30. doi: 10.1093/applin/amx039 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C. (2019). A positive psychology perspective on Chinese EFL students’ trait emotional intelligence, foreign language enjoyment and EFL learning achievement . J. Multiling. Multicult. Dev. 41 , 246–263. doi: 10.1080/01434632.2019.1614187 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C. (2021). A control-value theory approach to boredom in English classes among university students in China . Mod. Lang. J. 105 , 317–334. doi: 10.1111/modl.12693 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C., Dewaele J. M., Hu Y. (2021). Foreign language learning boredom: conceptualization and measurement . Appl. Ling. Rev. doi: 10.1515/applirev-2020-0124 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C., Dewaele J. M., Jiang G. (2019). The complex relationship between classroom emotions and EFL achievement in China . Appl. Ling. Rev. 11 , 485–510. doi: 10.1515/applirev-2018-0043 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Li C., Jiang G., Jean-Marc D. (2018). Understanding Chinese high school students’ foreign language enjoyment: validation of the Chinese version of the foreign language enjoyment scale . System 76 , 183–196. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2018.06.004 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Liao S., Lei L. (2017). What we talk about when we talk about corpus: a bibliometric analysis of corpus-related research in linguistics (2000-2015) . Glottometrics 38 , 1–20. [ Google Scholar ]
Liao H., Tang M., Li Z., Lev B. (2018). Bibliometric analysis for highly cited papers in operations research and management science from 2008 to 2017 based on essential science indicators . Omega 88 , 223–236. doi: 10.1016/j.omega.2018.11.005 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Luk G., Sa E. D., Bialystok E. (2011). Is there a relation between onset age of bilingualism and enhancement of cognitive control? Biling. Lang. Cogn. 14 , 588–595. doi: 10.1017/S1366728911000010 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Macaro E., Curle S., Pun J., Dearden J. (2018). A systematic review of English medium instruction in higher education . Lang. Teach. 51 , 36–76. doi: 10.1017/S0261444817000350 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Macintyre P., Gregersen T., Mercer S. (2019). Setting an agenda for positive psychology in SLA: theory, practice, and research . Mod. Lang. J. 103 , 262–274. doi: 10.1111/modl.12544 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Mancebo F. P., Sapena A. F., Herrera M. V., González L., Toca H., Benavent R. A. (2013). Scientific literature analysis of judo in web of science . Arch. Budo 9 , 81–91. doi: 10.12659/AOB.883883 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Marui M., Bozikov J., Katavi V., Hren D., Kljakovi-Gapi M., Marui A. (2004). Authorship in a small medical journal: a study of contributorship statements by corresponding authors . Sci. Eng. Ethics 10 , 493–502. doi: 10.1007/s11948-004-0007-7, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
May S. (2014). The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and bilingual education . New York: Routledge. [ Google Scholar ]
Mondada L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: language and the body in social interaction . J. Socioling. 20 , 336–366. doi: 10.1111/josl.1_12177 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Mondada L. (2018). Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: challenges for transcribing multimodality . Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 51 , 85–106. doi: 10.1080/08351813.2018.1413878 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Mondada L. (2019). Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: embodiment and materiality, multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction . J. Pragmat. 145 , 47–62. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2019.01.016 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Naiman N. (1978). The good language learner . Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters. [ Google Scholar ]
Newman M. (2008). The first-mover advantage in scientific publication . Eplasty 86 , 68001–68006. doi: 10.1209/0295-5075/86/68001 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Newman M. (2014). Prediction of highly cited papers . Eplasty 105 :28002. doi: 10.1209/0295-5075/105/28002 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Norton B., Toohey K. (2011). Identity, language learning, and social change . Lang. Teach. 44 , 412–446. doi: 10.1017/S0261444811000309 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Ortega L. (2019). SLA and the study of equitable multilingualism . Mod. Lang. J. 103 , 23–38. doi: 10.1111/modl.12525 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Ping Z., Thijs B., Glnzel W. (2009). Is China also becoming a giant in social sciences? Scientometrics 79 , 593–621. doi: 10.1007/s11192-007-2068-x [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Pritchard A. (1969). Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics . J. Doc. 25 , 348–349. [ Google Scholar ]
Ríos L. J. C., Tamao I. M., Olmos J. (2013). Bibliometric study (1922-2009) on rugby articles in research journals . South Afr. J. Res. Sport Phys. Educ. Rec. 17 , 313–109. doi: 10.3176/tr.2013.3.06 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Ruggeri G., Orsi L., Corsi S. (2019). A bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature on Fairtrade labelling . Int. IJC 43 , 134–152. doi: 10.1111/ijcs.12492 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Sabiote C. R., Rodríguez J. A. (2015). Bibliometric study and methodological quality indicators of the journal porta Linguarum during six year period 2008-2013 . Porta Ling. 24 , 135–150. doi: 10.30827/Digibug.53866 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Schissel J. L., De Korne H., López-Gopar M. E. (2018). Grappling with translanguaging for teaching and assessment in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts: teacher perspectives from Oaxaca, Mexico . Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 24 , 340–356. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2018.1463965 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Shen Q., Gao X. (2018). Multilingualism and policy making in greater China: ideological and implementational spaces . Lang. Policy 18 , 1–16. doi: 10.1007/s10993-018-9473-7 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Small H. (2004). Why authors think their papers are highly cited . Scientometrics 60 , 305–316. doi: 10.1023/B:SCIE.0000034376.55800.18 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Smith D. R. (2007). The New Zealand timber economy, 1840–1935 . N. Z. Med. J. 120 , U2871–U2313. doi: 10.1016/0305-7488(90)90044-C, PMID: [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
van Doorslaer L., Gambier Y. (2015). Measuring relationships in translation studies. On affiliations and keyword frequencies in the translation studies bibliography . Perspectives 23 , 305–319. doi: 10.1080/0907676X.2015.1026360 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
van Oorschot J. A. W. H., Hofman E., Halman J. (2018). A bibliometric review of the innovation adoption literature . Technol. Forecast. Soc. Chang. 134 , 1–21. doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2018.04.032 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Xie Z., Willett P. (2013). The development of computer science research in the People’s republic of China 2000–2009: a bibliometric study . Inf. Dev. 29 , 251–264. doi: 10.1177/0266666912458515 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Yan S., Zhang H., Wang J. (2022). Trends and hot topics in radiology, nuclear medicine and medical imaging from 2011–2021: a bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers . Jpn. J. Radiol. 40 , 847–856. doi: 10.1007/s11604-022-01268-z, PMID: [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Zhu H., Lei L. (2021). A dependency-based machine learning approach to the identification of research topics: a case in COVID-19 studies . Lib. Hi Tech 40 , 495–515. doi: 10.1108/LHT-01-2021-0051 [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]
Zhu H., Lei L. (2022). The research trends of text classification studies (2000–2020): a bibliometric analysis . SAGE Open 12 , 215824402210899–215824402210816. doi: 10.1177%2F21582440221089963 [ Google Scholar ]

Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident

We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings .

Login Alert

< Back to search results

Key Topics in Applied Linguistics

Download list of titles

Books in this series provide critical accounts of the most important topics in applied linguistics, conceptualised as an interdisciplinary field of research and practice dealing with practical problems of language and communication. Some topics have been the subject of applied linguistics for many years and will be re-examined in the light of new developments in the field; others are issues of growing importance that have not so far been given a sustained treatment. The topics of the series are nuanced and specialised, providing an opportunity for further reading around a particular concept. The concept examined may be theoretical or practice-oriented. Written by leading experts, the books in the series can be used on courses and in seminars, or as succinct guides to a particular topic for individual students and researchers.

General Editors: Zhu Hua , UCL Institute of Education, University College London , Claire Kramsch , University of California, Berkeley

Refine search

Actions for selected content:.

View selected items
Save to my bookmarks
Export citations
Download PDF (zip)
Save to Kindle
Save to Dropbox
Save to Google Drive

Save content to

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to .

To save content items to your Kindle, first ensure [email protected] is added to your Approved Personal Document E-mail List under your Personal Document Settings on the Manage Your Content and Devices page of your Amazon account. Then enter the ‘name’ part of your Kindle email address below. Find out more about saving to your Kindle .

Note you can select to save to either the @free.kindle.com or @kindle.com variations. ‘@free.kindle.com’ emails are free but can only be saved to your device when it is connected to wi-fi. ‘@kindle.com’ emails can be delivered even when you are not connected to wi-fi, but note that service fees apply.

Find out more about the Kindle Personal Document Service .

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

5 results in Key Topics in Applied Linguistics

Language Assemblages

Alastair Pennycook
Coming soon
Expected online publication date: June 2024 Print publication: 27 June 2024
Export citation
View description What are languages? An assemblage approach to language gives us ways of thinking about language as dynamic, constructed, open-ended, and in and of the world. This book unsettles regular accounts of knowledge about language in several ways, presenting an innovative and provocative framework for a new understanding of language from within applied linguistics. The idea of assemblages allows for a ﬂexibility about what languages are, not just in terms of having fuzzy linguistic boundaries but in terms of what constitutes language more generally. Languages are assembled from different elements, both linguistic elements as traditionally understood, as well as items less commonly included. Language from this point of view is embedded in diverse social and physical environments, distributed across the material world and part of our embodied existence. This book looks at what language is and what languages are with a view to understanding applied linguistics itself as a practical assemblage.

Locating Translingualism

Jerry Won Lee
Published online: 31 March 2022 Print publication: 28 April 2022
Get access Buy a print copy Check if you have access via personal or institutional login Log in Register
View description Encounters involving different cultures and languages are increasingly the norm in the era of globalization. While considerable attention has been paid to how languages and cultures transform in the era of globalization, their characteristic features prior to transformation are frequently taken for granted. This pioneering book argues that globalization offers an unprecedented opportunity to revisit fundamental assumptions about what distinguishes languages and cultures from each other in the first place. It takes the case of global Korea, showing how the notion of 'culture' is both represented but also reinvented in public space, with examples from numerous sites across Korea and Koreatowns around the world. It is not merely about locating spaces where translingualism happens but also about exploring the various ways in which linguistic and cultural difference come to be located via translingualism. It will appeal to anyone interested in the globalization of language and culture.

The Invention of Multilingualism

David Gramling
Published online: 04 June 2021 Print publication: 17 June 2021
View description Multilingualism is a meaningful and capacious idea about human meaning-making practice, one with a promising, tumultuous, and flawed present - and a future worth caring for in research and public life. In this book, David Gramling presents original new insights into the topical subject of multilingualism, describing its powerful social, economic and political discourses. On one hand, it is under acute pressure to bear the demands of new global supply-chains, profit margins, and supranational unions, and on the other it is under pressure to make way for what some consider to be better descriptors of linguistic practice, such as translanguaging. The book shows how multilingualism is usefully able to encompass complex, divergent, and sometimes opposing experiences and ideas, in a wide array of planetary contexts - fictitious and real, political and social, North and South, colonial and decolonial, individual and collective, oppressive and liberatory, embodied and prosthetic, present and past.

Language as Symbolic Power

Claire Kramsch
Published online: 15 October 2020 Print publication: 29 October 2020
View description Language is not simply a tool for communication - symbolic power struggles underlie any speech act, discourse move, or verbal interaction, be it in face-to-face conversations, online tweets or political debates. This book provides a clear and accessible introduction to the topic of language and power from an applied linguistics perspective. It is clearly split into three sections: the power of symbolic representation, the power of symbolic action and the power to create symbolic reality. It draws upon a wide range of existing work by philosophers, sociolinguists, sociologists and applied linguists, and includes current real-world examples, to provide a fresh insight into a topic that is of particular signiﬁcance and interest in the current political climate and in our increasingly digital age. The book shows the workings of language as symbolic power in educational, social, cultural and political settings and discusses ways to respond to and even resist symbolic violence.

Language and Subjectivity

Tim McNamara
Published online: 20 February 2019 Print publication: 28 February 2019
View description Understanding the role of language within the formation of a sense of self has been revolutionised by developments in social theory, particularly poststructuralism. There is now a new emphasis on the way in which subjects are vulnerable in the face of powerful discourses such as nation, gender, race and sexuality. This book is a clear and engaging introduction to these developments and their relevance to students of language. Using lively and often personal examples throughout, Tim McNamara explores the role of language within processes of subjectivity using the insights of conversation analysis (CA), creating an original conceptual and methodological bridge between the macro- and micro-dimensions of social discourse and everyday conversational interaction.

Email your librarian or administrator to recommend adding this to your organisation's collection.

Custom Essay, Term Paper & Research paper writing services

testimonials

Toll Free: +1 (888) 354-4744

Email: [email protected]

Writing custom essays & research papers since 2008

Top 50+ linguistics research topics for your paper.

Are you a student or a graduate of linguistics? If yes, there is no doubting the fact that research topics in linguistics are your bread and butter. You can escape them in school. Write within the confines of the topics in linguistics and get your grade without stress. However, linguistics is a wide field and it can be hard to pick one of the many linguistic topics for your research. Sometimes, the problem is not in picking a topic. The problem is that despite the wide scope of linguistics, you don’t know how to form linguistics research topics.

We noticed these problems with students and decided to help. Our solution is to compile a list of 50 linguistic research topics for linguistics students. These topics could form the basis of your linguistics research paper topics. You don’t have to worry anymore about topics for master thesis in linguistics. We have you covered for all English linguistics research topics. Let’s dive in!

Check Our 50 Linguistics Research Topics

There are linguistics research topics in abundance. If you search online, you would find more than a few examples. However, you need to know the aspect of linguistics you want to use for your linguistics paper topics. It would make no sense to have a list of thesis topics in applied linguistics and want to write on topics in cognitive linguistics. While they are all under the broad body of linguistics, they are quite different from each other.

So, the first step in finding the perfect linguistics essay topics is to choose the aspect of linguistics you want. After you have made a choice you can now look into linguistics topics in that aspect. We have made finding interesting linguistics topics in any aspect you chose easier by grouping our 50 linguistics research topics. All you have to do is search under the aspect of your choice.

Interesting Linguistics Research Topics

If you don’t only want to write a research paper but you want to find every minute of it intriguing, these interesting topics in linguistics are the ones for you.

What makes written communication more precise compared to spoken communication?
How to spot language disorders and deal with them
What contributes to the prevalent language shift and death in our society today?
The language of feminism: How formalized is it and how does it affect society?
Why is it impossible to claim to know a language entirely?
What salient factors cause ambiguity in language translation?
An in-depth analysis of feminism in Africa
Language vs Society: Which one influences the other? How does it affect the members?
How effective are subject teaching and language support?
What factors affect language choice in multilingual societies? (Study of selected communities)
The real functions of language

Linguistics Topics on Translation

If you want the latest research topics in applied linguistics, the topics under the following subheadings would help you. You just have to look for the aspect that you have an interest in and look at linguistics in that light.

How has technology affected translation at this age and time?
Is translation the cause of misunderstandings between speakers of different languages?
How effective is an audiovisual translation in revolutionizing the translation industry?
Does literal translation do more harm than good?
How has the translator training and pedagogy faired in the production of efficient translators?
How does translation relate to popular culture?

Translation is essential in this century with people of different languages communicating and coming together in a global economy. These topics look into the issues that translation encounter at this time.

Linguistics Topics on Politics

Politics is an ever-present phenomenon in any society. These dissertation topics in linguistics examine the issues surrounding language in the field of politics. We have explained samples of Ph.D. thesis topics in linguistics in this field.

The reality of hate speech in selected communities
The use of persuasive language strategies and tools in political speech
How colonial rule affected African politics and language
Why do politicians use indigenous languages to address communities?
A critical analysis of the changing political communication landscape
Effective political communication: A case study of selected politicians
How tag lines and buzz words are used to enhance political speeches

Sociolinguistics Research Topics

This aspect of linguistics examines how issues surrounding how language works in society. These research topics for English linguistics focus on how people in society use language and its effects on society.

What are the social factors that necessitate language varieties?
How does language affect identity?
An in-depth analysis of language attrition common to most English speakers
A critical evaluation of the difference in attitudes towards language in different societies
The differences in language functions in selected communities
How ethnicity affect language and vice versa

Argumentative Linguistics Research Topics

These topics in linguistics for research papers argue on issues surrounding language. You can use these topics if you want to show different sides of an argument in your research.

Is language the best way to communicate?
Can we say that language is merely a system of symbols
Do language disorders cause difficulties in the study of language?
Does brain injury lead to issues in language capacities?
Do mother tongue inflection and accent impact efficient communication?
Is it advisable to learn more than one language?

Linguistics Research Topics on History

Language was not a concept that started a few years ago. People have been communicating for centuries and centuries. These topics look at the history of language, sometimes about this age.

How Greek philosophy contributes to language
What are the early speculations scientists had about the origin of language?
Analysis of the history of language as explained in mythology
How do the 3,000 preserved cuneiform writings affect language?
A critical evaluation of different theories on the origin and development of language
Why has the question of language origin remained unanswerable?

Linguistics Research Topics on Semantics

Language is nothing without meaning. These interesting linguistic topics show how meaning and language mix and relate. You can research any one of these topics to understand how this field.

How does meaning affect language analysis and interpretation?
What is the major cause of language ambiguity?
How do sentences relate to one another?
How do speakers of different languages acquire a sense of meaning in conversation?
How can the meaning of words relate?
An in-depth analysis into how language is used and acquired in different communities

Tough Linguistics Research Topics

Do all the topics above seem too easy for you? Do you want something more challenging? We have a few topics for you. These topics would give you that challenge you want. Ensure that you do enough research on topics before you embark on them.

Why do people speak different languages?
What makes language translation possible?
What makes some languages harder to learn than others?
Why are English and French words similar?
Why does the mother tongue always affect pronunciation?
Does sign language only involve the hands?

How to Choose A Perfect Linguistics Topic for You

There are different aspects of linguistics. If you check online, you would find linguistic anthropology research topics, computational linguistics research topics, and much more. However, not all these aspects of linguistics would be perfect for your dissertation or thesis.

In selecting or creating the perfect linguistic topic for you, here are some of the tips from our experts in paper writing you should take into consideration.

Pick an aspect that interest you . Linguistics apply to different walks of life. Therefore, there are varied topics for your linguistics research. It can make choosing a topic quite stressful. What you do is find what interests you and find topics in that aspect. Start by looking for a broad aspect then narrow it down to a part of the field. For instance, you can start with applied linguistics and move on to linguistics in politics.
Brainstorm with friends . After you have chosen the aspect you like, you can pick a list of topics in linguistics for research papers and bounce off ideas from the topics with your friends. You can even write out your ideas from your brainstorming and ask your friends what they think about them. The topic that you notice that you and your friends keep going back to is possibly the best one for you. If you find a lot of things to talk about it, you would possibly find a lot of things to write about it.
Research the topics . Talk is cheap though. If you want to write on a topic, ensure that there are enough materials to support your claims. After you and your friends decide on a topic, research the topic before you start writing. Once you find that there are enough materials, you can start.

Linguistics has different aspects. If you check online and on our list, you would find different topics in these aspects, including topics related to linguistic diversity. Follow our guide and list to find the best linguistic topic for you!

100+ Compelling Linguistics Research Topics for University Students

Confused while selecting the interesting linguistics research topics to pen down your thoughts on a piece of paper? So, bounce back to this article and pick the best linguistics research paper topics and boost your grades.

Un-layering the essence of teaching-learning methodology demonstrates the development of linguistic theories. Linguistics is a science of language in which fact-finding is done through some rational and systematic study. While digging into the information about the history of linguistics, two perspectives on languages are unveiled: prescriptive and descriptive views.

The linguistic analysis uncovers the following areas: phonetics, phonology, syntax, morphology, semantics, and pragmatics. Furthermore, the scrutinization of linguistics helps you to know about every aspect of languages as well as methods for studying them.

Table of Contents

How To Choose the Right Linguistics Research Topics?

Stress work is the indication of degraded academic performance and lower grades even if we talk about a linguistics research paper. Make your every endeavor effective and energetic by applying the right strategy. Therefore, make the right selection for your academic writing that starts from the interesting topic selection in linguistics.

Moreover, take advantage of research paper help and discuss your concerns with professional writers. As a suggestion, you can choose the right linguistics research topics by keeping the following points in your mind:

Find your interest: Linguistics uncover various aspects of language learning and allow you to expand your mind capabilities. So, try to explore the depth of the subject and find your area of interest. It will make your academic writing more interesting and enthralling.

Brainstorm the ideas: Picking the interesting linguistics topics demands your knowledge and expertise. Therefore, you need to take the advantage of brainstorming and collect various ideas to explore the concept of linguistics.

Perform pensive research : When you are keen to score high marks, you need to have sufficient knowledge. Conduct insightful research and uncover the pensive ideas for your research paper topics in linguistics.

Interesting Topics in Linguistics

Linguistics is the foundation of language knowledge. Linguistics theories indeed are interrelated to learning the English language. When you have to boost your grades, your selection for linguistics research paper topics makes a huge difference. Some of the interesting linguistics research topics are:

Explain the significance of music in the evolution of language.
Does age really impact English pronunciation?
What is the role of sociolinguistics education in creating discipline?
What is the significance of language in creating teaching methodology?
Analysis of verbal and written communication based on language usage.
Is it important to have expertise in several languages?
Explain the issues related to receptive language disorder and its impact on brain development.
How do you correlate sentence-making and word flow in linguistics?
Discuss the comparability between English and French languages.
Factors responsible for different spoken languages.
The impact of slang in the development of languages.
Is text messaging creating a revolutionary subculture in the new linguistic scenario?
How are linguistic patterns helpful in locating migration roadways?
What are factors affecting the capability of learning a language?
Explain the role of language in building a national identity for developing a multicultural society.
Digital Revolution: impact of computers in modern language
A systematic review on vowel pronunciation in the American Schools.
Significance of language in creating cross-cultural communities: A comprehensive review
Elucidate the impact of language on one’s perception.
Textual and Linguistic analysis for housing studies.

Stimulating Research Paper Topics In Sociolinguistics

While seeking linguistics research topics for your assignments or research paper, you may find sociolinguistics interesting to explore. Sociolinguistics demonstrates the impact of language on our society. When you are keen to explore the effect of language in different aspects of society (including cultural values and expectations), you need to do an in-depth analysis of sociolinguistics.

For building a good foundation on sociolinguistics, you can select the following linguistics paper topics:

How would you define linguistic practices in specific communities?
An elaborative approach for code-switching and code-mixing
Explain the impact of dialect on gender.
A correlational study to share the relationship between language, social class, and cognition.
In-depth study of interactional sociolinguistics in the 21st Century.
A comprehensive analysis on accountability and aptness of dialect.
Evaluate the education of language in the U.S.
The role of languages in controlling emotions.
Effectiveness of verbal communication in expressing one’s feelings: A competitive analysis.
A literature review on communication with a precise comparison of verbal and non-verbal communication
Difference between advanced placement (AP) English literature and language.
What is the relationship between language and one’s personality?
A critical analysis on the relation of language and ethnicity.
Describe the attitudes to various languages among societies.
A comprehensive approach on dialect variations in American English-speaking people.
Scrutinize linguistic variation on language loyalty.
Develop a good understanding of sociological variations to languages.
Impact of the generation gap on language usage.
Examine the impact of various factors (social tension, media, racism, and entertainment) on the utilization of languages.
Is there a difference between linguistic practices among men and women?

Also, Read: 150+ Business Research Topics

Interesting Research Topics in Applied Linguistics

Are you looking for linguistics research topics to advance your learning abilities? In such a case, you have to learn about “Applied Linguistics.” It is the branch of linguistics in which one can understand the practical applications of language studies such as speech therapy, language teaching, and more.

In other words, applied linguistics offers solutions to deal with language-related real-life problems. Imperative academic areas where you can find the applications of applied linguistics are psychology, education, sociology, communication research, and anthropology. Some applied linguistics research paper topics:

Discuss the expansion of learning a second language through reading.
Share your learning on the critical period hypothesis for the acquisition of the second language.
Impact of bilingualism on an individual’s personality.
Linguistics evaluation on the difference between written and spoken language.
Describe language cognition and perceptions in a learning process.
Impact of language barriers on healthcare delivery.
Detailed analysis on various methodologies to learn applied linguistics.
Discuss the relationship between empathy and language proficiency in learners of adult language.
Detailed analysis on multilingualism and multiculturalism.
Impact of extended instructions on the use of passive voices, modals, and relative clauses: A critical analysis.
Explain digitally-mediated collaborative writing for ESL students.
How do we evaluate self-efficacy in students who speak low-level English language?
Elucidate the significance of phrasal verbs in creating technical documents.
Expectations of American Students while taking Japanese language classes.
A detailed study on American deaf students in English as a Non-Native Language (ENNL) classes.
How do you understand by modeling music with Grammars?
The cognitive development of expertise as an ESL teacher: An insightful analysis.
Sound Effects: Gender, Age, and Sound symbolism in American English.
Importance of applied linguistics in today’s digital world.

Also, Read: Modern Literature

Interesting Research Topics in Semantics

The study of reference, meaning, and the truth is covered under semantics or semiotics, or semasiology. A comprehensive analysis of semantics reflects the essence of compositional semantics and lexical semantics. The combination of words and their interaction to form larger experiences like sentences comes under compositional semantics. Whereas, the notion of words is shared under lexical semantics.

Some academic disciplines in linguistic semantics are conceptual semantics, cognitive semantics, formal semantics, computational semantics, and more. Linguistic research paper topics on Semantics are as follows:

Examine meaning work in language interpretation and scrutinization
A critical evaluation of language acquisition and language use.
Challenges in the study of semantic and pragmatic theory.
Discuss semantics lessons and paragraph structure in written language.
How do you explain the semantic richness effects in the recognition of visual words?
How richness of semantics affects the processing of a language.
Semantic generation to action-related stimuli: A neuroanatomical evaluation of embodied cognition.
Examine the understanding of blind children for reading phonological and tactual coding in Braille.
Explain a semantic typology of gradable predicates.
A comparison of between blind and sighted children’s memory performance: the reverse-generation effect.
Clinical research for designing medical decision support systems.
Discuss word recognition processes in blind and sighted children.
A corpus-based study on argumentative indicators.
The typology of modality in modern West Iranian languages.
A critical analysis on changes in naming and semantic abilities in different age groups.
Explain the multidimensional semantics of evaluative adverbs.
A comprehensive analysis on procedural meaning: problems and perspectives.
Cross-cultural and cross-linguistic perspectives on figurative language.
Elucidate semantic and pragmatic problems in discourse and dialogue.

Topics For Linguistics Essays

A curiosity of exploring the various concepts in linguistics leads you to work on essays. Projecting your thoughts in writing linguistics essays makes you understand the structure and changes in human languages. In a case, if you are searching for the best topics in linguistics, go through the following list of linguistics essays:

Difference between human language and artificial language.
Classification of writing systems based on various stages of development.
The laws of language development
Culture and language: impact on reflections.
Methodology of reading and writing for children by Albert James.
Significance of phoneme and phonological matters
The complexity of human language: the specific cases of the apes
Explain the development of languages and derivational morphology.
Detailed analysis on language extinction.
Investigate the peculiarities of English-Chinese and Chinese-English translations.
A comprehensive overview on the acquisition of English as a second language by Mid-Eastern students.
Discuss semiology in language analysis.
Impact of blogging on learning languages.
Linguistics: grammar and language teaching.
English Language: Explain its standard and non-standard types.
Discuss speech community as linguistic anthropology.
A systematic review on linguistic diversity in modern culture.
Similarities and differences between language and logic.
What is the impact of language on digital communication?
Listening comprehension: a comparative analysis of the articles.

Computational Linguistics Research Topics

Analysis and synthesis of language and speech using the techniques of computer science share the significance of computational linguistics. This branch of linguistics reflects the study of computational modeling of natural language. It also describes the computational approaches to answering the linguistic questions.

Under computational linguistics, you can explore different concepts such as artificial intelligence, mathematics, computer science, cognitive science, neuroscience, anthropology. More interesting computational linguistics research topics are:

Explain the factors measuring the performance of speech recognition.
Discuss word sense disambiguation.
Detailed analysis on dependency parsing based on graphs and transitions.
A multidimensional analysis on linguistic dimensions
Analyze Medieval German poetry through supervised learning.
Extraction of Danish verbs.
Analysis of Schizophrenia text dataset.
An intra-lingual contrastive corpus analysis based on computational linguistics.
Discuss various methods to introduce, create, and conclude a text.

Still, Confused? Select The Compelling Linguistics Research Topics With Our Writers!

Are you still stressed about picking the right linguistics research paper topic? Without striking the right ideas to your mind, you find it hard to initiate your research work. But, don’t take tension anymore. Our professional and Ph.D. writers will help you to make the appropriate selection for linguistics assignments. Grab our online paper help and receive customized solutions for your research papers.

By Alex Brown

I'm an ambitious, seasoned, and versatile author. I am experienced in proposing, outlining, and writing engaging assignments. Developing contagious academic work is always my top priority. I have a keen eye for detail and diligence in producing exceptional academic writing work. I work hard daily to help students with their assignments and projects. Experimenting with creative writing styles while maintaining a solid and informative voice is what I enjoy the most.

Questions? Call us:

Email:

How it works
Testimonials

Essay Writing

Essay service
Essay writers
College essay service
Write my essay
Pay for essay
Essay topics

Term Paper Writing

Term paper service
Buy term papers
Term paper help
Term paper writers
College term papers
Write my term paper
Pay for term paper
Term paper topic

Research Paper Writing

Research paper service
Buy research paper
Research paper help
Research paper writers
College research papers
Write my research paper
Pay for research paper
Research paper topics

Dissertation Writing

Dissertation service
Buy dissertation
Dissertation help
Dissertation writers
College thesis
Write my dissertation
Pay for dissertation
Dissertation topics

Other Services

Custom writing services
Speech writing service
Movie review writing
Editing service
Assignment writing
Article writing service
Book report writing
Book review writing

Popular request:

100 best linguistic research topics.

November 26, 2020

Some learners struggle to choose linguistic research topics to research and write about. That’s because linguistics is interesting to learn about yet challenging to write papers and essays about. Some students stay up at night learning about phonetics, phonology, morphology, syntax, and semantics. Unfortunately, they still struggle to write quality papers and essays on linguistic topics in these areas. If looking for ideas to form the basis of your paper or essay, here is a list of research topics in linguistics to consider.

Linguistic Research Topics in Discourse Studies

Discourse studies provide fascinating details about individuals, culture, technology, movements, and changes that take place over time. If looking for linguistics topics that relate to discourse studies, here are some of the best ideas to consider. You can also check out our communication research topics .

Childhood is the time when speech is made or broken
Cultivation of politicians’ buzzword through linguistic analysis
How linguistic patterns are sued to locate migration paths
How computers affect modern language negatively
How text messaging has created a new linguistic subculture
How the brain works when it comes to learning a new language
How words change over time
How effective is non-verbal communication when it comes to displaying emotions?
How effective is verbal communication when it comes to displaying feelings?
How society alters words and their meanings
How the negative power of a word be reduced by neuro-linguistic programming for trauma victims
Is verbal communication more effective than non-verbal communication?
How individuals communicate without a shared language
How beneficial is learning more than one language during childhood?
Why should Elementary School teach students a second language?
Explain the acquisition of a language at different growth stages
How global leaders use language ethics to change the emotional views of the masses
Explain the power of a language in capitalizing on emotions
How technology alters the communication
How proper use of a language makes a person better in society

A learner should pick a linguistics topic in this category if it piques their interest. That’s because writing a great paper or essay requires a student to explore an idea that they are interested in. Essentially, a learner should research and write about something that they find enjoyable.

Interesting Linguistic Topics for Research

Some topics in linguistics are very interesting to research. These are ideas that most people in society will find enjoyable to read about. Here is a list of the most interesting linguistics topics that students can choose for their papers and essays.

Explain how sociolinguistics help people understand multi-lingual language choices
A study of differences and similarities of Post-Tudor English
How language encourages gender differences
Understanding socio-linguistics via color and race background in America
Vowel pronunciation in the UK- A systematic review
The role of music in language evolution
Explain the development and evolution of slangs
A study of the connection between perception and language
How language creates bonds among cross-cultural communities
Language review in informal and formal settings
How age affects English pronunciation
A phonological treatment based review for English-French load words
How sociolinguistics influence gender empowerment
How words can be used to master legal settings
How the media use sociolinguistics to gain a competitive edge and create bias
Exploratory analysis of the impact and importance of body language
Importance of sociolinguistics education in discipline development
How genders perceive politeness via language use
A study of social change through history via sociolinguistics
An evaluation of English evolution via a focus on different sociolinguistics

The vast majority of topics in this category touches on language and society. That’s why papers and essays about these linguistic research topics will most likely impress many readers.

Applied Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Applied linguistics focus on finding meaningful language solutions to real-world issues. Some of the best linguistic paper topics to consider in this category include the following.

The beauty idea and its expression verbally
A detailed evaluation of hate language
What are the key determinants of hate language propagation?
A literature-based review that explores eye-tracking technology and its implication for applied linguistics advancement
A detailed evaluation of research methods for applied linguistics
How relevant is the development of applied linguistics?
Discuss the impacts of the language used in social media on the current generation
An essay on the impact of using proper linguistic communication in social media
Are applied linguistics relevant in the current digitalized world?
How political oppression affect the linguistic used in the media
How important is applied linguistics vocationally?
The major differences between spoken and written language via linguistics evaluation
Is multilingualism a possibility that follows bilingualism?
What is the contribution of a language to national identity within a multicultural society?
How effective is healthcare delivery when there are language barriers?
Is the language barrier relevant in social media?
How bilingualism enriches the personality of an individual
Discuss language cognition and perceptions during the learning process
Discuss the learning mechanisms when it comes to a foreign language
Explain how a non-native teacher can teach local students the English language

These can also be great dissertation topics in linguistics. That’s because they require extensive research and analysis of facts to write brilliant papers. So, if struggling to find an idea for your dissertation, consider one of these thesis topics in applied linguistics.

Great Linguistics Essay Topics

Perhaps, you’re looking for a list of English linguistics research topics from which you can get ideal for your essay. In that case, consider these amazing research proposal topics in linguistics.

Discuss the new generative grammar concept
Analysis of pragmatics and semantics in two texts
Identity analysis in racist language
Do humans have a predisposition to learn a language?
English assessment as a second language
Endangered languages and language death causes
Attitudes towards a language and childhood language acquisition
Mixing modern language and code-switching
Linguistic turn and cognitive turn
What is computational linguistics?
Linguistic and cultural diversity as an educational issue
Differences between adults and childhood language learning
Factors that affect the ability to learn a language
A forensic assessment of linguistics
Lexical and grammatical changes
How important is a language?
What are the effects of language on human behavior?
English or indigenous languages?
Is language an essential element of human life?
Is language the primary communication medium?

These can be great topics for short essays. However, they can also be PhD thesis topics in linguistics where learners will have to conduct extensive and detailed research. The most important thing is to gather relevant and new information that will interest the readers.

Research Topics in Cognitive Linguistics

Students that want to explore questions in cognitive linguistics should consider topics in this category. Here are some of the most interesting topics in linguistics for research papers that also touch on cognition. If these ideas seem a bit complicated, use our writing services .

How grammatical phrasing affects compliance with prescriptions, prohibitions, or suggestions
Latest research findings into cognitive literacy in Indian English poetry
Conceptual metaphor: Does the activation of a single-source domain activates the multiple target concepts?
Multilingualism: Does L2 modulate L1/L2 organization in the brain?
Can task-based language teaching perception be measured?
Are there prominent cognitive-linguistic books for students?
What role does cognitive linguistics play in the acquisition of a second language?
Is word meaning a concept that is advocated for by some scholars?
Which linguistic experiments can be used to understand how the right and left hemispheres work?
Discuss the relationship between metaphors and similes

Computational Linguistics Research Topics

Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field that deals with rule-based or statistical modeling of the natural language from the computational perspectives. Here are some of the best topics for research in this field.

Using supervised learning to analyze Medieval German poetry
Which computer-assisted program is best for phonetic comparison of different dialects and why?
How and where can Danish verbs be extracted?
Can computational linguistic suggest an intra-lingual contrastive corpus analysis?
Where can the Schizophrenia text dataset be found?
Discuss the techniques used for meaning or semantic representation in the natural language processing
Describe performance measures for speech recognition
How to extract the introduction, development, and conclusion of a text
Discuss the addition of matrices in a dictionary in python
Explain the definition and characterization of linguistic dimensions in a multidimensional analysis

Students that are struggling to choose what to write about can pick any topic in this list that they find interesting, research, and write about it. Taking the time to research extensively and write quality papers or essays is what will earn learners their desired grades.

Take a break from writing.

Top academic experts are here for you.

How To Write An Autobiography Guideline And Useful Advice
182 Best Classification Essay Topics To Learn And Write About
How To Manage Stress In College: Top Practical Tips
How To Write A Narrative Essay: Definition, Tips, And A Step-by-Step Guide
How To Write Article Review Like Professional
Great Problem Solution Essay Topics
Creating Best Stanford Roommate Essay
Costco Essay – Best Writing Guide
How To Quote A Dialogue
Wonderful Expository Essay Topics
Research Paper Topics For 2020
Interesting Persuasive Essay Topics

Topics in Linguistics

Newest Articles
Most Downloaded
Volumes & Issues
Volumes & Issues

The semantic complexity of Hausa kinship terms

Austin in the lab: empirically reconsidering the constative-performative distinction, the morphological and syntactic functions of dagbani nominal suffixes, the adv speaking-construction in american english: a quantitative corpus-based investigation, the mental consideration of resilience as a relevant social concept (a corpus-based research of american english), the directorate-general for translation’s gender-neutral english guidelines (1998-2022).

Aim & Scope
Editorial Board
How to Submit

DOI: 10.1017/s0272263124000056
Corpus ID: 268763282

SLA volume 46 issue 1 Cover and Front matter

Jill Jegerski , Kevin McManus Pennsylvania , +5 authors Amanda Huensch
Published in Studies in Second Language… 1 March 2024
Linguistics

6 References

On the effects of task focus and processing level on the perception–production link in second-language speech learning, language proficiency modulates l2 orthographic learning mechanism: evidence from event-related brain potentials in overt naming, modeling effects of linguistic complexity on l2 processing effort: the case of eye movement in text reading, the congruency effect in l2 collocational processing: the underlying mechanism and moderating factors, how to present l2 chinese words effectively for learning: exploring learning outcomes and learner perceptions, related papers.

Showing 1 through 3 of 0 Related Papers

Robot face processing human talk and learning from it

Updated : 6 June 2024 Contributor : Jim Holdsworth

Natural language processing (NLP) is a subfield of computer science and artificial intelligence (AI) that uses machine learning to enable computers to understand and communicate with human language.

NLP enables computers and digital devices to recognize, understand and generate text and speech by combining computational linguistics—the rule-based modeling of human language—together with statistical modeling, machine learning (ML) and deep learning.

NLP research has enabled the era of generative AI, from the communication skills of large language models (LLMs) to the ability of image generation models to understand requests. NLP is already part of everyday life for many, powering search engines, prompting chatbots for customer service with spoken commands, voice-operated GPS systems and digital assistants on smartphones. NLP also plays a growing role in enterprise solutions that help streamline and automate business operations, increase employee productivity and simplify mission-critical business processes.

Use this model selection framework to choose the most appropriate model while balancing your performance requirements with cost, risks and deployment needs.

A natural language processing system can work rapidly and efficiently: after NLP models are properly trained, it can take on administrative tasks, freeing staff for more productive work. Benefits can include:

Faster insight discovery : Organizations can find hidden patterns, trends and relationships between different pieces of content. Text data retrieval supports deeper insights and analysis, enabling better-informed decision-making and surfacing new business ideas.

Greater budget savings : With the massive volume of unstructured text data available, NLP can be used to automate the gathering, processing and organization of information with less manual effort.

Quick access to corporate data : An enterprise can build a knowledge base of organizational information to be efficiently accessed with AI search. For sales representatives, NLP can help quickly return relevant information, to improve customer service and help close sales.

NLP models are not perfect and probably never will be, just as human speech is prone to error. Risks might include:

Biased training : As with any AI function, biased data used in training will skew the answers. The more diverse the users of an NLP function, the more significant this risk becomes, such as in government services, healthcare and HR interactions. Training datasets scraped from the web, for example, are prone to bias.

Misinterpretation : As in programming, there is a risk of garbage in, garbage out (GIGO). NLP solutions might become confused if spoken input is in an obscure dialect, mumbled, too full of slang, homonyms, incorrect grammar, idioms, fragments, mispronunciations, contractions or recorded with too much background noise.

New vocabulary: New words are continually being invented or imported. The conventions of grammar can evolve or be intentionally broken. In these cases, NLP can either make a best guess or admit it’s unsure—and either way, this creates a complication.

Tone of voice : When people speak, their verbal delivery or even body language can give an entirely different meaning than the words alone. Exaggeration for effect, stressing words for importance or sarcasm can be confused by NLP, making the semantic analysis more difficult and less reliable.

Human language is filled with many ambiguities that make it difficult for programmers to write software that accurately determines the intended meaning of text or voice data. Human language might take years for humans to learn—and many never stop learning. But then programmers must teach natural language-driven applications to recognize and understand irregularities so their applications can be accurate and useful.

NLP combines the power of computational linguistics together with machine learning algorithms and deep learning. Computational linguistics is a discipline of linguistics that uses data science to analyze language and speech. It includes two main types of analysis: syntactical analysis and semantical analysis. Syntactical analysis determines the meaning of a word, phrase or sentence by parsing the syntax of the words and applying preprogrammed rules of grammar. Semantical analysis uses the syntactic output to draw meaning from the words and interpret their meaning within the sentence structure.

The parsing of words can take one of two forms. Dependency parsing looks at the relationships between words, such as identifying nouns and verbs, while constituency parsing then builds a parse tree (or syntax tree): a rooted and ordered representation of the syntactic structure of the sentence or string of words. The resulting parse trees underly the functions of language translators and speech recognition. Ideally, this analysis makes the output—either text or speech—understandable to both NLP models and people.

Self-supervised learning (SSL) in particular is useful for supporting NLP because NLP requires large amounts of labeled data to train state-of-the-art artificial intelligence (AI) models . Because these labeled datasets require time-consuming annotation—a process involving manual labeling by humans—gathering sufficient data can be prohibitively difficult. Self-supervised approaches can be more time-effective and cost-effective, as they replace some or all manually labeled training data. Three different approaches to NLP include:

Rules-based NLP : The earliest NLP applications were simple if-then decision trees, requiring preprogrammed rules. They are only able to provide answers in response to specific prompts, such as the original version of Moviefone. Because there is no machine learning or AI capability in rules-based NLP, this function is highly limited and not scalable.

Statistical NLP : Developed later, statistical NLP automatically extracts, classifies and labels elements of text and voice data, and then assigns a statistical likelihood to each possible meaning of those elements. This relies on machine learning, enabling a sophisticated breakdown of linguistics such as part-of-speech tagging. Statistical NLP introduced the essential technique of mapping language elements—such as words and grammatical rules—to a vector representation so that language can be modeled by using mathematical (statistical) methods, including regression or Markov models. This informed early NLP developments such as spellcheckers and T9 texting (Text on 9 keys, to be used on Touch-Tone telephones).

Deep learning NLP : Recently, deep learning models have become the dominant mode of NLP, by using huge volumes of raw, unstructured data—both text and voice—to become ever more accurate. Deep learning can be viewed as a further evolution of statistical NLP, with the difference that it uses neural network models. There are several subcategories of models:

Sequence-to-Sequence (seq2seq) models : Based on recurrent neural networks (RNN) , they have mostly been used for machine translation by converting a phrase from one domain (such as the German language) into the phrase of another domain (such as English).
Transformer models : They use tokenization of language (the position of each token—words or subwords) and self-attention (capturing dependencies and relationships) to calculate the relation of different language parts to one another. Transformer models can be efficiently trained by using self-supervised learning on massive text databases. A landmark in transformer models was Google’s bidirectional encoder representations from transformers (BERT), which became and remains the basis of how Google’s search engine works.
Autoregressive models : This type of transformer model is trained specifically to predict the next word in a sequence, which represents a huge leap forward in the ability to generate text. Examples of autoregressive LLMs include GPT, Llama , Claude and the open-source Mistral.
Foundation models : Prebuilt and curated foundation models can speed the launching of an NLP effort and boost trust in its operation. For example, the IBM Granite™ foundation models are widely applicable across industries. They support NLP tasks including content generation and insight extraction. Additionally, they facilitate retrieval-augmented generation, a framework for improving the quality of response by linking the model to external sources of knowledge. The models also perform named entity recognition which involves identifying and extracting key information in a text.

For a deeper dive into the nuances between multiple technologies and their learning approaches, see “ AI versus. machine learning versus deep learning versus neural networks: What’s the difference? ”

Several NLP tasks typically help process human text and voice data in ways that help the computer make sense of what it’s ingesting. Some of these tasks include:

Linguistic tasks

Coreference resolution is the task of identifying if and when two words refer to the same entity. The most common example is determining the person or object to which a certain pronoun refers (such as, “she” = “Mary”). But it can also identify a metaphor or an idiom in the text (such as an instance in which “bear” isn’t an animal, but a large and hairy person).
Named entity recognition ( NER ) identifies words or phrases as useful entities. NER identifies “London” as a location or “Maria” as a person's name.
Part-of-speech tagging , also called grammatical tagging, is the process of determining which part of speech a word or piece of text is, based on its use and context. For example, part-of-speech identifies “make” as a verb in “I can make a paper plane,” and as a noun in “What make of car do you own?”
Word sense disambiguation is the selection of a word meaning for a word with multiple possible meanings. This uses a process of semantic analysis to examine the word in context. For example, word sense disambiguation helps distinguish the meaning of the verb “make” in “make the grade” (to achieve) versus “make a bet” (to place). Sorting out “I will be merry when I marry Mary” requires a sophisticated NLP system.

User-supporting tasks

Speech recognition , also known as speech-to-text , is the task of reliably converting voice data into text data. Speech recognition is part of any application that follows voice commands or answers spoken questions. What makes speech recognition especially challenging is the way people speak—quickly, running words together, with varying emphasis and intonation.
Natural language generation (NLG) might be described as the opposite of speech recognition or speech-to-text: NLG is the task of putting structured information into conversational human language. Without NLG, computers would have little chance of passing the Turing test , where a computer tries to mimic a human conversation. Conversational agents such as Amazon’s Alexa and Apple’s Siri are already doing this well and assisting customers in real time.
Natural language understanding (NLU) is a subset of NLP that focuses on analyzing the meaning behind sentences. NLU enables software to find similar meanings in different sentences or to process words that have different meanings.
Sentiment analysis attempts to extract subjective qualities —attitudes, emotions, sarcasm, confusion or suspicion—from text. This is often used for routing communications to the system or the person most likely to make the next response.

See the blog post “ NLP vs. NLU vs. NLG: the differences between three natural language processing concepts ” for a deeper look into how these concepts relate.

The all-new enterprise studio that brings together traditional machine learning along with new generative AI capabilities powered by foundation models.

Organizations can use NLP to process communications that include email, SMS, audio, video, newsfeeds and social media. NLP is the driving force behind AI in many modern real-world applications. Here are a few examples:

Customer assistance : Enterprises can deploy chatbots or virtual assistants to quickly respond to custom questions and requests. When questions become too difficult for the chatbot or virtual assistant, the NLP system moves the customer over to a human customer service agent. Virtual agents such as IBM watsonx™ Assistant , Apple’s Siri and Amazon’s Alexa use speech recognition to recognize patterns in voice commands and natural language generation to respond with appropriate actions or helpful comments. Chatbots respond to typed text entries. The best chatbots also learn to recognize contextual clues about human requests and use them to provide even better responses or options over time. The next enhancement for these applications is question answering, the ability to respond to questions—anticipated or not—with relevant and helpful answers in their own words. These automations help reduce costs, save agents from spending time on redundant queries and improve customer satisfaction. Not all chatbots are powered by AI, but state-of-the-art chatbots increasingly use conversational AI techniques, including NLP, to understand user questions and automate responses to them.
FAQ : Not everyone wants to read to discover an answer. Fortunately, NLP can enhance FAQs: When the user asks a question, the NLP function looks for the best match among the available answers and brings that to the user’s screen. Many customer questions are of the who/what/when/where variety, so this function can save staff from having to repeatedly answer the same routine questions.
Grammar correction : The rules of grammar can be applied within word processing or other programs, where the NLP function is trained to spot incorrect grammar and suggest corrected wordings.
Machine translation: Google Translate is an example of widely available NLP technology at work. Truly useful machine translation involves more than replacing words from one language with words of another. Effective translation accurately captures the meaning and tone of the input language and translates it to text with the same meaning and desired impact in the output language. Machine translation tools are becoming more accurate. One way to test a machine translation tool is to translate text from one language and then back to the original. An oft-cited, classic example: Translating “ The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak” from English to Russian and back again once yielded, “ The vodka is good, but the meat is rotten .” Recently, a closer result was “ The spirit desires, but the flesh is weak. ” Google translate can now take English to Russian to English and return the original, “ The spirit is willing, but the flesh is weak."
Redaction of personally identifiable information (PII) : NLP models can be trained to quickly locate personal information in documents that might identify individuals. Industries that handle large volumes of sensitive information—financial, healthcare, insurance and legal firms—can quickly create versions with the PII removed.
Sentiment analysis : After being trained on industry-specific or business-specific language, an NLP model can quickly scan incoming text for keywords and phrases to gauge a customer’s mood in real-time as positive, neutral or negative. The mood of the incoming communication can help determine how it will be handled. And the incoming communication doesn’t have to be live: NLP can also be used to analyze customer feedback or call center recordings. Another option is an NLP API that can enable after-the-fact text analytics. NLP can uncover actionable data insights from social media posts, responses or reviews to extract attitudes and emotions in response to products, promotions and events. Information companies can use sentiment analysis in product designs, advertising campaigns and more.
Spam detection: Many people might not think of spam detection as an NLP solution, but the best spam detection technologies use NLP’s text classification capabilities to scan emails for language indicating spam or phishing. These indicators can include overuse of financial terms, characteristic bad grammar, threatening language, inappropriate urgency or misspelled company names.
Text generation : NLP helps put the “generative” into generative AI. NLP enables computers to generate text or speech that is natural-sounding and realistic enough to be mistaken for human communication. The generated language might be used to create initial drafts of blogs, computer code, letters, memos or tweets. With an enterprise-grade system, the quality of generated language might be sufficient to be used in real time for autocomplete functions, chatbots or virtual assistants. Advancements in NLP are powering the reasoning engine behind generative AI systems, driving further opportunities. Microsoft® Copilot is an AI assistant designed to boost employee productivity and creativity across day-to-day tasks and is already at work in tools used every day.
Text summarization: Text summarization uses NLP techniques to digest huge volumes of digital text and create summaries and synopses for indexes, research databases, for busy readers who don't have time to read the full text. The best text summarization applications use semantic reasoning and natural language generation (NLG) to add useful context and conclusions to summaries.
Finance : In financial dealings, nanoseconds might make the difference between success and failure when accessing data, or making trades or deals. NLP can speed the mining of information from financial statements, annual and regulatory reports, news releases or even social media.
Healthcare : New medical insights and breakthroughs can arrive faster than many healthcare professionals can keep up. NLP and AI-based tools can help speed the analysis of health records and medical research papers, making better-informed medical decisions possible, or assisting in the detection or even prevention of medical conditions.
Insurance : NLP can analyze claims to look for patterns that can identify areas of concern and find inefficiencies in claims processing—leading to greater optimization of processing and employee efforts.
Legal : Almost any legal case might require reviewing mounds of paperwork, background information and legal precedent. NLP can help automate legal discovery, assisting in the organization of information, speeding review and helping ensure that all relevant details are captured for consideration.

Python and the Natural Language Toolkit (NLTK)

The Python programing language provides a wide range of tools and libraries for performing specific NLP tasks. Many of these NLP tools are in the Natural Language Toolkit , or NLTK, an open-source collection of libraries, programs and education resources for building NLP programs.

The NLTK includes libraries for many NLP tasks and subtasks, such as sentence parsing , word segmentation , stemming and lemmatization (methods of trimming words down to their roots), and tokenization (for breaking phrases, sentences, paragraphs and passages into tokens that help the computer better understand the text). It also includes libraries for implementing capabilities such as semantic reasoning: the ability to reach logical conclusions based on facts extracted from text. Using NLTK, organizations can see the product of part-of-speech tagging. Tagging words might not seem to be complicated, but since words can have different meanings depending on where they are used, the process is complicated.

Generative AI platforms

Organizations can infuse the power of NLP into their digital solutions by leveraging user-friendly generative AI platforms such as IBM Watson NLP Library for Embed , a containerized library designed to empower IBM partners with greater AI capabilities. Developers can access and integrate it into their apps in their environment of their choice to create enterprise-ready solutions with robust AI models, extensive language coverage and scalable container orchestration.

More options include IBM ® watsonx.ai™ AI studio , which enables multiple options to craft model configurations that support a range of NLP tasks including question answering, content generation and summarization, text classification and extraction. Integrations can also enable more NLP capabilities. For example, with watsonx and Hugging Face AI builders can use pretrained models to support a range of NLP tasks.

Accelerate the business value of artificial intelligence with a powerful and flexible portfolio of libraries, services and applications.

Infuse powerful natural language AI into commercial applications with a containerized library designed to empower IBM partners with greater flexibility.

Learn the fundamental concepts for AI and generative AI, including prompt engineering, large language models and the best open source projects.

Learn about different NLP use cases in this NLP explainer.

Visit the IBM Developer's website to access blogs, articles, newsletters and more. Become an IBM partner and infuse IBM Watson embeddable AI in your commercial solutions today. Use IBM Watson NLP Library for Embed in your solutions.

Watch IBM Data and AI GM, Rob Thomas as he hosts NLP experts and clients, showcasing how NLP technologies are optimizing businesses across industries.

Learn about the Natural Language Understanding API with example requests and links to additional resources.

IBM has launched a new open-source toolkit, PrimeQA, to spur progress in multilingual question-answering systems to make it easier for anyone to quickly find information on the web.

Train, validate, tune and deploy generative AI, foundation models and machine learning capabilities with IBM watsonx.ai, a next-generation enterprise studio for AI builders. Build AI applications in a fraction of the time with a fraction of the data.

We've detected unusual activity from your computer network

To continue, please click the box below to let us know you're not a robot.

Why did this happen?

Please make sure your browser supports JavaScript and cookies and that you are not blocking them from loading. For more information you can review our Terms of Service and Cookie Policy .

For inquiries related to this message please contact our support team and provide the reference ID below.

ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

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

School of Foreign Languages, Central China Normal University, Wuhan, China

1. Introduction

2. Literature review

1. 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?

2. What are the most frequently explored topics in HCPs?

3. What are the general research trends revealed from the HCPs?

3. Materials and methods

3.1. Data source

Table 1 . Retrieval strategies.

3.2. Data analysis

3.2.1. citation analysis.

Figure 1 . 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

Table 2 . Top 17 publication venues of HCPs.

4.2. Authors of HCPs

Table 3 . Authors with at least 2 HCPs.

4.3. Productive countries of HCPs

Table 4 . Top 18 countries with at least 3 HCPs.

4.4. Top 20 HCPs

Table 5 . Top 20 HCPs.

4.5. Most frequently explored topics of HCPs

Table 6 . Categorization of the most explored research topics.

5. Discussion and implications

Data availability statement

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 .

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

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

Aksnes, D. W. (2003). Characteristics of highly cited papers. Res. Eval. 12, 159–170. doi: 10.3152/147154403781776645

CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Anthony, L. (2022). AntConc (version 4.0.5) Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University. Available at: https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software (Accessed June 20, 2022).

Google Scholar

Archila, P. A., Molina, J., and Truscott de Mejía, A.-M. (2021). Fostering bilingual scientific writing through a systematic and purposeful code-switching pedagogical strategy. Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 24, 785–803. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2018.1516189

Blessinger, K., and Hrycaj, P. (2010). Highly cited articles in library and information science: an analysis of content and authorship trends. Libr. Inf. Sci. Res. 32, 156–162. doi: 10.1016/j.lisr.2009.12.007

Chen, H., and Ho, Y. S. (2015). Highly cited articles in biomass research: a bibliometric analysis. Renew. Sust. Energ. Rev. 49, 12–20. doi: 10.1016/j.rser.2015.04.060

Clark, S. (2017). Translanguaging in higher education: beyond monolingual ideologies. Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 22, 1048–1051. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2017.1322568

Dance, A. (2012). Authorship: Who’s on first? Nature 489, 591–593. doi: 10.1038/nj7417-591a

PubMed Abstract | CrossRef Full Text | Google Scholar

Danell, R. (2011). Can the quality of scientific work be predicted using information on the author’s track record? J. Am. Soc. Inf. Sci. Technol. 62, 50–60. doi: 10.1002/asi.21454

Darvin, R., and Norton, B. (2015). Identity and a model of Investment in Applied Linguistics. Annu. Rev. Appl. Linguist. 35, 36–56. doi: 10.1017/S0267190514000191

Dewaele, J.-M., and MacIntyre, P. D. (2016). “Foreign language enjoyment and foreign language classroom anxiety: the right and left feet of the language learner” in Positive psychology in SLA . eds. D. M. Peter, G. Tammy, and M. Sarah (Bristol, Blue Ridge Summit: Multilingual Matters), 215–236.

Gardner, R. (2010). Motivation and second language acquisition: The socio-educational model . New York: Peter Lang.

Gong, Y., Lyu, B., and Gao, X. (2018). Research on teaching Chinese as a second or foreign language in and outside mainland China: a bibliometric analysis. Asia Pac. Educ. Res. 27, 277–289. doi: 10.1007/s40299-018-0385-2

Hsu, Y., and Ho, Y. S. (2014). Highly cited articles in health care sciences and services field in science citation index Expanded. Methods Inf. Med. 53, 446–458. doi: 10.3414/ME14-01-0022

Lee, I. (2014). Publish or perish: the myth and reality of academic publishing. Lang. Teach. 47, 250–261. doi: 10.1017/S0261444811000504

Lei, L., and Liao, S. (2017). Publications in linguistics journals from mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Macau (2003–2012): a bibliometric analysis. J. Quant. Ling. 24, 54–64. doi: 10.1080/09296174.2016.1260274

Lei, L., and Liu, D. (2018). The research trends and contributions of System’s publications over the past four decades (1973–2017): a bibliometric analysis. System 80, 1–13. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2018.10.003

Lei, L., and Liu, D. (2019). Research trends in applied linguistics from 2005 to 2016: a bibliometric analysis and its implications. Appl. Linguis. 40, 540–561. doi: 10.1093/applin/amy003

Leivada, E., Westergaard, M., Duabeitia, J. A., and Rothman, J. (2020). On the phantom-like appearance of bilingualism effects on neurocognition: (how) should we proceed? Biling. Lang. Congn. 24, 197–210. doi: 10.1017/S1366728920000358

Li, W. (2011). Moment analysis and translanguaging space: discursive construction of identities by multilingual Chinese youth in Britain. Energy Fuel 43, 1222–1235. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2010.07.035

Li, W. (2018). Translanguaging as a practical theory of language. Appl. Linguis. 39, 9–30. doi: 10.1093/applin/amx039

Li, C. (2019). A positive psychology perspective on Chinese EFL students’ trait emotional intelligence, foreign language enjoyment and EFL learning achievement. J. Multiling. Multicult. Dev. 41, 246–263. doi: 10.1080/01434632.2019.1614187

Li, C. (2021). A control-value theory approach to boredom in English classes among university students in China. Mod. Lang. J. 105, 317–334. doi: 10.1111/modl.12693

Li, C., Dewaele, J. M., and Hu, Y. (2021). Foreign language learning boredom: conceptualization and measurement. Appl. Ling. Rev. doi: 10.1515/applirev-2020-0124

Li, C., Dewaele, J. M., and Jiang, G. (2019). The complex relationship between classroom emotions and EFL achievement in China. Appl. Ling. Rev. 11, 485–510. doi: 10.1515/applirev-2018-0043

Li, C., Jiang, G., and Jean-Marc, D. (2018). Understanding Chinese high school students’ foreign language enjoyment: validation of the Chinese version of the foreign language enjoyment scale. System 76, 183–196. doi: 10.1016/j.system.2018.06.004

Liao, S., and Lei, L. (2017). What we talk about when we talk about corpus: a bibliometric analysis of corpus-related research in linguistics (2000-2015). Glottometrics 38, 1–20.

Liao, H., Tang, M., Li, Z., and Lev, B. (2018). Bibliometric analysis for highly cited papers in operations research and management science from 2008 to 2017 based on essential science indicators. Omega 88, 223–236. doi: 10.1016/j.omega.2018.11.005

Luk, G., Sa, E. D., and Bialystok, E. (2011). Is there a relation between onset age of bilingualism and enhancement of cognitive control? Biling. Lang. Cogn. 14, 588–595. doi: 10.1017/S1366728911000010

Macaro, E., Curle, S., Pun, J., and Dearden, J. (2018). A systematic review of English medium instruction in higher education. Lang. Teach. 51, 36–76. doi: 10.1017/S0261444817000350

Macintyre, P., Gregersen, T., and Mercer, S. (2019). Setting an agenda for positive psychology in SLA: theory, practice, and research. Mod. Lang. J. 103, 262–274. doi: 10.1111/modl.12544

Mancebo, F. P., Sapena, A. F., Herrera, M. V., González, L., Toca, H., and Benavent, R. A. (2013). Scientific literature analysis of judo in web of science. Arch. Budo 9, 81–91. doi: 10.12659/AOB.883883

Marui, M., Bozikov, J., Katavi, V., Hren, D., Kljakovi-Gapi, M., and Marui, A. (2004). Authorship in a small medical journal: a study of contributorship statements by corresponding authors. Sci. Eng. Ethics 10, 493–502. doi: 10.1007/s11948-004-0007-7

May, S. (2014). The multilingual turn: Implications for SLA, TESOL and bilingual education . New York: Routledge.

Mondada, L. (2016). Challenges of multimodality: language and the body in social interaction. J. Socioling. 20, 336–366. doi: 10.1111/josl.1_12177

Mondada, L. (2018). Multiple temporalities of language and body in interaction: challenges for transcribing multimodality. Res. Lang. Soc. Interact. 51, 85–106. doi: 10.1080/08351813.2018.1413878

Mondada, L. (2019). Contemporary issues in conversation analysis: embodiment and materiality, multimodality and multisensoriality in social interaction. J. Pragmat. 145, 47–62. doi: 10.1016/j.pragma.2019.01.016

Naiman, N. (1978). The good language learner . Clevedon, UK: Multilingual Matters.

Newman, M. (2008). The first-mover advantage in scientific publication. Eplasty 86, 68001–68006. doi: 10.1209/0295-5075/86/68001

Newman, M. (2014). Prediction of highly cited papers. Eplasty 105:28002. doi: 10.1209/0295-5075/105/28002

Norton, B., and Toohey, K. (2011). Identity, language learning, and social change. Lang. Teach. 44, 412–446. doi: 10.1017/S0261444811000309

Ortega, L. (2019). SLA and the study of equitable multilingualism. Mod. Lang. J. 103, 23–38. doi: 10.1111/modl.12525

Ping, Z., Thijs, B., and Glnzel, W. (2009). Is China also becoming a giant in social sciences? Scientometrics 79, 593–621. doi: 10.1007/s11192-007-2068-x

Pritchard, A. (1969). Statistical bibliography or bibliometrics. J. Doc. 25, 348–349.

Ríos, L. J. C., Tamao, I. M., and Olmos, J. (2013). Bibliometric study (1922-2009) on rugby articles in research journals. South Afr. J. Res. Sport Phys. Educ. Rec. 17, 313–109. doi: 10.3176/tr.2013.3.06

Ruggeri, G., Orsi, L., and Corsi, S. (2019). A bibliometric analysis of the scientific literature on Fairtrade labelling. Int. IJC 43, 134–152. doi: 10.1111/ijcs.12492

Sabiote, C. R., and Rodríguez, J. A. (2015). Bibliometric study and methodological quality indicators of the journal porta Linguarum during six year period 2008-2013. Porta Ling. 24, 135–150. doi: 10.30827/Digibug.53866

Schissel, J. L., De Korne, H., and López-Gopar, M. E. (2018). Grappling with translanguaging for teaching and assessment in culturally and linguistically diverse contexts: teacher perspectives from Oaxaca, Mexico. Int. J. Biling. Educ. Biling. 24, 340–356. doi: 10.1080/13670050.2018.1463965

Shen, Q., and Gao, X. (2018). Multilingualism and policy making in greater China: ideological and implementational spaces. Lang. Policy 18, 1–16. doi: 10.1007/s10993-018-9473-7

Small, H. (2004). Why authors think their papers are highly cited. Scientometrics 60, 305–316. doi: 10.1023/B:SCIE.0000034376.55800.18

Smith, D. R. (2007). The New Zealand timber economy, 1840–1935. N. Z. Med. J. 120, U2871–U2313. doi: 10.1016/0305-7488(90)90044-C

van Doorslaer, L., and Gambier, Y. (2015). Measuring relationships in translation studies. On affiliations and keyword frequencies in the translation studies bibliography. Perspectives 23, 305–319. doi: 10.1080/0907676X.2015.1026360

van Oorschot, J. A. W. H., Hofman, E., and Halman, J. (2018). A bibliometric review of the innovation adoption literature. Technol. Forecast. Soc. Chang. 134, 1–21. doi: 10.1016/j.techfore.2018.04.032

Xie, Z., and Willett, P. (2013). The development of computer science research in the People’s republic of China 2000–2009: a bibliometric study. Inf. Dev. 29, 251–264. doi: 10.1177/0266666912458515

Yan, S., Zhang, H., and Wang, J. (2022). Trends and hot topics in radiology, nuclear medicine and medical imaging from 2011–2021: a bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers. Jpn. J. Radiol. 40, 847–856. doi: 10.1007/s11604-022-01268-z

Zhu, H., and Lei, L. (2021). A dependency-based machine learning approach to the identification of research topics: a case in COVID-19 studies. Lib. Hi Tech 40, 495–515. doi: 10.1108/LHT-01-2021-0051

Zhu, H., and Lei, L. (2022). The research trends of text classification studies (2000–2020): a bibliometric analysis. SAGE Open 12, 215824402210899–215824402210816. doi: 10.1177%2F21582440221089963

Keywords: bibliometric analysis, linguistics, highly cited papers, corpus analysis, research trends

Citation: Yan S and Zhang L (2023) Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: A bibliometric analysis of highly cited papers. Front. Psychol . 13:1052586. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2022.1052586

Received: 24 September 2022; Accepted: 23 December 2022; Published: 11 January 2023.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2023 Yan and Zhang. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Le Zhang, ✉ [email protected]

Disclaimer: 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.

US Surgeon General calls for warning labels on social media amid mental health 'emergency'

The U.S. Surgeon General called for social media companies to be required to use safety warning labels in a New York Times opinion essay published Monday.

Citing research that shows social media could be negatively impacting youth mental health , Dr. Vivek H. Murthy said a surgeon general's warning on social media platforms, similar to those on tobacco and alcohol products, could raise awareness for parents about the potential harm of the platforms.

"One of the worst things for a parent is to know your children are in danger yet be unable to do anything about it," Murthy wrote. "That is how parents tell me they feel when it comes to social media — helpless and alone in the face of toxic content and hidden harms."

NetChoice , a trade organization representing some social media companies, said in a statement shared with USA TODAY that the responsibility should be on the parents to protect their children's mental health, not the government or tech companies.

Research shows social media could come with benefit and harm

Murthy said social media is a major factor in the mental health crisis among young people, which he called "an emergency."

Social media has become nearly ubiquitous among youth. The 2023 U.S. Surgeon General's Advisory on Social Media and Youth Mental Health found that nearly 95% of youth aged 13 to 17 use a social media platform , with more than a third saying they use it "almost constantly."

The advisory concluded that more research is needed to fully understand the impacts of social media. But it showed there are some benefits and "ample indicators that social media can also have a profound risk of harm to the mental health and well-being of children and adolescents."

Potential benefits identified in the advisory were community, connection and self expression. It also stated that social media can support mental health of LGBTQ youth to help develop their identities. Additionally, seven out of 10 girls of color reported encountering identity-affirming content related to race on social media, the advisory stated.

Potential harms of using social media included greater risk of suffering from depression and anxiety. Some studies also showed greater risk of negative health outcomes for adolescents girls including disordered eating and poor sleep.

Murthy praises dairy recall, Boeing response as examples of swift action

In the NYT letter, Murthy pointed to the F.A.A.'s swift grounding of Boeing 737 MAX 9 planes after a door plug came off mid-flight earlier this year and widespread recalls of cheese products due to risk of listeria contamination .

"Why is it that we have failed to respond to the harms of social media when they are no less urgent or widespread than those posed by unsafe cars, planes or food?," Murthy wrote. "These harms are not a failure of willpower and parenting; they are the consequence of unleashing powerful technology without adequate safety measures, transparency or accountability."

Several state bills seeking to limit youth access to social media have been passed by legislatures but blocked in court. Those lawsuits were often brought by NetChoice.

NetChoice vice president and general counsel Carl Szabo said in a statement that the onus is on parents to protect their children from harm online.

"A warning label oversimplifies this issue, and it is a simplistic way to approach this that assumes that every child is the exact same. In reality, every child is different and struggles with their own challenges," Szabo said. "Parents and guardians are the most appropriately situated to handle these unique needs of their children—not the government or tech companies."

Suggestions or feedback?

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Machine learning
Social justice
Black holes
Classes and programs

Departments

Aeronautics and Astronautics
Brain and Cognitive Sciences
Architecture
Political Science
Mechanical Engineering

Centers, Labs, & Programs

Abdul Latif Jameel Poverty Action Lab (J-PAL)
Picower Institute for Learning and Memory
Lincoln Laboratory
School of Architecture + Planning
School of Engineering
School of Humanities, Arts, and Social Sciences
Sloan School of Management
School of Science
MIT Schwarzman College of Computing

A technique for more effective multipurpose robots

Press contact :, media download.

Four photos show, on top level, a simulation of a robot hand using a spatula, knife, hammer and wrench. The second row shows a real robot hand performing the tasks, and the bottom row shows a human hand performing the tasks.

*Terms of Use:

Images for download on the MIT News office website are made available to non-commercial entities, press and the general public under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial No Derivatives license . You may not alter the images provided, other than to crop them to size. A credit line must be used when reproducing images; if one is not provided below, credit the images to "MIT."

Previous image Next image

Let’s say you want to train a robot so it understands how to use tools and can then quickly learn to make repairs around your house with a hammer, wrench, and screwdriver. To do that, you would need an enormous amount of data demonstrating tool use.

Existing robotic datasets vary widely in modality — some include color images while others are composed of tactile imprints, for instance. Data could also be collected in different domains, like simulation or human demos. And each dataset may capture a unique task and environment.

It is difficult to efficiently incorporate data from so many sources in one machine-learning model, so many methods use just one type of data to train a robot. But robots trained this way, with a relatively small amount of task-specific data, are often unable to perform new tasks in unfamiliar environments.

In an effort to train better multipurpose robots, MIT researchers developed a technique to combine multiple sources of data across domains, modalities, and tasks using a type of generative AI known as diffusion models.

They train a separate diffusion model to learn a strategy, or policy, for completing one task using one specific dataset. Then they combine the policies learned by the diffusion models into a general policy that enables a robot to perform multiple tasks in various settings.

In simulations and real-world experiments, this training approach enabled a robot to perform multiple tool-use tasks and adapt to new tasks it did not see during training. The method, known as Policy Composition (PoCo), led to a 20 percent improvement in task performance when compared to baseline techniques.

“Addressing heterogeneity in robotic datasets is like a chicken-egg problem. If we want to use a lot of data to train general robot policies, then we first need deployable robots to get all this data. I think that leveraging all the heterogeneous data available, similar to what researchers have done with ChatGPT, is an important step for the robotics field,” says Lirui Wang, an electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) graduate student and lead author of a paper on PoCo .

Wang’s coauthors include Jialiang Zhao, a mechanical engineering graduate student; Yilun Du, an EECS graduate student; Edward Adelson, the John and Dorothy Wilson Professor of Vision Science in the Department of Brain and Cognitive Sciences and a member of the Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CSAIL); and senior author Russ Tedrake, the Toyota Professor of EECS, Aeronautics and Astronautics, and Mechanical Engineering, and a member of CSAIL. The research will be presented at the Robotics: Science and Systems Conference.

Combining disparate datasets

A robotic policy is a machine-learning model that takes inputs and uses them to perform an action. One way to think about a policy is as a strategy. In the case of a robotic arm, that strategy might be a trajectory, or a series of poses that move the arm so it picks up a hammer and uses it to pound a nail.

Datasets used to learn robotic policies are typically small and focused on one particular task and environment, like packing items into boxes in a warehouse.

“Every single robotic warehouse is generating terabytes of data, but it only belongs to that specific robot installation working on those packages. It is not ideal if you want to use all of these data to train a general machine,” Wang says.

The MIT researchers developed a technique that can take a series of smaller datasets, like those gathered from many robotic warehouses, learn separate policies from each one, and combine the policies in a way that enables a robot to generalize to many tasks.

They represent each policy using a type of generative AI model known as a diffusion model. Diffusion models, often used for image generation, learn to create new data samples that resemble samples in a training dataset by iteratively refining their output.

But rather than teaching a diffusion model to generate images, the researchers teach it to generate a trajectory for a robot. They do this by adding noise to the trajectories in a training dataset. The diffusion model gradually removes the noise and refines its output into a trajectory.

This technique, known as Diffusion Policy , was previously introduced by researchers at MIT, Columbia University, and the Toyota Research Institute. PoCo builds off this Diffusion Policy work.

The team trains each diffusion model with a different type of dataset, such as one with human video demonstrations and another gleaned from teleoperation of a robotic arm.

Then the researchers perform a weighted combination of the individual policies learned by all the diffusion models, iteratively refining the output so the combined policy satisfies the objectives of each individual policy.

Greater than the sum of its parts

“One of the benefits of this approach is that we can combine policies to get the best of both worlds. For instance, a policy trained on real-world data might be able to achieve more dexterity, while a policy trained on simulation might be able to achieve more generalization,” Wang says.

Because the policies are trained separately, one could mix and match diffusion policies to achieve better results for a certain task. A user could also add data in a new modality or domain by training an additional Diffusion Policy with that dataset, rather than starting the entire process from scratch.

The researchers tested PoCo in simulation and on real robotic arms that performed a variety of tools tasks, such as using a hammer to pound a nail and flipping an object with a spatula. PoCo led to a 20 percent improvement in task performance compared to baseline methods.

“The striking thing was that when we finished tuning and visualized it, we can clearly see that the composed trajectory looks much better than either one of them individually,” Wang says.

In the future, the researchers want to apply this technique to long-horizon tasks where a robot would pick up one tool, use it, then switch to another tool. They also want to incorporate larger robotics datasets to improve performance.

“We will need all three kinds of data to succeed for robotics: internet data, simulation data, and real robot data. How to combine them effectively will be the million-dollar question. PoCo is a solid step on the right track,” says Jim Fan, senior research scientist at NVIDIA and leader of the AI Agents Initiative, who was not involved with this work.

This research is funded, in part, by Amazon, the Singapore Defense Science and Technology Agency, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Toyota Research Institute.

Share this news article on:

Method rapidly verifies that a robot will avoid collisions

15 photos in a sequential 3x5 grid show two robotic arms working together to pick up an item.

A new optimization framework for robot motion planning

Top view of a demo showing 2 robot arms, manipulating a white bucket labeled “Mr. Bucket.”

AI helps robots manipulate objects with their whole bodies

Photo of a robotic arm holding a squeegee in preparation to wipe up a blob of pink liquid

Soft robots that grip with the right amount of force

Previous item Next item

More MIT News

The surface of Titan, containing lake-shaped crevices

Study: Titan’s lakes may be shaped by waves

Read full story →

Catherine D’Ignazio and book cover of “Counting Feminicide”

3 Questions: Catherine D’Ignazio on data science and a quest for justice

Four panels show a neuron glowing in red and yellow. The top left panel shows a neuron looing pretty sharp. Below that are zoomed in sections also looking detailed. On the right is a neuron that looks hazy. Below that are zoomed in sections that are also clouded.

Microscope system sharpens scientists’ view of neural circuit connections

Arvind, longtime MIT professor and prolific computer scientist, dies at 77

Four AI experts seated on a stage address an audience

MIT-Takeda Program wraps up with 16 publications, a patent, and nearly two dozen projects completed

Side-by-side portrait photos of David Autor and Daniel Rubinfeld

David Autor named the inaugural Daniel (1972) and Gail Rubinfeld Professor in Economics

More news on MIT News homepage →

Massachusetts Institute of Technology 77 Massachusetts Avenue, Cambridge, MA, USA

Map (opens in new window)
Events (opens in new window)
People (opens in new window)
Careers (opens in new window)
Accessibility
Social Media Hub
MIT on Facebook
MIT on YouTube
MIT on Instagram

SUGGESTED TOPICS
The Magazine
Newsletters
Managing Yourself
Managing Teams
Work-life Balance
The Big Idea
Data & Visuals
Reading Lists
Case Selections
HBR Learning
Topic Feeds
Account Settings
Email Preferences

Build a Corporate Culture That Works

There’s a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their culture in such a way that the words become an organizational reality that molds employee behavior as intended.

All too often a culture is described as a set of anodyne norms, principles, or values, which do not offer decision-makers guidance on how to make difficult choices when faced with conflicting but equally defensible courses of action.

The trick to making a desired culture come alive is to debate and articulate it using dilemmas. If you identify the tough dilemmas your employees routinely face and clearly state how they should be resolved—“In this company, when we come across this dilemma, we turn left”—then your desired culture will take root and influence the behavior of the team.

To develop a culture that works, follow six rules: Ground your culture in the dilemmas you are likely to confront, dilemma-test your values, communicate your values in colorful terms, hire people who fit, let culture drive strategy, and know when to pull back from a value statement.

Start by thinking about the dilemmas your people will face.

Idea in Brief

The problem.

There’s a widespread understanding that managing corporate culture is key to business success. Yet few companies articulate their corporate culture in such a way that the words become an organizational reality that molds employee behavior as intended.

What Usually Happens

How to fix it.

Follow six rules: Ground your culture in the dilemmas you are likely to confront, dilemma-test your values, communicate your values in colorful terms, hire people who fit, let culture drive strategy, and know when to pull back from a value.

At the beginning of my career, I worked for the health-care-software specialist HBOC. One day, a woman from human resources came into the cafeteria with a roll of tape and began sticking posters on the walls. They proclaimed in royal blue the company’s values: “Transparency, Respect, Integrity, Honesty.” The next day we received wallet-sized plastic cards with the same words and were asked to memorize them so that we could incorporate them into our actions. The following year, when management was indicted on 17 counts of conspiracy and fraud, we learned what the company’s values really were.

EM Erin Meyer is a professor at INSEAD, where she directs the executive education program Leading Across Borders and Cultures. She is the author of The Culture Map: Breaking Through the Invisible Boundaries of Global Business (PublicAffairs, 2014) and coauthor (with Reed Hastings) of No Rules Rules: Netflix and the Culture of Reinvention (Penguin, 2020). ErinMeyerINSEAD

Partner Center

COMMENTS

211 Interesting Research Topics in Linguistics For Your Thesis
Linguistics Research Paper Topics. If you want to study how language is applied and its importance in the world, you can consider these Linguistics topics for your research paper. They are: An analysis of romantic ideas and their expression amongst French people. An overview of the hate language in the course against religion.
PDF A Guide to Writing a Senior Thesis in Linguistics
A linguistics thesis is an original research project undertaken during your senior year at Harvard College . You will conduct research into past literature on your topic, con-duct analysis of relevant data (including designing and running an experiment, where relevant) and, eventually, produce a written final product of between 50-70 pages Your .
130+ Original Linguistics Research Topics: That Need To Know
Most students turn to the internet to find research paper topics. Sadly, most sources provide unoriginal and basic topics. For this reason, this article provides some creative sample research topics for English majors. Creative Language Research Topics. Linguistics is a fascinating subject with so many research topic options.
55 Top-Rated Research Topics in Linguistics For an A+
A critical evaluation of language and ethnicity. Analyzing language attrition among most English speakers. Distinct functions of language among different communities. Interesting Topics in ...
Language and linguistics
Drawing upon the philosophical theories of language—that the meaning and inference of a word is dependent on its use—we argue that the context in which use of the term patient occurs is ...
100+ Linguistic Topics
100+ Linguistic Topics for Excellent Research Papers. Linguistics is an English language category that deals with logical dialectal analysis and interpretation. It seeks to reveal the form, meaning, and context of language. While most college students may perceive linguistics as a simple subject, it is pretty complex.
Journal of Linguistics
The Journal of Linguistics is an open access journal that is concerned with all branches of theoretical linguistics. Preference is given to original Research Articles which present analyses or generalisations based on sound empirical work, which results in making a clear contribution to current debate in theoretical linguistics.Papers should be accessible to non-specialist linguists with an ...
Journal of English Linguistics: Sage Journals
The Journal of English Linguistics is your premier resource for original linguistic research based on data drawn from the English language, encompassing a broad theoretical and methodological scope. Highlighting theoretically and technologically innovative scholarship, the Journal provides in-depth research and analysis in a variety of areas, including history of English, English grammar ...
Applied Linguistics Research: Current Issues, Methods, and Trends
This chapter provides a broad contextualisation of the Handbook, locating its focus within current debates and concerns of relevance to the field of applied linguistics.The editors highlight the field's growing interest in research methodology and offer a rationale for the selection of topics and issues in the Handbook, such as methodological reform, transparency, transdisciplinarity, and ...
Essential Topics in Applied Linguistics and Multilingualism
The papers included in the collection offer state-of-the-art perspectives on a number of key issues in applied linguistics and multilingualism; Many of the contributions report on the findings of original research that enhance our knowledge concerning the acquisition of additional languages and the variables affecting this process
Research at MIT Linguistics
Explore the cutting-edge research papers by MIT Linguistics faculty and students on various topics of language and cognition.
Researching language and cognition in bilinguals
Topics like motion are then ideal testbeds for different theoretical and empirical approaches to research on language and cognition, including linguistic relativity research. This special issue then includes two papers about motion that illustrate this point: Filipović, and Nicoladis and Gao.
Research Topics in Applied Linguistics as Keywords from ...
As dynamicism is the only constant in scientific research (Yan 2014), the list of possible topics that can be investigated is limitless (Powner 2017).Over time, some topics are consistently well-studied within applied linguistics, for example, discourse analysis, reading comprehension, and self-efficacy (Lei and Liu 2018, 2019), while others slowly or rapidly appear (ELF, multilingualism) or ...
Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: A
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 ...
Key Topics in Applied Linguistics
About Key Topics in Applied Linguistics. Books in this series provide critical accounts of the most important topics in applied linguistics, conceptualised as an interdisciplinary field of research and practice dealing with practical problems of language and communication.
50+ Linguistics Research Topics For Papers And Projects
Linguistics Topics on Politics. Politics is an ever-present phenomenon in any society. These dissertation topics in linguistics examine the issues surrounding language in the field of politics. We have explained samples of Ph.D. thesis topics in linguistics in this field. The reality of hate speech in selected communities.
100+ Compelling Linguistics Research Topics for University ...
Interesting Topics in Linguistics. Linguistics is the foundation of language knowledge. Linguistics theories indeed are interrelated to learning the English language. When you have to boost your grades, your selection for linguistics research paper topics makes a huge difference. Some of the interesting linguistics research topics are:
Trends and hot topics in linguistics studies from 2011 to 2021: A
The retrieved topics can be grouped into five general categories: multilingual-related, language teaching, and learning related, psycho/pathological/cognitive linguistics-related, methods and ...
Top 100 Linguistic Research Topics for Students
Here is a list of the most interesting linguistics topics that students can choose for their papers and essays. Explain how sociolinguistics help people understand multi-lingual language choices. A study of differences and similarities of Post-Tudor English. How language encourages gender differences.
Topics in Linguistics
Topics in Linguistics is a double-blind, peer-reviewed international scientific journal issued twice a year by the Department of English and American Studies, the Faculty of Arts, at the Constantine the Philosopher University in Nitra. The journal aims to foster interdisciplinary, cross-linguistic and cross-cultural approaches to language research.
Research
Research - MIT Linguistics
45054 PDFs
Computational linguistics is an interdisciplinary field dealing with the statistical or rule-based modeling of natural language from a computational perspective. Questions (134) Publications ...
SLA volume 46 issue 1 Cover and Front matter
Linguistics Studies in Second Language Acquisition is a refereed journal of international scope devoted to the scientific discussion of acquisition of the use of non-native and heritage languages. Each volume contains five issues, one of which is devoted to a special topic in the field.
What Is NLP (Natural Language Processing)?
NLP enables computers and digital devices to recognize, understand and generate text and speech by combining computational linguistics—the rule-based modeling of human language—together with statistical modeling, machine learning (ML) and deep learning. NLP research has enabled the era of generative AI, from the communication skills of large language models (LLMs) to the ability of image ...
Bloomberg's AI Group Publishes 3 Research Papers at NAACL 2024
NAACL 2024 research papers highlight a variety of computational linguistics applications, novel approaches, and improved models used in key NLP tasks.
Frontiers
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 ...
Surgeon General calls for warning label on social media platforms
The U.S. Surgeon General called for social media companies to be required to use safety warning labels in a New York Times opinion essay published Monday.. Citing research that shows social media ...
Rethinking English essay scores: The argument for ...
Yasuda had them write a short essay on a given topic and looked at the relationship between the linguistic complexity of the texts and the writers' ability to present complex arguments, and how ...
A technique for more effective multipurpose robots
PoCo is a solid step on the right track," says Jim Fan, senior research scientist at NVIDIA and leader of the AI Agents Initiative, who was not involved with this work. This research is funded, in part, by Amazon, the Singapore Defense Science and Technology Agency, the U.S. National Science Foundation, and the Toyota Research Institute.
Build a Corporate Culture That Works
Read more on Organizational culture or related topics Organizational decision making, Managing employees, Hiring and recruitment, Decision making and problem solving, Management communication and ...

211 Research Topics in Linguistics To Get Top Grades

Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Sociolinguistic Research Topics

Language Research Topics

Linguistics Essay Topics

List of Research Topics in English Language

English Research Paper Topics for College Students

Finding Linguistics Hard To Write About?

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

130+ Original Linguistics Research Topics: Ideas To Focus On

Creative Language Research Topics

Leave a Reply Cancel reply

Language and linguistics articles from across Nature Portfolio

Analyzing “Jayu” in South Korean presidential rhetoric: a comprehensive study from 1948–2023 with a focus on the Yoon Suk Yeol administration

A gothic Taoism and its dual facets: possible worlds in The Haunted Monastery

Syntactic bootstrapping as a mechanism for language learning

Applying large language models for automated essay scoring for non-native Japanese

News and Comment

Language evolution in China

Time to revise the terminology we use to regulate water management practices

Is boredom a source of noise and/or a confound in behavioral science research?

Exploration of the social and philosophical underpinning of ‘the patient’—what this means for people with a long-term condition

Approaching the neuroscience of language

Neural evidence of word prediction

Quick links

100+ Linguistic Topics for Excellent Research Papers

Linguistics Research Paper: Definition, Explanation, Examples

Introduction

Methodology

Choosing A Good Linguistic Topic Isn’t Hard – Here’s How To Do It

Top 15 Brilliant Psycholinguistics Topics

15 Interesting Sociolinguistics Topic Ideas

15 Good Applied Linguistics Topics

15 Computational Linguistics Research Paper Topics

15 Engaging Comparative Linguistics Research Paper Topics

15 Interesting Historical Linguistics Topic Ideas

15 Compelling Stylistics Linguistics Research Paper Topics

Having Problems with Your Paper? Our Experts Are Available 24/7

Read the essay prompt carefully

Choose a topic

Conduct comprehensive research

Develop a thesis

Design an outline

Writing process

Thorough editing and proofreading

A life lesson in Romeo and Juliet taught by death

Ethical Research Paper Topics

Art Research Paper Topics

Research Topics in Applied Linguistics as Keywords from Authors and Keywords from Abstracts: A Bibliometric Study

Cite this chapter

Access this chapter

Similar content being viewed by others

On the scientometric value of full-text, beyond abstracts and titles: evidence from the business and economic literature

The Seeds of the NEH Algorithm: An Overview Using Bibliometric Analysis

Author information

Editor information

Rights and permissions

Copyright information

About this chapter

Download citation

Share this chapter

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

1. Introduction

2. Literature review

3. Materials and methods

3.1. Data source

3.2. Data analysis

3.2.2. Corpus analysis and manual checking

4.1. Main publication venues of HCPs

4.2. Authors of HCPs

4.3. Productive countries of HCPs

4.4. Top 20 HCPs

4.5. Most frequently explored topics of HCPs

5. Discussion and implications

Data availability statement

Conflict of interest

Publisher’s note

Supplementary material

Login Alert

Key Topics in Applied Linguistics