This study explores the close relationship between language and culture. Nowadays, the issue of human communication is one of the most important subjects occupying the minds of linguists, anthropologists, psychologists, and philosophers. .Since it is the most important means for communication among human beings, the relation between language, culture, and their mutual interactions have high significance. The inextricable connection highlights various manifestations of conventionalized language including the idiomatic expressions as one of the important and pervasive language uses reflecting culture in real life. Like other types of figurative language, idioms appear to be the natural decoders of customs, cultural beliefs, social conventions, and norms. Idioms, as a major component of native-like communication, enable a language learner to understand the thoughts, emotions and views of the speakers of target language. For this reason, learning idioms provides learners with a significant chance to acquire information about the underlying parameters of a language. Awareness of figurative language particularly idioms will improve teaching and assist learners to have better communication strategies. Otherwise, accurate and appropriate target language use and understanding will be at risk and the learners will tend to transfer their native language conceptual structure which will most probably be inappropriate. The strong relationship among the language, culture, and the figurative branch of the language especially idioms need particular attention in language learning since it appears to have inadequate research. Therefore, a systematic knowledge of language and culture integration inside and beyond the classroom setting can be built up.

This study aims to make a comparison between research article abstracts written by two groups in the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) by Turkish scholars and non-Turkish scholars working in Anglophone countries to find the rhetorical structure they employ in their abstracts. To achieve this purpose, 390 research article abstracts, 195 abstracts from each group, were analyzed. To analyze the abstracts, Hyland's (2000) model with five moves was employed. In addition to the descriptive statistics, the Chi-Square test was used to find whether there are any statistical differences between two writer groups in terms of move use. Results showed that there are no statistically significant differences in terms of moves between the two groups. However, three moves (purpose, method, product) frequently occurred in Turkish writers' abstracts while foreign writers include four moves (purpose, method, product, conclusion) more commonly in their abstracts. These findings have some implications for researchers, particularly for developing teaching materials for academic writing courses that can guide scholars to successfully participate in the international discourse community.

Boosting, an authorial commitment, and hedging, a authorial mitigating, are two issues interconnected one another with a gaining importance in the last decades (for detail see Gillaerts & Velde, 2010). However, boosting has remained as an issue needing to be studied from different aspects; for instance, cross-linguistic, cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural or comparative while hedging gains a great deal of attention from researchers. The purpose of the present study is to investigate the corpora in terms of statistical inclusion of certainty markers in the research articles written in English by Turkish, Japanese and Anglophonic authors, and then to explain the results obtained through statistical tests in the sense of linguistic and cultural factors. A corpus of total 60 research articles written by 20 Anglophonic authors, 20 Japanese authors, and 20 Turkish authors of English constituted the data for the present study. The data were scanned by researchers of the present study. Having completed the scanning, the words functioning as boosters were categorized in line with the taxonomy created for the present study. Then, the total certainty markers for each group of scholars were calculated and analyzed through ANOVA test. The test results provided whether there were any statistically significant differences among the groups in terms of including boosters in the research papers. Furthermore, the present study formed a boosting list as a result of dictionary scanning, which may be a reference for further studies, and the most and the least used boosters of authors were gathered in the tables.

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Brain damaged participants offer an opportunity to evaluate the cognitive and linguistic processes and make assumptions about how the brain works. Cognitive linguists have been investigating the underlying mechanisms of idiom comprehension to unravel the ongoing debate on hemispheric specialization in figurative language comprehension. The aim of this study is to evaluate and compare the comprehension of idiomatic expressions in left brain damaged (LBD) aphasic, right brain damaged (RBD) and healthy control participants. Idiom comprehension in eleven LBD aphasic participants, ten RBD participants and eleven healthy control participants were assessed with three tasks: String to Picture Matching Task, Literal Sentence Comprehension Task and Oral Idiom Definition Task. The results of the tasks showed that in overall idiom comprehension category, the left brain-damaged aphasic participants interpret idioms more literally compared to right brain-damaged participants. What is more, there is a significant difference in opaque idiom comprehension implying that left brain-damaged aphasic participants perform worse compared to right brain-damaged participants. On the other hand, there is no statistically significant difference in scores of transparent idiom comprehension between the left brain-damaged aphasic and right brain-damaged participants. This result also contribute to the idea that while figurative processing system is damaged in LBD aphasics, the literal comprehension mechanism is spared to some extent. The results of this study support the view that idiom comprehension sites are mainly left lateralized. Furthermore, the results of this study are in consistence with the Giora's Graded Salience Hypothesis.