This volume has its origin in a selection of the papers presented at the "Second ELC International Postgraduate Conference on English Linguistics" (ELC2), held at the University of Vigo in October 2009 and designed and organised by postgraduate students belonging to the English Departments of the Universities of Vigo and Santiago de Compostela. The purpose of the conference was to allow young professional researchers to share and survey their current views on linguistic research. Four of the ten chapters included address the diachronic change undergone by particular lexical items, namely the morphosemantic change illustrated by the development of the morpheme "punk," the historical evolution of "including" and "included," the origin and semantics of the expletive form "adsheartlikins," and the structure and distribution of nominalisations referring to actions or processes. Variation is also approached from a diatopic perspective in the study of expressions of obligation and necessity ("must" and "have to") in New Englishes, the distribution and functions of the discourse marker "eh" in Channel Island English, and regional variability of vowel phonology in Scottish Standard English. Lastly, three studies address semantics and culture in the field of L2 learning. These contributions focus on the assessment of Lexical Frequency Profile applications in the analysis of Romanian learner English, the role of cultural knowledge in the learning process of English as an International Language, and L1 typicality effects in L2 vocabulary learning.