This thesis presents the design and evaluation of a new concordancer called The Prime Machine which has been developed as an English language learning and teaching tool. The software has been designed to provide learners with a multitude of examples from corpus texts and additional information about the contextual environment in which words and combinations of words tend to occur. The prevailing view of how language operates has been that grammar and lexis are separate systems and sentences can be constructed merely by choosing any syntactic structure and slotting in vocabulary. Over the last few decades, however, corpus linguistics has presented challenges to this view of language, drawing on evidence which can be found in the patterning of language choices in texts. Nevertheless, despite some reports of success from researchers in this area, only a limited number of teachers and learners of second language seem to make direct use of corpus software tools. The desire to develop a new corpus tool grew out of professional experience as an English language teacher and manager in China. This thesis begins by introducing some background information about the role of English in international higher education and the language learning context in China, and then goes on to describe the software architecture and the process by which corpus texts are transformed from their raw state into rows of data in a sophisticated database to be accessed by the concordancer. It then introduces innovations including several aspects of the search screen interface, the concordance line display and the use of collocation data. The software provides a rich learning platform for language learners to independently look up and compare similar words, different word forms, different collocations and the same words across two corpora. Underpinning the design is a view of language which draws on Michael Hoey's theory of Lexical Priming. The software is designed to make it possible to see tendencies of words and phrases which are not usually apparent in either dictionary examples or the output from other concordancing software. The design features are considered from a pedagogical perspective, focusing on English for Academic Purposes and including important software design principles from Computer Aided Language Learning. Through a small evaluation involving undergraduate students, the software has been shown to have great potential as a tool for the writing process. It is believed that The Prime Machine will be a very useful corpus tool which, while simple to operate, provides a wealth of information for English language teaching and self-tutoring.

The poetry of George Crabbe has for a long time not received the attention it deserves. Part of the reason for this is that it does not easily fit the preconceived trends in eighteenth and early nineteenth century verse. This thesis looks at Crabbe from a new direction, exploring his writing on its own terms. Using previously unexplored writing, the thesis builds a fuller picture of the poet’s interests in the world and examines how these informed the creation of his major achievement, the verse tale. The preface opens arguments for re-evaluating the critical reception. It considers the apparent twenty-two year gap in Crabbe’s writing career and argues that the activities of this period must be considered to fully understand the verse tales he produced in the latter period of his life. Chapter one examines the origins for the tale. Looking at Crabbe’s interest in redressing what he considered ‘failings’ in poetry it draws together examples of the poet’s original innovation. Using a hitherto unexamined poetic fragment in the John Murray Archive, a view is put forward that Crabbe had already begun writing tales during the twenty-two year gap, countering the opinion that the form was arrived at from experimentation in ‘The Parish Register’. Chapter two considers the largely overlooked impact that Crabbe’s faith had on his poetry. Examining a wide range of the poet’s unpublished religious manuscripts, it redresses the view that he entered the church simply to support himself writing poetry. It counters the opinion that these are simple ‘moral tales’, demonstrating a more complex view that Crabbe’s firm soteriological views did not allow such judgements to be made. Chapter three explores the poet’s naturalist endeavours and examines how his pursuits in scientific classification shaped the arrangement of his writing. It puts forward new evidence for the range of taxonomic systems the poet was using, and argues that the attention to specification had a significant impact on the poet’s realistic portrayals of the world. Chapter four draws together the arguments of these chapters in considering the poet’s representation of altered psychological states. It builds a detailed picture of key examples of realist narratives in Crabbe’s tales. In the conclusion, the impact of Crabbe’s writing is addressed. Looking at how his poetry influenced a wide range of writers in the nineteenth century and beyond, it argues that the poet’s refusal to simplify the complexities of the world set the foundations for Victorian realism.

This thesis examines the motif of terraforming from Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009) in order to assess the dialogical development of ecological themes and its imbrication with politics in science fictional narratives of terraforming. It tracks the growth of the theme in four distinct phases that are contextualised by a short history of terraforming in the introductory first chapter. Chapter two examines the appearance of proto-terraforming and proto-Gaian themes in British scientific romance and American pulp sf prior to Jack Williamson’s coining of the term “terraform” in 1942. Environmental philosophical concepts of nature’s otherness, Lee’s Asymmetry, Autonomy and No-Teleology Theses and notions of identification with nature are examined in this connection to illustrate the character of these texts’ engagement with environmental philosophy and ecopolitics. Chapter three examines the development of the terraforming theme in primarily American 1950s terraforming stories and explores how the use of elements of the American Pastoral are deployed within the discourse of sf to consider the various ways in which the political import of terraforming is imagined. Chapter four explores the impact of the environmental movement of the 1960s in terraforming stories of the 1960s-1970s. Beginning with a consideration of the use of Gaian images in characterisations of alien ecologies, this chapter then progresses to consider a parallel strand of terraforming stories that transform the themes of the 1950s texts in the light of the impact of the 1960s environmental movement. Chapter five concludes this analysis by considering two major trilogies of terraforming written in the 1980s-1990s, Pamela Sargent’s Venus and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogies. These works inherit the discourse of terraforming established by earlier works and re-configure them in ways that address contemporary environmental and geopolitical concerns.

The changing nature of English Language teaching in today’s world, driven by the forces of Globalisation, prompts a number of questions about the roles and identities of English language teachers. Previously acceptable dichotomies, notably ‘native/non-native speaker’ and ‘Centre/Periphery’ are consequently being challenged in studies of who teaches English, where they teach it and what they teach. I embarked on the current study because I felt that the ‘native/non-native’ dichotomy did not adequately describe the knowledge and skills of English teachers I had worked with worldwide. I developed a qualitative interpretative approach, as befitted the interpersonal nature of the study, and gathered data by recording conversations with fifteen participants from seven countries about their experiences of learning, using and teaching English in their contexts. The rich content they provided enabled me to delve below the oft-quoted dichotomies and uncover qualities rarely acknowledged in multilingual teachers. The most important features identified in the study concern the diminished importance of the ‘native speaker’ and the concomitant growth in the confidence of the multilingual teacher. My data reveals that this confidence has been acquired through depth of linguistic knowledge, through observance of other cultures, and through resistance to the encroachment of English by finding a place for the language which satisfies the needs of multilingual users without requiring subservience. In discovering these strengths of multilingual teachers, my exploration of their contexts demonstrates the importance of stepping outside the boundaries of one’s own limited environment and appreciating the range and depth of knowledge which individual English teachers are able to draw on to take ownership of their professionalism.

This thesis explores the text-compositional options that are available for the construction of university-style lectures. In doing so, it employs techniques developed by Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) to investigate how lectures are structured in terms of “genre” and the related issue of what is termed “hierarchy of periodicity”. It applies these techniques to the analysis of a small selection of university lectures to explore the ways in which, and the degree to which, these texts are structured as genres and the extent to which they are simultaneously structured by waves of foreshadowing and reiteration (or periodicity). As to the possible conclusions that might be reached from this type of analysis, this thesis will propose that the principles of “hierarchy of periodicity” and “genre complexes” are likely to be important options for structuring in university lectures, since all of the texts analyzed were found to be structured by such mechanisms. It will also proposes that lectures, although forms of speech, are structured in ways that are closer to forms of writing and that lectures as a set of texts can be categorized by the extent to which they display or do not display, the text-compositional arrangements of such (written) texts.

This study explores the relationship between the ‘sense’ of the prepositions over, into and through and the combined ‘form’ of their preceding and following nouns, using the hypothesis that the co-occurring nouns can predict different senses of the prepositions. It uses concepts drawn from both corpus linguistics and cognitive linguistics, in particular drawing on theories of phraseology formulated by Sinclair and others and on theories of preposition meaning formulated by Langacker and Tyler. 1,366 instances of the use of the prepositions from the Ice-GB corpus were examined. The results indicate a relationship between the senses of prepositions and their co-occurring nouns together with some features of their linguistic behaviour. Over, into and through have similar patterns when their trajector and landmark are combined. The thesis draws on statistical information regarding Human, Concrete object and Abstract object classifications to explore the distribution of sense of over. It uses equivalent information relating to into and through to reinforce and amend the semantic networks for these prepositions proposed by Lakoff and by Tylor and Evans.

This thesis uses corpus tools and methods to explore how the enunciations of White House spokespersons are intertextually informed by the enunciations (including their questions at White House press meetings) journalists under institutional constraints, by studying a corpus consisting of texts created by both spokespersons (transcripts of White House press conferences) and journalists (newspaper editorials/articles downloaded from New York Times online version). It sheds light on an important reason behind the lack of corpus studies in exploring intertextuality—there is no clear material connexion between corpus linguistics and intertextuality—based on the observation in the literature that intertextuality involves a mental process (e.g.: Kristeva 1980) while corpus linguistics is based on concrete language samples (e.g.: Sinclair 1991; Tognini- Bonelli 2001). It thus introduces the notion of intertext (a collection of text segments which refer to / indicate the same conceptual area(s)) as the material connection between the corpus approach and intertextuality and exemplifies how this notion and its features contribute to the exploration of intertextuality, by the analysis of two words used as prominent examples, namely, timetable and troops. It also highlights the claim for institutional talks that participants have different preferences in selecting the words they use (Heritage 1997), pointing out that participants within an institutional talk make their lexical choices under the impact of both institutional constraints and their interlocutors’ intertextual influence. Finally, it challenges the traditional idea of institutional interaction between spokespersons and journalists, showing that this interaction does not stop immediately when a press conference ends; rather, there are subsequent indirect interactions between them via newspaper articles/editorials.

Business case report writing is a common requirement on academic business programmes. In order to inform language-based pedagogical support, this thesis set out to explore the linguistic characteristics of these case reports and to evaluate different approaches to the teaching and learning of business case report writing. Analysis of a specially constructed case report corpus (125,000 words) consisting of 53 postgraduate NS and NNS business reports, combined with confirmatory analysis of BAWE\(^1\) corpus business case reports, identified common report features as impersonal style, high levels of explicit structure, low citation levels and business specialism-dependent lexis. Three obligatory rhetorical moves were identified (orientation, analysis, advisory) and five optional moves (methodology, options and alternatives, summary and consolidation, supplementary supporting information and reflection), moves being realized through diverse structural components with significant variability observed in optional move deployment and move realization dependent on a range of factors, in particular business specialism, suggesting the value of specialism-based pedagogy. Study of case report options and alternatives move structures identified multiple rhetorical components, exhibiting high degrees of cyclicity. Genre learning experiments demonstrated learning-approach dependent increases in move, modal verb and lexical deployment, with both directed and undirected approaches to genre model study supporting effective pedagogy. \(^1\) British Academic Written English corpus (2008)

A very great part of this essay is taken up with the discussion of questions about the ordinary meaning of various words and longer expressions. None the less, this is neither a piece of amateur psychology nor a criticism of uses of words in any literary aspect, but an authentic philosophical study. To give the investigation of meanings the amount of attention I have given is inevitable in any work written from the special philosophical point of view which this essay is intended to illustrate. In reaching this point of view I have been more influenced by the writings and teaching of professor G. E. Moore than by any other single agency.

In the contemporary globalized world, translation plays a key role in sharing news across the globe, in particular in the age of multimedia, where meaning is transferred through various modes and genres. This study focuses on two Arab Spring speeches of Mummar Algaddafi’s and Hosni Mubarak’s and their translations in different media. The thesis initially conducts a comparative study of the source texts (STs), including a textual/contextual analysis drawing on Norman Fairclough’s Critical Discourse Analysis, and on Gunther Kress’ multimodal analysis. This is followed by examining the target texts (TTs) to investigate the inventible changes that occur during the translation process, particularly if the translation involves not only a transfer of meaning from Arabic to English but also from mode to mode (such as, speaking to writing) and genre to genre (a political speech to a newspaper article). The thesis introduces the Multimodal Translation Analysis model to investigate the following aspects of the TTs: linguistic aspects of the TTs, the TT’s multimodal qualities, and, drawing on Mona Baker’s narrative theory, the role of dominant narratives in the shaping of the TT.