Research into modality has tended to focus on modal auxiliary verbs (modals) at the expense of other forms that may express modal meaning. This thesis takes a phraseological, exploratory approach to the investigation of modal meaning by focusing on modal expressions with verbs with wh-clause complementation (the V wh pattern). The approach first tests the hypothesis that the pattern is associated with markers of modal meaning and then goes on to conduct a concordance analysis of samples of frequently-occurring V wh verbs taken from the British National Corpus. This analysis first categorizes these verbs into semantic sets and then explores which realizations of different types of modal meaning – obligation, volition, potential, and uncertainty – are most often found with verbs in particular sets. The presentation of the results of this analysis also involves a discussion of how exponents of modal meaning other than modals extend the range of expression available to users of English, indicating what an exclusive focus on modals will tend to overlook.

This thesis is the first book length study dedicated to exploring D.H. Lawrence’s concept of blood-consciousness primarily alongside his fiction. Blood-consciousness will be identified as Lawrence’s individual philosophy of the unconscious which he developed throughout his life. Chapter One foregrounds what blood-consciousness is, and different aspects of this philosophy in order to establish the basis of the discussions that will follow in relation to Lawrence’s fiction. Chapter Two considers how Lawrence creates a new kind of character in The Rainbow through a blood-conscious flux which is likened to the theories of Henri Bergson. Chapter Three focuses upon the crisis of mental-consciousness in Women in Love, also incorporating the ideas of F.W.H. Myers. Chapter Four evaluates the portrayal of Mexican blood-consciousness in The Plumed Serpent. This involves identifying what the primitive means for Lawrence in a reading of Franz Fanon, and questioning to what extent blood-consciousness is a progressive term in the light of postcolonial studies. Chapter Five provides a reading of the blood-conscious marriage of ‘A Propos’ in correspondence with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Finally, the Conclusion evaluates the difficulties Lawrence faced in envisioning blood-consciousness and putting it into language.

This study relates corpus-driven discourse analysis to the concept of collaborative knowledge construction. It demonstrates that the traditional synchronic perspective of meaning in corpus linguistics needs to be complemented by a diachronic dimension. The fundamental assumption underlying this work is that knowledge is understood not within the traditional epistemological framework but from a radical social epistemological perspective, and that incremental knowledge about an object of the discourse corresponds to continual change of meaning of the lexical item that stands for it. This stance is based on the assumption of the discourse as a self-referential system that uses paraphrase as a key device to construct new knowledge. Knowledge is thus seen as the result of collaboration between the members of a discourse community. The thesis presents, in great detail, case studies of asynchronous computer-mediated communication that allow a comprehensive categorisation of a wide range of paraphrase types. It also investigates overt and covert signs of intertextuality linking a new paraphrase to previous contributions. The study then discusses ways in which these new insights concerning the process of collaborative knowledge construction can have an impact on teaching methodologies.

Recontextualisation involves repetition and change; it is central to police work. Officers routinely transform the words of the legal institution by explaining them to lay people and they routinely transform the words of lay people for institutional use. This thesis explores police officers’ transformations of written and spoken language in two situations. First, in explaining the rights of detainees in custody and secondly, in collecting witness’ spoken accounts during investigations. The forms and functions of recontextualisation in police work are illustrated through the analysis of naturally occurring data, ethnographic observations and qualitative interviews. The investigation shows that recontexutalisations in these legal contexts are characterised by personalisation, collaboration and appropriation. Through personalisation, officers and detainees make rights texts relevant to detainees’ decisions. Through collaboration, officers share practices amongst themselves and create new formulations with lay people. Finally, through personalisation, routine procedures become vehicles for wide-ranging interpersonal and experiential work. Both officers and detainees exhibit sophisticated metalinguistic awareness, reflecting on their own recontextualisation practices and other practices that they encounter. The thesis concludes that recontextualisation in the police station is not simply about transmission of information and that its many other levels of meaning might usefully be recognised.

A major challenge in second-language pedagogy and research is that of determining linguistic competence. Spontaneous oral production gives some indication of the state of a learner’s interlanguage, but the presence of non-target-like forms in such production confounds the analysis since the teacher or researcher cannot be certain whether such forms are random or systematic. Corrective feedback (CF) in oral production, usually in the form of recasts or elicitation, can thus appear arbitrary and inconsistent. This thesis investigates the effectiveness of delayed CF, in which representative samples of learners’ non-target-like production are systematically collected and tracked. The investigation employed three methods: first, accuracy and fluency in production were measured by means of a test in which learners reformulated their own non-target-like production and that of peers; second, accuracy and reaction time were measured as learners judged the well-formedness of those same reformulations; third, the developing complexity of learner production is monitored by means of an ‘error corpus’. Results indicate that delayed CF of this kind is effective in pushing learners towards greater complexity and accuracy in both production and recognition, and constitutes an approach to the problem of determining what the individual learner knows that has theoretical validity and pedagogical relevance.

This study ascertains what is recognisably distinctive about seventeenth-century Quaker prose compared to other contemporary varieties of prose, and identifies characteristic features of that style. By compiling and investigating through corpus analysis techniques a collection of texts from a wide range of authors, I reveal key elements of the language through quantitative methods not previously applied to this subject. The study is not genre-based nor is it a literary investigation of a single author. The corpus is unusual in comprising texts by many different people within the same community of practice, demonstrating a remarkable uniformity of style and discourse. Typical stylistic features include a speech-like informal register, idiosyncratic syntax and sentence length, and I suggest reasons why Quakers developed this sociolect. In key Quaker lexis I found unexpected frequencies and usage, including findings that differ from assertions in the critical literature. Corpus analysis provides new insights into early Quakerism as well as establishing a new mode of research. My findings clarify understanding of early Quaker writing, experience and practice, dispelling some present-day misconceptions.

This thesis surveys the gradual emergence and development of the English testament from the earliest surviving examples until 1499. The introductory section of this interdisciplinary study examines the religious and legal origins of the first vernacular dispositive acts, the oral roots of the testamentary process in the Anglo-Saxon period, and the development of the written will in the centuries before and after the Conquest, including detailed comparisons between early thirteenth-century texts from Worcester and Exeter. The second section begins by examining the processes of will-writing in later-medieval England in detail, analysing the essential linguistic components of the canonical testament before using two specific groups of wills from mid-fourteenth- and late-fifteenth-century London to explore nuances of composition and phrasing. Having established the context and structure of the developed form, a detailed comparative analysis of the testamentary language contrasts the phrasing of wills written in Latin and French with that used in the emerging English texts. The succeeding chapters focus on the testamentary archives of Bury St Edmunds and York, these case studies including examination of vernacular texts composed on behalf of women, trends in urban and rural usage, the effect of periods of high mortality on language choice, scribal methods, and the regional character of testamentary language.

Although there has been considerable research into Language Learning Strategies (LLS) in a variety of educational and cultural contexts, it is still the case that there have been few sociocultural LLS studies that have tried to understand learners’ approaches to learning and using a second language within a particular cultural context. In contrast to widespread LLS studies conducted within a cognitive psychology framework, this interpretive study has attempted to understand the dynamics of the shifts and developments in language learning strategies used by a group of Chinese Masters students in a UK University within a sociocultural theoretical framework. A qualitative approach was used in this research. Data was collected at three stages over a time span of one year of Chinese students' MA academic study in the UK. The first and second stage data collection involved interviews that explored the participants’ LLS use and how this changed and developed during their period of study abroad. The third stage data collection involved a questionnaire survey to validate whether the salient findings identified from the first and second stage interviews also applied to a wider group. Findings suggest the overall characteristics of the participants’ LLS use tend to be creative, flexible, voluntary and independent. The participants’ dynamic changing language learning strategies were shaped by interaction with various social mediating agents: peers, teachers and tutors and other native speakers, social material resources, technology and other artefacts, socio-contextual realities, assessment modes, and all in interaction with learner agency. The outcomes provide insightful and useful guidance to Chinese university students who are planning to pursue their higher education abroad in English-speaking education systems and offer suggestions to teachers and policy makers in China and the UK about the kinds of support that they can offer Chinese students, especially in terms of the development of their competence in their studies through English.

This is a practitioner-research study of the development of criticality in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts, via pedagogy for autonomy, exploratory practice (EP), and arts-enriched research methods. The study begins with an exploration of criticality with respect to the literature on Critical English for Academic Purposes (CEAP), critical pedagogy, critical thinking, and critical theory. The context for the empirical research was three short programmes/modules on academic English, involving 56 students in total, at two HE institutions in the UK and a partner university in China, over a total period of seven months. The aim of the research was to identify signs of criticality in what we did; and whether and how pedagogy for autonomy, EP, and arts-enriched research methods were conducive to criticality development. Data collected included my own diary; students’ reflective writing; reflective drawings/paintings; voice- and video-recorded group discussions and presentations; posters made in class; semi-structured interviews; and conversations. Themes emerging in each teaching phase/cycle are presented in three central chapters, followed by a cross-phase rearrangement which reveals three main overarching themes: being in charge; sociological and cultural awareness; and collaboration and others. These serve as the basis on which to identify signs of criticality and to discuss to what extent and how pedagogy for autonomy, EP and arts-informed research methods contributed to criticality development. The main signs of criticality included students’ enquiries into their own epistemic doubts; dialogue for understanding and joint enquiry; and developing awareness of the constructed nature of knowledge and socio-cultural discourses and practices, and of struggles in the performance of difference. The study contributes to understanding of the nature of criticality and how to develop it in EAP contexts; and of aspects of pedagogy for autonomy, EP and arts-enriched methods. The study shows the value to EAP of a broader understanding of criticality with contributions from CEAP, critical pedagogy, critical thinking and critical theory. The value of pedagogy for autonomy, EP and arts-enriched research methods in the development of criticality is also highlighted, and practitioner-research is shown to contribute insights that can illuminate other practitioners and the field more broadly.

This thesis investigates Free Indirect Discourse for speech presentations [FIS] in the work of Jane Austen, and presents the discovery that it is a substantial feature of her narrative style, unexpectedly versatile, performing various functions and effects, ranging from the basic to the sophisticated. Critics have often discussed the primary function of Free Indirect Discourse for both speech and thought presentations [FID] as a means of merging the voices of the narrator and a character. They have focused especially on Free Indirect Discourse for thought presentations [FIT] as an important vehicle for presenting the heroine’s subjective ideas within the narrative. A primary function of FIS identified by previous critics is, on the other hand, the narrator’s mimicry of a character’s speech, owing to the gap in the dual perspectives of the narrator and a character. I have made a strict distinction between FIS and FIT and conduct a full survey of Austen’s FIS with a stylistic approach, which demonstrates that Austen’s FIS is not limited to the basic functions formerly discussed. I propose that it serves at least eleven functions, both satirical and non-satirical. I have given names to these functions, for example, FIS for ‘Formal Politeness’, ‘Condensed Conversations’, ‘Voices in Harmony’ and ‘Filtering Information’. The narrator in Austen’s novels sometimes restrains her subjective view and exists as a transparent mediator to present a character’s speech, as in modernist novels. Austen uses these different functions of FIS in specific episodes to silently guide the reader’s interpretation. On a larger scale, Austen uses the embedded nature of FIS in contrast with FIT or Direct Thought in the foreground, which is similar to the painter’s technique of using ‘light and shade’ to create perspective. As a case study, I have analysed Austen’s technique of FIS for ‘Concealment of Plot Development’ in Emma. As part of my survey, I also revise the origin of Austen’s FID. Critics have presumed that Austen must have discovered FID in the work of immediate precursors, particularly Frances Burney. It is true that the writers of the late eighteenth century sporadically used FIT. However, in respect of FIS, I argue that its origin can be traced back to the early eighteenth century, and changes in punctuation marks for speech in English typesetting. Proto-FIS and FIS occasionally appear in the work of major writers of the eighteenth century, such as Samuel Richardson, Joseph Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Austen may have gained ideas about FIS from the limited usage in their works. However, while FIT became a feature of the fiction of some writers, such as Charlotte Smith and Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s, FIS was rarely used in this period. Austen excavated the proto-style and developed it with remarkable speed. Austen is not just the first writer who employed FIS in a substantial way, but a brilliant exponent of the technique.