This thesis investigates oppositional stance-taking between multilingual couples through analysing discourse strategies from a sociocultural perspective. It is based on the naturally-occurring conversations of twenty-one Taiwanese participants and their foreign spouses, and aims at providing a better understanding of how different strategies are deployed to mitigate or intensify their propositions in disagreement contexts. Through a detailed interactional sociolinguistics analysis of the negotiation between the couples, it is demonstrated that disagreement cultivates the intimate relationship between participants from different languages and cultures. Discourse strategies, such as vocatives, the discourse marker well, apology and complaint can be used to indicate upcoming oppositions, whereas questioning, swearing, reference to nationality, humour, and indirectness are used to maintain the disagreement. I employ the theory of stance-taking as a framework to elucidate how numerous discourse strategies are related to disagreement. A sequential analysis of stances demonstrates that multilingual intercultural couples may choose different languages to index their identities, attitudes, and beliefs and highlight disagreement. Code-switching functions as one of the most readily available strategies that the couples draw on to express their affective and epistemic stances, which strengthens the salience of constructing and negotiating their oppositions during the interaction. It argues that disagreement strategies are highly idiosyncratic rather than culture-specific. The fact that multilingual couples’ disagreement commonly terminates without consensus supports the main argument that sustaining oppositional stances does not damage their relationship.

There is growing evidence that brain structure and cognitive performance can be moulded from various forms of experience. Bilingualism seems to form such an experience, with studies mainly showing a bilingual advantage over monolinguals in executive control of attention. This has been attributed to bilinguals’ lifelong practice in controlling two simultaneously active languages while using only one during communication. However, the problematic replicability of some of the main findings of relevant studies suggests that a confounding factor may have influenced their results. We suggest this could be the socioeconomic status (SES) of the participants, which has been inadequately controlled for in the majority of those studies, despite evidence on SES’s strong influences on the cognitive system. Also, research has largely neglected the possible effects of bilingualism in the other two main attention functions, alerting and orienting. Four experiments were designed to explore the bilingual effect in executive attention, alerting and orienting, in children, young and old adults, bilingual in Albanian and Greek or monolingual in Greek, all of low SES. Several cognitive tasks were used to detect the bilingual effect. An additional innovation of this investigation was the language-switching task we used as an index of bilingual proficiency, to compensate for the questionable reliability of self-report measures that have been used up to date for this purpose. This also enabled us to determine what level of bilingual experience is required to influence cognition and to explore possible commonalities between the mechanisms underlying bilingual language-switching and executive attentional control. Our results suggest that, when controlling for SES and when bilinguals are balanced, there is a bilingual effect in executive attention and alerting. However it is weaker than what has been suggested, as specific manipulations were required to detect it (i.e. individuals with age-related cognitive decline, under high working memory load).

This sociolinguistic and historical study aims to identify ideologies reflected in the official school songbooks (Monbushō-shōka: MS-S hereafter) of the Empire of Japan and to trace possible pedagogical and ideological shifts during 1881-1945. Through detailed qualitative and quantitative analyses of the texts, with and without context-based approaches, the study demonstrates the important role that socio-cultural contexts may have played in children’s coherent interpretation of the MS-S texts. The findings point to the possibility that ideological intensification through MS-S occurred through a synergy between the linguistic and thematic adaptation of the lyrics to suit the target audience, on the one hand, and the pedagogical policy of cross-curricular teaching that encouraged children’s association-based text comprehension of the MS-S, on the other. This study proposes an ‘assimilation-association model’ of ideological transfer and, using the framework of the Discourse-Historical Approach within Critical Discourse Analysis, demonstrates how the characteristics of MS-S texts in different historical periods of the Empire reflected the contemporary educational policies that in turn reflected the socio-political contexts of the given time. Over the course of development an increasing number of stories in MS-S were set in the everyday-life of children, while the amount of recurrent references to imperial and militaristic facts and symbols multiplied overtime, and most prominently, towards the end of the Empire, not by ostensive lexical mention, but mainly by indirect, semantic associations. Such associations were encouraged by pedagogical emphasis on children’s autonomous-spontaneous response to the learning-input through cross-curricular teaching. This, with constant kokutai (‘national polity’) indoctrination ideologies inferred from MS-S, intensified to produce kōkokumin (‘imperial subjects’) who were imbued with the spirit of chūkō (‘loyalty and filial piety’) towards the imperial homeland and were ready to be mobilised. This resultant wartime effect appears to mirror the pedagogical aim as described in the preface of Japan’s first MS-S published in 1881.

This thesis employs an interdisciplinary approach and draws on archival texts to investigate representations of Yorkshire speech in the writing of three twentieth century authors from coal-mining backgrounds. Dialect representation predominantly involves the respelling of words in order to invoke the sounds of speech. This representation of vernacular speech engages with the dominant conceptualisation of the relationship between standard orthography and speech enshrined in mainstream literacy education and promoted by ideologies concerning language standards. Dialect representation has traditionally been seen as an attempt to 'capture' vernacular speech in writing with scholarship from both linguistic and literary backgrounds focussing on the accuracy of the dialect represented. However, I argue that dialect representation should be approached not as an act of representation but rather as an act of social negotiation. In this study I reposition the representation of dialect in writing as a complex laminate of social practices. Drawing on practice-based approaches to language, orthography and literacy, as well as socio-linguistic research, I position dialect representation as a culturally determined evocation of vernacular speech undertaken by socially motivated authors. I explore literature in terms of the cultural legitimacy and prestige that this cultural sphere affords socially motivated individuals, as well as in terms of the inherent cultural norms, language standards and literacy ideologies that these individuals must engage with in order to participate in this sphere. My aim is to present dialect representation as a complex act, which has its root in commonplace social interaction, and to engage with it as an act of literacy which is 'embedded in [...] oral language and social interaction' (Barton 1994: 130-136). The collected works, ephemera and public responses to the works of Arthur Eaglestone (Roger Dataller), Tom Hague (Totley Tom) and Barry Hines are explored in three case studies which explore issues related to authenticity, legitimacy and inequality.

This thesis offers a text-worlds-approach to the study of linguistic identity in discursive interaction. It focuses on how settled Chinese migrants in Sheffield, who migrated predominantly from Hong Kong and the New Territories, construct their identities linguistically. To this extent, linguistic interview data is analysed with the use of the conceptual framework Text World Theory (e.g. Gavins 2007a; Werth 1999). As such, this thesis has three central aims: to extend the use of Text World Theory by applying it to spoken discourse; to examine the ways in which people linguistically represent themselves and talk about their life experiences; and to provide insight into the narratives of Chinese migrants and their families in Sheffield in particular. The linguistic data used in this thesis has been collected through 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork at a Chinese complementary school in Sheffield, UK. Based on the outcome of the analytical investigations of linguistic interview data, I aim to offer several original contributions. Firstly, I hope to provide a better understanding of migrant lives, by investigating the narrated experiences of Chinese migrants and their families. Secondly, I offer Text World Theory as a suitable framework for the study of linguistic identity. I extend the framework to the relatively unexplored domain of spoken discourse, synthesising a discursive approach to identity (e.g. Bucholtz and Hall 2005) with a Text World Theory approach (e.g. Gavins 2007a; Werth 1999). I demonstrate that Text World Theory can explain the complex and multi-layered nature of identity through the scope it provides for tracing linguistic self-representation across multiple worlds. Finally, I show that the framework is particularly adept at synthesising macro-level analysis of discursive interaction with detailed micro-level analysis of linguistic choices and their conceptual consequences.

Through an investigation of the realisation patterns of apologies in British English and Jordanian Arabic, this study presents an account of politeness phenomena in Jordanian culture as compared to British culture. A comparison is thus made between the British conceptualisation of the pragmatic notions of face and politeness and their Jordanian equivalents. In order to arrive at better understanding of how politeness operates in each of the cultures under study, it was decided to linguistically examine the act of apologising within the theoretical framework of Brown & Levinson's (1978,1987) model of politeness in which a distinction is made between two main constituents of face: negative face and positive face. The adoption of Brown & Levinson's theory of politeness also meets the need to study this particular speech act in connection with explanatory variables, such as social power, social distance, and the absolute ranking of imposition, which all provide more insights into how politeness is conceived of in the two cultures. The intercultural and intracultural analyses carried out in this study uncover the similarities and differences in the two cultures' linguistic behaviour, as exhibited in the performance of this act. The study argues that Brown & Levinson's claim for the universality of their theory, in which apologies and deference are viewed as being intrinsically negative politeness strategies, is not supported on the ground that Jordanian apologies are found to be positive politeness strategies. The study's main contribution to the field of politeness research is to reinforce the findings of previous researchers (Locher & Watts 2005; Spencer-Oatey 2005; Arundale 2006) who argue that Brown & Levinson's (1987) model of politeness can still be valid if politeness strategies they have proposed are viewed as possible realisations of relational work. The study also reaffirms the findings of Davies et al (2007) and Koutsantoni (2007) in which apologies are found to be of benefit for both the apologiser and the apologisee and likely to maintain "equity" between them. Seen in this way, apologies could be viewed as "relational" and "interactional" phenomena.

The virtual world Second Life (SL) offers its millions of users a fertile environment in which to socialise and engage in digital communication, immersed in a world where it seems like anything is possible and imagination is the only limit. To become an established resident of this virtual world is to acquire a virtual identity, which in turn requires an understanding and acquisition of phenomena such as how to dress, walk and talk. The acquisition of a SLidentity involves various linguistic acts. Users must familiarise themselves with the creative vocabulary of SL in order to reflect in-group identity. They must recognise the deictic field of the virtual environment and act accordingly through appropriate use of indexical and deictic expressions, to show awareness of the virtual surroundings. The final step towards becoming 'virtual' is recognising, acknowledging and fulfilling pragmatic acts in all of their complexity. These acts, such as those of an instructive nature, have different communicative intentions and short and long-term aims that contribute to the (co)construction of virtual identity. A SL corpus of approximately 200 thousand words and 24 hours of video data was gathered through systematic participant observation and ethnographic data collection methods. Wordsmith Tools(Scott, 2011) was used to examine the corpus observing frequencies, concordances and collocations of lexical items, leading to qualitative discussions of examples. Through the use of SLEnglish and SLArabic, reflecting in-group identity, the use of personal pronouns and place and time deictic expressions, indexing one's personal, spatial and temporal awareness in the virtual world, and through instruction and direction, a noob (Crystal, 2004) or novice can transform into a Resident (www.secondlife.com) or established user, and it is this transformation process and the linguistic (co)construction of a virtual identity that is the focus of this study.

This thesis focuses on how a group of linguistically and culturally diverse individuals in an employment preparation class for immigrants to Canada use communicative strategies and resources to build common ground, that is, how they use language to form a socially cohesive group that foregrounds shared knowledge, shared relational identity, in-group membership and shared attitudes and feelings. The thesis draws from a 12-week ethnographically informed study using participant observation with audio recording and semi-structured interviews as the main methods of data collection. It builds on the combined insights drawn from the well established discipline of interethnic communication and the relatively new but growing field of research on English as a lingua franca. While the former illuminates factors that make intercultural communication problematic, the latter sheds light on what makes it work despite cultural differences and linguistic limitations. In analysing the data, which consists primarily of transcriptions from audio recordings of spoken classroom interactions, the thesis draws analytic inspiration from scholarship situated in discourse analysis, interactional sociolinguistics and applied linguistics. It borrows concepts from the Communities of Practice framework to understand how individuals from highly diverse backgrounds develop shared ways of talking/behaving and negotiate interactional norms. The thesis contributes to academic knowledge in several ways. It challenges common assumptions about iscommunication in intercultural contexts. It shows miscommunication episodes as potentially productive sites for negotiating meaning and restructuring social relations. It argues that the notion of ‘national’ culture, which has fallen into disfavour amongst scholars, should not simply be dismissed because ananalysis of the data collected suggests that it can serve as a multifaceted interactional resource for speakers alongside other identity categories. An important contribution of this thesis to the field of intercultural communication lies in its careful attention to what participants actually do in interaction over an extended period of time rather than starting from any a priori assumptions.

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This research investigates the dynamics of interaction between multilingual ideologies and practices of the Uyghurs and China’s language policies pertaining to Uyghur, Mandarin Chinese and English languages, situating it within the social and historical contexts of Xinjiang. Focus of the research is on the predicament of Uyghurs as social agents as they engage in linguistic practices in a rapidly changing linguistic landscape. Primary objectives of the research are to uncover the ways in which: a) the language ideologies and practices of the Uyghurs are discursively shaped; b) the dynamic interaction between the state language policies and the Uyghur language ideologies and practices; c) the effect that language has on the social relations of symbolic and material power in the wider society. The research adopts a mixed methods approach, integrating ethnographic qualitative case studies with online ethnography, documentary analysis and quantitative questionnaire research, in order to gain a more balanced view. The qualitative data is analysed using the poststructuralist theoretical framework of language, identity and power, drawing on the works of Pierre Bourdieu, Judith Butler and Michel Foucault, as well as poststructuralist theories of second language learning and identity. The analysis of qualitative data is supported by quantitative analysis of the questionnaire data. The research concludes that Uyghur language ideology and practices are socially and historically embedded and discursively constructed in social interaction and shape the ways in which Uyghurs experience and make sense of the world. The changes in state language policies in recent years promoting Mandarin Chinese oracy and literacy among the Uyghurs have negatively impacted on the symbolic and material value of Uyghur language in public domain and widened the imbalance of power. Meanwhile, the promotion of English and rise of its material and symbolic value in Chinese society has made strong impact on the Uyghur youth and provided them with an opportunity to shift the balance of symbolic relations of power in their favour.