Translated esoteric texts that are originally written for a specific 'discourse community' (Swales 1990) in the source language are unlikely to attract readers from outside that community in the target language due to their specialised content and style. The present thesis is based on the hypothesis that adopting a different style in the translation of a non-literary text in the target language will increase its readability and accessibility among a wider readership. It attempts to measure the reader's response to style in a translated text and assess the ability of stylistic shifts to broaden its horizons in the host culture. To test this hypothesis, excerpts from Sent before my Time: a Child Psychotherapist's View of Life on a Neonatal Intensive Care Unit by Margaret Cohen (2003) have been translated into Arabic in two versions that are stylistically different. While the first version recreates the source text style, the second adopts a different approach that borrows stylistic features usually found in fiction and thus opens up the psychotherapeutic discourse implied in the source text. This study uses qualitative and quantitative methods. A total of 150 participants divided into two groups named Professionals and Laypeople took part in a reading experiment in which they were invited to register their response to two versions of the Arabic translation and choose which version they liked best. Surprisingly, the results show that not only the group of Laypeople responded more favourably to the second version but also the group of Professionals who were members of the discourse community addressed by the source text author. The implications of this study are potentially considerable. Stylistic shifts are capable of turning an esoteric text into an exoteric one and thus increasing its chances of being read by a wider readership in the target language.

Bucholtz "Herkules"-novel is an extensive, rambling work of 1920 quarto pages and barely readable nowadays. It was very popular for the first 130 years, however, and went through seven editions and adaptations. The present study tries to account for the work's initial popularity, but at the same time emphasises that "Herkules" has many features which make it strangely antiquated even for the century in which it was written. This study further attempts to show how "Herkules" is composed of many heterogeneous elements which had accumulated from antiquity onwards. It examines some of the principal components of these literary traditions apparent in the form, content and style of the work, demonstrating how they are exploited by the author for purposes of edification, entertainment and emotive effect("prodesse", "delectare" and "movere") and to what extent they are transmuted by the cultural, social and confessional background of the author's upbringing and profession. Chapter I reviews the judgements passed on "Herkules", from the clearly positive ones of contemporaries like Rist and Schottel down to the mainly negative ones of the principal modern historians of literature. It draws attention to several shortcomings inherent in such appraisals and suggests a re-examination of certain elements in "Herkules" which hark back to the literary traditions of previous ages. Chapter II proposes a re-appraisal of the work in another respect, vis: in the framework of the concept of literary art then obtaining, stressing in particular the artefact quality and the factors of edification, entertainment and emotive effect. Chapters III end IV examine the work's links with popular late-medieval and 16th century literature and with the late-Greek novel respectively. Chapter V seeks to explain the diversity of styles in "Herkules" by the 17th century modification of a three-style technique ultimately traceable to classical antiquity, and suggests a co-ordination with the "prodesse-delectare-movere" function and the Humanist-Protestant-burgher milieu factors.

This thesis is an interdisciplinary project formulated within a number of interrelated fields of study. At its broadest it represents a contribution to Latin American studies, but, within that, it has three main concerns: Spanish American women's writing, gender studies, and the intellectual debate on the relationship between gender and genre. Most specifically, it engages with the Bildungsroman, or development novel, whose widely recognised gender bias has generated scholarly interest in the theorisation of its 'female' version. My study of six contemporary Spanish American novels illuminates the presence of this contested genre in women's writing from across the region, thus contributing to its critical evaluation as a narrative mode both possible in a 'female' form, and highly pertinent to the feminist aims of the authors. In Chapter One, I extract from the Bildungsroman's original narrative trajectory a dialectic framework cons isting of the phases of 'thesis', 'antithesis' and 'synthesis'. This framework is then rearticulated in terms germane to my fields of study, in order to elucidate the texts' portrayals of the 'construction', 'deconstruction' and 'reconstruction' of gendered identities. The depiction of each of these developmental phases is investigated in the subsequent chapters by pairing novels and focusing on a different literary topos: in Chapter Two, 'myth', in Eva Luna (Isabel Allende, 1985) and Como agua para chocolate (Laura Esquivel, 1989); in Chapter Three, 'exile', in En breve carcel (Sylvia Molloy, 1981) and La nave de los locos (Cristina Peri Rossi, 1984); and, in Chapter Four, 'the female body', in Arrancame la vida (Angeles Mastretta, 1985) and La nada cotidiana (Zoe Valdes, 1995). Overall, this analytical framework allows me to argue that, read as a cross-corpus portrayal of gendered Bildung, these novels project a transition from passivity to social agency. As a consequence, this thesis serves to highlight the contribution made by these women writers to the understanding of gendered identity as a social construction that remains open ended.

This investigation examines two adaptations of Gryphius' Aemillus Paulus Papinianus for the German itinerant theatre in order to establish their relationship to Gryphius' tragedy, their relationship to each other, and also to assess whether or not they have some individual contribution to make to the contemporary German popular drama. It has proved possible to establish which is the earlier version and also to surmise or corroborate the authorship of each manuscript. A detailed analysis is made of the structure, plot, language and style of the adaptations, with particular attention being paid to the methods used to render the original literary drama acceptable to the wider kind of audience for which the itinerant theatre catered. Of the new features in the adaptations the introduction of the element of comedy proves to be the most significant and rewarding of investigation. Since one of the comic figures is a lawyer this new element provides a sharp contrast to the treatment of the theme of justice in the serious action of the adaptations and in Gryphius' original play. The principal deduction made from the investigation is that, although the adaptations are essentially in the pattern of other contemporary dramas of the itinerant theatre, they nevertheless have features which appear to be peculiar to themselves. The most important of these is the exceptionally extensive scope given the comic characters together with the subject matter of the comic interludes. These scenes, often in the form of pseudo-learned discourses, cover a variety of themes of topical interest, which are treated in a satirical fashion. The content and treatment of some of these interludes point to a connection between these adaptations , and other popular satirical literature; this indicates that further investigation of associations "between dramas of the itinerant theatre and contemporary popular literature would prove worthwhile.

Federico García Lorca (1898-1936), one of the greatest poets/playwrights of the 20th Century, is probably best known for the rural trilogy; Bodas de sangre (1933), Yerma (1934) and La casa de Bernarda Alba (1936). There are numerous (re)translations of these three plays and they are regularly performed in the UK. This project examines the English translation of Lorca’s metaphorical use of colour in these three plays focusing on ‘performability’ and ‘performativity’. Performability is a contentious term in the field of theatre translation but operational on a practical level, while performativity is a concept that still requires definition. Colour metaphor has been chosen for several reasons. Firstly, in the source text it is a cohesive device which also provides social commentary. Moreover, it is related to Lorca’s brand of theatre. It is thus an essential element of the dramatic effect of the original which needs to be addressed in translation. It is a way of ‘acting’ upon the receiver and is therefore related to performativity. Secondly, in the actual performance, colour plays an important part as a physical element of lighting, costume etc. I develop a model to carry out a comparative analysis of four published translations of each play (drama texts) and three performances (performance texts). My model is based on a predominantly pragmatic framework including Austin’s Speech-Act Theory (1962), Grice’s notion of implicature (1975), Sperber and Wilson’s Relevance Theory (1986, 1987), and Peirce’s semiotics (1940). I also use Lefevere’s (1982, 1984) notion of refraction to conceptualise translation as multiple versions of one source text. The findings reveal how performability and performativity are interrelated and how translators ‘act’ upon the text. I put forward the notion of ‘hearability’ as a key element.

This thesis investigates the syntax of the left periphery in two varieties of Arabic, Modern Standard Arabic and Tabuki Arabic. The thesis adopts the Split-CP hypothesis proposed by Rizzi (1997) and the minimalist theoretical framework proposed by Chomsky (2000; 2001; 2008; 2013). The thesis looks at the possible constituent orders in the two varieties of Arabic, and how they differ, and accounts for that variation order within a minimalist analysis. Within the core clause, an account is proposed for the agreement patterns and the case assignment between the subject and the verb in the two main orders VS and SV. Then Rizzi’s (1997) proposals for the CP-left periphery are examined here with data from Modern Standard Arabic and Tabuki Arabic, with regard to the positioning of two kinds of topic and focus. In embedded clauses, there are different lexical complementizers in the left peripheries of the two varieties of Arabic, and an account is given for their properties of assigning case or mood. Based on the feature valuations of the complementizers in Arabic, they interact with other left peripheral elements differently. Finally, the phenomenon of Complementizer Agreement in Modern Standard Arabic and Tabuki Arabic is analysed, as a kind of clitic agreement of Complementizer Agreement following the establishment of an Agree relation between the complementizers and the relevant following elements of clausal structure.

Speaker recognition technology is becoming more available to forensic speech analysts to help to arrive at conclusions around how likely the speech in multiple recordings was produced by the same speaker. However, there is not currently a suitable technological tool that could assist with speaker profiling tasks (i.e. tasks where we wish to deduce information about an unknown speaker). Accent recognition technology could play a role in speaker profiling tasks. This thesis therefore presents numerous automatic accent recognition experiments that have been motivated by forensic applications. This thesis conducts a detailed examination of one automatic accent recognition system in particular, the York ACCDIST-based automatic accent recognition system (the Y-ACCDIST system). It is trained to assign an accent label to a speaker's speech sample. Unlike other accent recognition system architectures, Y-ACCDIST takes a segmental approach by forming models of speakers' accents using representations of individual phonemes. Implementing a segmentation phase comes at a practical cost, but it is expected that Y-ACCDIST's segmental approach captures a more detailed reflection of a speaker's accent than other accent recognition systems. When classifying speech samples into one of four categories, Y-ACCDIST achieved a recognition rate of 86.7% correct, while the best-performing text-independent system obtained 47.5%. This thesis also shows Y-ACCDIST's performance on spontaneous speech data. On a three-way classification task on Northern English accents, we witness a recognition rate of 86.7% correct. Additionally, we achieved 63.1% correct when classifying recordings into one of seven non-native English categories. The latter task is also a demonstration of Y-ACCDIST's capabilities on telephone data.

This thesis investigates first languages (L1) influence on second language (L2) acquisition of long-distance wh-movement and related constraints governed by Universal Grammar. It thus seeks to integrate L2 syntactic knowledge into L2 knowledge at the syntax-semantics interface in order to find out more about the nature of L2 acquisition, thesis extends its body of research into L2 processing at the syntax-semantics interface. That being so, it allows us not only to explore an ultimate issue of whether L2 speakers have access to Universal Grammar but also to consider how grammar and meaning interact in real time. To this end, this thesis examines crossover phenomena in L2 English, by speakers of German and Korean. A series of experiments are employed in this research: an acceptability judgement task, a truth-value judgement task, and a self-paced reading task. Experiment 1 investigates whether L2 speakers have acquired syntactic knowledge of long-distance wh-movement in English. This experiment, in particular, examines whether L2 speakers are sensitive to locality conditions on wh-movement. Experiment 2 identifies whether semantic knowledge is facilitated by syntactic knowledge in L2 acquisition. Experiment 3–4 examine whether L2 speakers make use of syntax-semantics interface knowledge during online processing. The findings from Experiment 1–4 suggest that that L1 does not influence acquisition and processing of L2.

The Achterhoeks dialect, spoken in the eastern Dutch province of Gelderland near the German border, is a Low Saxon dialect that differs noticeably from Standard Dutch in all linguistic areas. Previous research has comprehensively covered the differences in lexicon (see, for example, Schaars, 1984; Van Prooije, 2011), but less has been done on the phonology in this area (the most notable exception being Kloeke, 1927). There has been research conducted on the changes observed in other Dutch dialects, such as Brabants (Hagen, 1987; Swanenberg, 2009) and Limburgs (Hinskens, 1992), but not so much in Achterhoeks, and whether the trends observed in other dialects are also occurring in the Achterhoek area. It is claimed that the regional Dutch dialects are slowly converging towards the standard variety (Wieling, Nerbonne & Baayen, 2011), and this study aims to not only fill some of the gaps in Achterhoeks dialectology, but also to test to what extent the vowels are converging on the standard. This research examines changes in six lexical sets from 1979 to 2015 in speakers’ conscious representation of dialect. This conscious representation was an important aspect of the study, as what it means to speak in dialect may differ from person to person, and so the salience of vowels can be measured based on the number of their occurrences in self-described dialectal speech. Through a perception task, this research also presents a view of the typical Achterhoeks speaker as seen by other Dutch speakers, in order to provide a sociolinguistic explanation for the initial descriptive account of any vowel change observed in dialectal speech. Subtle changes in the Achterhoeks vowels were observed, suggesting a lack of stability, but not yet at the stage of functional dialect loss. The most noticeable difference within the Achterhoek area occurs with the pronunciation of what we term the HUIS vowel when it appears after /r/, realised as either [u] or [y]. The lexical sets of PRAAT, KAART, and KAAS were presented in three groups: as front, Standard and back vowels, with pronunciation patterns attributed to post-Westphalian breaking processes, grammatical rules, and trajectories associated with the original West Germanic vowels. The accompanying perception study provided a partner to the main research, suggesting subconscious social information behind what it means to speak in dialect.

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