This study explores senior secondary school (SSS) students' imagined community and identities against the language ideologies of English portrayed in the discourse on education in Nigeria. There has been lots of research done in the areas of identity, imagined community and L2 teaching from different perspectives and contexts (Norton, 2000; Ilori, 2013, Sung, 2013). However, no studies have under a Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) angle, explored how learners' identities /imagined community are constructed and what resources or mechanisms (e.g. language ideological discourses of English) play a role in the construction of their identities/imagined community. The research draws on Fairclough‘s (2001) concept of social discourse, van Dijk‘s (2006) socio-cognitive approach to CDA and Norton's (2000) notion of imagined community, and is designed around a qualitative study involving open-ended questionnaires and official documents (e.g. language policy on education). This questionnaire which facilitated the interview process of participants (students, parents, teachers and principals) was digitally recorded, transcribed, coded and analysed thematically. Findings suggest that the English language, more than any other language is implicated in the process of imagination, as the choices students make about who they are and who they want to be are direct responses to how English is perceived in the local (social, political and educational) and global context. Therefore, examining the relationship that may exist between the ideologies that associates English with the resource of education, employment or status and students‘ imagined communities/identities may demand that neutrality should no longer be accepted as a concept when talking about imagination or identity. In this way, learners would no longer be viewed as social beings with multiple identities that emerge within specific learning trajectories (Norton, 2000), but as beings with deep-rooted ambiguities that must be represented in a reasonable and justifiable way.

This thesis presents innovative research which uses gender-ambiguous speech to investigate perceptions of speaker-indexical information. In a series of three perceptual experiments perceptions of speaker age, gender and social class are researched. In Experiment 1 listeners heard audio samples, on the basis of which they were asked to evaluate speaker age, gender and social class using a Visual Analogue Scale. Experiment 2 was performed in the interests of investigating how perceptions of the same speaker-indexical information as in Experiment 1 might be shifted when providing the listener with visual information about the supposed speaker. For example, upon seeing a young female face when hearing a phonetic variant, the listener might rate the variant differently from the answer s/he gave in response to the same stimulus in Experiment 1. In Experiment 3, a new social factor, ethnicity, was introduced. The aim of this experiment was to investigate perceptions of speaker-indexical information when listeners were exposed to visual cues to the ethnicity of the supposed speaker. As Experiment 2, Experiment 3 tested whether speaker-indexical information could be shifted as a result of the manipulation. Furthermore, this research offers a multivariate investigation of perception of speaker-indexical information based on Tyneside English. Perceptions of the variants of the FACE, GOAT and NURSE vowels, T-to-R and variants of /p t k/ are tested. Finally, the findings for groups of listeners with high and lower exposure to Tyneside English are compared and contrasted.

The Mutual Exclusivity (ME) assumption guides early lexical acquisition by biasing children to establish one-to-one relationships between word forms and their meanings. While it constitutes a useful strategy for word learning, ME is often suspended to allow for the acquisition of terms that overlap in reference. Furthermore, while extensive previous research has shown that children maintain ME by default, the developing ability to use it as a flexible assumption and its linguistic or cognitive nature remain debated. The present work introduces the social-cognitive framework to investigate the ontogeny of this strategy, its flexible use according to the context of each naming situation, and its relation to more general aspects of early linguistic, social, and cognitive development. A set of behavioural and preferential looking eye-tracking paradigms were constructed to assess the flexible use of ME in populations of 18-month-old infants, monolingual, sequential bilingual, and simultaneous bilingual three- to five-year-old children, and adults. The exclusivity paradigms tested participants' default use of the assumption, while the overlap paradigms tested their ability to suspend it to acquire referentially overlapping terms. In addition, children completed batteries of tasks of receptive vocabulary, social understanding, metalinguistic, and general cognitive development, which were analysed in relation to performance in the ME tasks.

The current work is a methodological investigation in the use of elicited data and Web data in the analysis of cultural specificities statting from semantic elements. After considering and discussing several theoretical and analytical approaches to culture in linguistics, anthropology, psychology, and marketing research, a specifically developed method of analysis and cross-cultural comparison is applied to elicited data on chocolate and wine, gathered through free sentence-completion and sentence-writing tests on English and Italian respondents. The results obtained are discussed within the framework of cultural systems theories and used as control reference for further methodological investigations. In palticular, the elicited data are qualitatively and quantitatively compared to non-elicited sentences on chocolate and wine from general Web corpora in English and Italian. Furthermore, in order to find an alternative route which could avoid the complex and time-consuming process of manually coding a large dataset, some alternative routes are tested, based on the creation of sub-corpora using sampling procedures and analysis of a limited number of the most frequent words in the dataset's wordlist. Finally, an automatic semantic tagger is tested on the elicited data, in order to assess the extent of its possible application in cultural analysis. Comparisons between the Web corpora and the elicited data suggest that large general Web corpora can be considered representative of the cultural associations of a node word and could thus be used in cultural analysis or in exploratory marketing research. Finally, in the light of the results of the various methodological tests, the work discusses general issues, such as the relationship between word frequency and cultural relevance, and tagset granularity.

This thesis examines the recontextualization and localization of global culinary discourse to Slovenia after its independence from Yugoslavia in 1991 and its transition into a free market economy. Slovenia and its emerging celebrity chefs, Luka and Valentina Novak, are an example of the' local', whereas the global is represented by the British celebrity chef Jamie Oliver. The study is based on culinary texts from Oliver and the Novaks' cookbooks. However, 'standard' Slovene cookbook texts are also analysed with the aim of showing the difference between the previous educational role of cookbooks and the contemporary, increasingly edutaining role of the new 'celebrity' cookbooks. This study is situated within critical discourse analysis and it generally draws on the methodological framework of the discourse-historical approach ('DHA') (Reisigl and Wodak 2001), but also combines this with theoretical insights from the dialecticrelational approach (Fairclough 2010, 1992, 2001 [1989]). Its underlying theoretical focus has been recontextualization, which is one of the salient concepts within 'CDA' (e.g. Wodak and Fairclough 2010; Chouliaraki . 1998). The model of recontextualization that I presented in this thesis (based on the definition of discourse in 'DHA') enables me to show how global culinary discourse has been recontextualised from Britain to Slovenia, via, firstly, a translation of Jamie Oliver's cookbooks, and secondly, via the production of an original local discourse. The main claim of this thesis is that under the influence of global culinary discourse, local representations related to food and taste change, and so do cookbooks as genres. Whiie recontextualization as translation results in appropriation of the text to the local circumstances in terms of genre conventions, branding opportunities, country-related representations (e.g. Italy) and the reconfirmation of the national identity, the second phase of recontextualisation reveals the characteristics of the locally produced discourse based on global characteristics. Compared to the 'standard' Slovene cookbooks, its 'celebrity' variant aims to reconstructs the national culinary identity via legitimation of the tastes ofthe new middle classes. Influenced by the global model, the Novaks' tend to represent food and foodstuffs relying on characteristics found in advertising while social actors are often synthetically personified (Fairclough 1989). Likewise, various perspectives construct a seemingly democratisized discourse and disperse the top-down authority as found in 'standard' cookbooks.

A demonstrative expression is a linguistic device for which, paradigmatically, an accompanying demonstration is required for the determination of content. It is through witnessing the demonstration that accompanies a stereotypical (i.e. deictic I) tokening of a sentence in which a demonstrative expression occurs that a listener discerns which object that demonstrative, on that occasion of use, is being used to talk about. The listener thereby grasps what was said (semantically; and often as a result, pragmatically) via the making of that utterance. Consequently, in the paradigmatic case to miss the demonstration accompanying the use of a demonstrative expression is to be left ignorant as to the referent of the expression on that occasion of use. To the extent that this is a correct categorisation of the paradigmatic case it is correct to say that a hearer will be unable to grasp fully what has been said via an utterance of a sentence containing a demonstrative unless that hearer has witnessed the accompanying demonstration, and thereby is aware which object is the demonstratum? Examples of such paradigmatic uses of demonstrative expreSSIOns are easy to construct. "That" in an utterance in the Louvre of "That is a beautiful painting" is one example (the accompanying pointing action needing to be witnessed in order to determine just which painting is being complimented). An accompanying demonstration is not always necessary, however. In some circumstances the context may do for the speaker or already have done that which the demonstrative act does in the paradigmatic case (viz. render one object in the conversational context relevantly salient). Kaplan's "Stop that man!" scenario is an example of this kind: .. . a demonstration may also be opportune and require no special action on the speaker's part, as when someone shouts "Stop that man" while only one man is rushing toward the door.

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Language teachers are often called upon by their students to provide examples of vocabulary usage in the classroom. Drawing on their experience of language, these teachers model lexical combinations and collocations, not only in their classes, but also in materials writing. However, corpus linguists have claimed that native speaker intuitions about the typical collocates of words are not reliable, because they do not align with the patterns observed in large corpora. These claims are critically evaluated, and an alternative explanation for the mismatch, the possibility that the corpora might not be representative of actual language in use, is also examined. Various linguistic and psycholinguistic explanations for the disparity between corpus data and elicited data are examined, and theories dealing with the mental representation of collocations are also discussed. Data from word frequency estimate research, and word association research are also analysed for relevant information on the subject. Five experiments are then reported, investigating the ability of native speakers (students and EFL teachers) and non- native speakers (Arab university teachers) to rank, recognize and spontaneously produce frequent adjective-noun collocations. The results indicate that a key factor affecting the 'quality' of lexical intuitions may be the employment of an 'availability heuristic' in judgements of frequency. It is argued that some collocates of words may be more hidden from memory searches than others, and that there may be a systematic bias in the respondants' lexical intuitions based on how words are stored in the mental lexicon. Conclusions are drawn that reflect the many facets of research relevant to the questions under discussion: corpus linguistics, frequency theory, word association research, learning theory and theories of lexical storage. The thesis ends in applying some of the key findings to language teachers.

This study contributes to research into the relationship between people's religious affiliations and their conversational use of language, by analysing spoken language of congregants from two ideologically different churches within the Church o f England. I interviewed twenty Evangelical Anglicans from Christ Church Cambridge and twenty Anglo-Catholics from Little Saint Mary's Cambridge, comprising equal numbers of male and female participants, about their opinions on three contemporary moral issues: styles of dress, smoking tobacco, and caring for the environment. Since these topics are not explicitly regulated by the Church of England, they might be labelled as "grey areas" of morality. The transcribed and digitised texts were analysed using corpus methods to provide key words and phrases, which served the basis of qualitative discussion. I have explored my respondents' use o f religious and secular registers, and I have weighed my findings against the existing knowledge about different types o f congregations. The original contribution to knowledge that this thesis proposes is threefold. Firstly, it demonstrates how religious affiliation can be reflected in the spoken language of grass-roots congregants, not only in conceptual content, but also at the stylistic and argumentational levels. Secondly, the findings presented in my thesis indicate how the typology of congregations proposed by Paul Heelas and Linda Woodhead can be associated with patterns of spoken language use. Thirdly, my thesis shows how ordinary contemporary Anglicans conceptualise these new "grey areas" of morality in spoken discourse.

In everyday environments, we often have to attend to one person’s speech (target speech) while ignoring another (competing speech). A competing talker can impair speech processing through both energetic masking (acoustic degradation at the periphery) and informational, cognitively-demanding aspects of the mask. We refer to the latter as informational interference. We hypothesized that informational interference depletes processing resources that could otherwise be allocated to recognizing and understanding target speech. Consequently, informational interference should be more pronounced when the task is more resource-demanding (more or less complex syntax) or when the participants’ own processing demands are elevated (non-native listeners). Finally, modulating the semantic content of the competing talker’s utterances should influence the degree of informational interference. Using a speeded picture-selection task, we assessed native and non-native listeners’ understanding of spoken sentences varying in syntactic complexity, played with a competing talker or a matched energetic mask, at various signal-to-noise ratios (SNRs). In a follow-up experiment, the semantic content of the competing talker sentences was manipulated to be congruent, incongruent or unrelated to the target sentence. Participants’ performance was measured with accuracy and reaction times from button presses, as well as eye-tracking. Selective attention, short-term and working memory were assessed to determine the contribution of these cognitive factors to informational interference. Although syntactic complexity affected participants’ performance, the competing talker was not more detrimental than the energetic mask controls, contrary to our hypothesis. This pattern was comparable for native and non-native listeners, and across SNRs. In the follow-up experiment there was no difference between semantically incongruent and neutral competing sentences, but semantically congruent sentences led to faster sentence processing, indicating facilitation or priming. This indicates that the content of the competing talker is not indiscriminately inhibited. Moreover, individual differences in memory and selective attention were not related to differences in the speeded-selection task, regardless of the mask. These results provide little support for the existence of a uniquely informational source of speech masking.