This thesis discusses positive and negative polarity questions and their answers in Taiwanese. Different types of questions and their answers are scrutinized, which include intonation questions, sentence final particle questions, sentence internal particle questions, disjunctive questions, and [A-not-A] questions. Chapter 1 introduces the aims and background of the study and the outline of thesis. Chapter 2 provides essential background information and theoretical assumptions, concerning, among other things, the semantics of questions, and asymmetries between affirmative and negative questions and answers, and terminology used in the thesis. Chapter 3 is a review of recent work on questions and answers, particularly Holmberg (2013a, b, 2016) on the distinction between polarity-based and truth-based answering systems and the syntax of English questions and answers. It is demonstrated how the syntactic structure of the answer is determined by the syntactic structure of the question, and how the position of negation in the question affects the form and meaning of the answer. This hypothesis is tested on Taiwanese in subsequent chapters. Chapters 4 to chapter 9 are focused on Taiwanese yes-no questions and their answers; the issues of negation, and modality are also discussed. Yes-no questions can be divided into two categories: presumptive and non-presumptive questions. Presumptive questions, which include intonation questions and sentence final particle questions will be discussed in chapter 5. Chapter 6 discusses tag questions and chapter 7 neutral questions. Chapter 8 examines disjunctive questions and chapter 9 A-not-A questions. These chapters demonstrate that Taiwanese has very consistent answering patterns. Predicate head answers, which are the answers consisting of just the head of the predicate of the question in positive or negative form, can be used to answer yes-no questions as well as disjunctive questions. The answer particles si a ‘yes’, m-si ‘no’, and the judgment verb/particle tioh a can be used to answer yes-no questions but not disjunctive questions. The judgement verb tioh a ‘correct’ can only be used to answer presumptive yes-no questions. It is shown that, unlike English, the position of the negation in the question does not affect the form and meaning of the answer in Taiwanese. Chapter 10 is a brief description of the question and answer patterns in Mandarin Chinese, focusing on questions with a final question particle ma. It is shown that the position iv of the negation in the question does affect the form and meaning of the answer in Mandarin Chinese, like English and unlike Taiwanese. In other respects, the answering system is the same in Mandarin and Taiwanese. Chapter 11 concludes. The importance of the study is to provide an explicit description of answering patterns used in response to all types of yes-no questions, disjunction questions, and [A-not-A] questions in Taiwanese, in a comparative perspective. The Taiwanese answer particles are shown to differ from their English counterparts, and in part their Mandarin counterparts, in the following way: The English answer particle no can disagree with a positive statement or positively biased question, and agree with a negative statement or negatively biased question. The Taiwanese answer particle m-si can only disagree with a positive, or a negative statement, or biased question. Correspondingly, the Taiwanese positive answer particles si a and tioh a can only agree with a positive or a negative statement or biased question. The relation between the different forms/uses of si is discussed: as a copula, a focus marker, and with the discourse marker a, as a positive answer particle. An explanation is provided why the negative answer particle m-si in Taiwanese always needs to co-occur with a full sentence. The explanation is based on an analysis of particle answers, even when consisting of a single word like si or yes, as derived from a full sentential source by ellipsis.

This research investigates children’s semantic and pragmatic competence using the logical quantifiers ‘most’ and ‘some’, and the operators ‘or’ and ‘and’ in English and Arabic. It includes two main studies, with a sample of 30 Arabic-bidialectal, 26 English-monolingual, and 30 Arabic-and-English-bilingual pre-schoolers (mean age 5;6). Study 1 explored the relationship between children’s semantic comprehension of quantifiers and their numeracy skills, and asked two questions: a) do children comprehend quantifiers in semantically appropriate ways, and b) to what extent does acquisition of numerical system affect acquisition of quantifiers? The study applied two semantic tasks (perception v. production) and four numerical tasks (how-many, give-a-number, non-verbal ordinal, and estimating-magnitude-numerically). Most children showed very good numeracy skills; all performed better on the production than on the perception task, and Arabic children had significantly lower quantifier comprehension than the other groups. Ability on the give-a-number task (measuring ability to produce sets representing numerical values) had a significant effect on comprehension of ‘some’. Study 2 explored the relationship between pragmatic competence and bilingualism, with a focus on scalar implicature. It asked whether any superior pragmatic competence in bilinguals is due to a cognitive advantage over monolinguals. It applied two ternary-response judgment tasks to assess pragmatic ability in two conditions (enriched context v. no context), and two cognitive tasks: an inhibitory control task and a short-term memory task. A bilingual advantage was found only on pragmatic, not cognitive, tasks; however, cognitive tasks had strong effects on pragmatic performance. These results are discussed vis-à-vis theories of implicature processing. The main contributions of this research are to a) theoretically establish how quantifiers and numbers are associated by linking theories of abstract and number word representations and then testing this relation empirically, b) show that the bilingual advantage emerges in both English and Arabic, and c) provide evidence that implicature processing is cognitively effortful.

In today’s translation profession, being skilful at revision (including self-revision and other-revision) and post-editing tasks is becoming essential for translators. The exploration of the working styles of student translators in the revision and post-editing processes is vital in helping us to understand the nature of these tasks, and may help in improving pedagogy. Drawing on theories from translation-related studies, cognitive psychology, and text comprehension and production, the aims of this research were to: (1) identify the basic types of reading and typing activity (physical activities) of student translators in the processes of revision and post-editing, and to measure statistically and compare the duration of these activities within and across tasks; (2) identify the underlying purposes (mental activities) behind each type of reading and typing activity; (3) categorise the basic types of working style of student translators and compare the frequency of use of each working style both within and across tasks; (4) identify the personal working styles of student translators in carrying out different tasks, and (5) identify the most efficient working style in each task. Eighteen student translators from Durham University, with Chinese as L1 and English as L2, were invited to participate in the experiment. They were asked to translate, self-revise, other-revise and post-edit three comparable texts in Translog-II with the eye-tracking plugin activated. A cue-based retrospective interview was carried out after each session to collect the student translators’ subjective and conscious data for qualitative analysis. The raw logging data were transformed into User Activity Data and were analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. This study identified seven types of reading and typing activity in the processes of self-revision, other-revision and post-editing. Three revision phases were defined and four types of working style were recognised. The student translators’ personal working styles were compared in all three tasks. In addition, a tentative model of their cognitive processes in self-revision, other-revision and post-editing was developed, and the efficiency of the four working styles in each task was tested.

This thesis investigates the discursive construction of gender identities through the use of abusive language in YouTube comments sections. The study attempts to answer the following overarching research question: How is abusive language used in the construction of gendered identities by Arabic-speaking posters on YouTube? A corpus of more than 2 million words of YouTube comments is constructed to study discourses involving terms of abuse and abusive swearing targeted at males and females. These discourses are analysed by utilising a combination of tools. Target descriptors and activation/passivation are used to examine the roles constructed for men and for women. Differential usage of abusive language is investigated by looking at the (non)existence of corresponding masculine and feminine terms of abuse, the behaviour of gendered terms of abuse in different domains, and contrastive collocation of masculine/feminine-marked words. The pragmatic functions of abusive language are studied by examining cultural scripts of abusive language against men and women. The main method used in this thesis is a qualitative analysis of concordance lines where the terms of abuse occur. However, frequency analysis is also employed, to produce a wordlist of masculine- and feminine-marked terms of abuse and to compare the frequencies of terms of abuse in my corpus. The results show that men and women are represented as having different identities. Men are mainly constructed as the social actors who have and abuse power (especially in relation to politics and religion). On the other hand, sexual morality is discursively constructed as the most integral component of female gender identity.

This thesis has three main objectives. The first is to propose a new theoretical framework for analyzing modality in political discourse from a cognitive-functional perspective. The second is to explore the types, forms, values and functions of modality in English political speeches both quantitatively and qualitatively. The third is to identify and demonstrate the categories and functions of evidentiality in political discourse, and to discuss its co-occurrence and interaction with modality in the persuasion process. Drawing on some relevant theories and concepts from Cognitive Linguistics, including Chilton’s model of discourse space, image schemas of space, Langacker’s epistemic model, as well as Halliday’s Systemic Functional Linguistics, this thesis establishes an analytical framework for studying three types of modality (epistemic, deontic and volitional modality) in political discourse from a cognitive-functional perspective. The framework illustrates the functions of modality in political discourse modelled in dimensions of Space, Time and Evidentiality, which interact through deontic distance / epistemic distance / volitional distance, value of modality and strength of evidence. The framework is applied in a discourse analysis of thirty English political speeches by three politicians: Tony Blair, Barack Obama, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad. Analysing the data both quantitatively and qualitatively demonstrates how different speakers express stance, reflect ideologies and (de)legitimise assertions or actions with different forms, values and types of modality in political discourse. In addition, on the basis of a new classification of evidentiality with regard to its source and mode of knowing, this thesis illustrates the functions of six types of evidentials in political discourse. It is suggested that the adoption of different sources of evidentials reveals the speakers’ corresponding commitments toward their stance and marks subjectivity and intersubjectivity of their stance. Some types of evidentiality reflect the speaker’s ideology as they encode presuppositions about authorities, facts or shared knowledge. It is also argued that there are five patterns in the co-occurrence of modality and evidentiality at the sentential level: Evidentials as SOURCE of Evidence for modal stance; epistemic modality as PART of evidentials; a concessive relation; a conditional relation; a coordinative or progressive relation.

In contemporary post-Yugoslav societies, the ongoing processes of nation-building interact and intersect with the manifold challenges of post-socialist transition, post-conflict reconciliation, democratisation and European integration. Amid growing uncertainty and insecurity, public intellectuals may play a key role in ‘making sense’ of these complexities, in particular by shaping shared representations of the nation and by defining national identities in public discourse. Engaging in symbolic practices of nation-building, however, also enables intellectuals to legitimise their own authority and social status, as reflected in the concept of national intellectual practice elaborated by Suny and Kennedy (1999). This thesis explores the multifaceted power dynamics underlying post-Yugoslav intellectuals’ engagement in nation-building from the perspective of the Discourse-Historical Approach to critical discourse studies (Reisigl & Wodak, 2009; Wodak, 2011). Using an innovative methodological framework based on the original notion of intellectual spokespersonship for the nation (drawing on Pels, 2000), I examine a sample of published opinion pieces addressing three key recent events, i.e. Kosovo’s declaration of independence from Serbia in 2008, Croatia’s accession into the EU in 2013, and the anti-government protests in Bosnia and Herzegovina in 2014. Detailed analysis of the patterns of intellectual spokespersonship for the nation that are distinctive to each case leads to the following conclusions. The Kosovo issue seems to have led Serbian intellectuals to refurbish their attitude as ‘saviours of the nation’, similarly to what had happened during the crisis of Yugoslavia. Croatian intellectuals, on the other hand, appear to be engaged in an effort to (re)define the role and place of the Croatian nation within the volatile context of European integration. Lastly, the ambivalent stance of Bosnia and Herzegovina’s intellectuals concerning the potential of the protest movement to undermine the status quo suggests that their involvement is chiefly aimed at strengthening their influence over the country’s public opinion.

The Resolution for a National Language Policy Programme 2014-2018 was adopted by the Slovene parliament in the summer of 2013, and was intended to set a common agenda in the area of state language policy. In this thesis, I investigate its trajectory from inception to (attempted) implementation. My study analyses policymaking practices during a time of political, social and economic instability in Slovenia, and investigates how the roles of various actors involved with the policy changed along with the political landscape. It focusses particularly on the traditional role of linguists as authorities on language in Slovenia. To analyse these processes, I develop a comprehensive theoretical framework for language policy analysis, drawing on social field theory, social action theory, state theory, interpretive policy analysis, critical discourse studies, and critical sociolinguistics. The framework analyses policy as a set of practices which occur across different social spaces, such as fields and nexuses of practice. It also takes into account the changeability of such spaces, particularly how transformations in the broader socio-political context open and close opportunities for agency. The thesis includes four case studies, each exploring a different aspect of the policy process, consisting of the media discourse about language policy in Slovenia, the drafting of the policy text, a parliamentary committee meeting about it, and its implementation. The studies draw on a broad data-set comprised of media texts, documentary data, correspondence, interview data and observation data. For my analysis, I combine the discourse historical approach in critical discourse analysis with mediated discourse analysis to develop a methodology which enables analysis of discourse from the perspective of text as well as social action. My analysis of the public discourse surrounding language policy in Slovenia finds an ongoing ideological debate between two groups of linguists. I find that members of both groups were successful in inserting their own ideology in the policy text, but that opportunities to do so occurred at different times. I find that linguists voicing the established language ideology were particularly successful in using their symbolic capital to exert influence on policymaking across different sites.

This thesis reports on an empirical investigation of native-language (L1) influence on the acquisition of second-language (L2) argument structures in which the L1 argument structures are a superset of those allowed in the L2, and vice versa. To do so, the dative alternation was adopted as a linguistic phenomenon. English allows all verbs in the Give class, Tell class and Throw class to occur in both the Prepositional Dative (PD) construction and the Double Object Dative (DOD) construction. In contrast, only some verbs in the Give class such as ‘give’ and ‘sell’ and the Tell class such as ‘tell’ and ‘show’ are allowed to appear in the DOD construction in Arabic. On the other hand, Scrambling Dative (SD) constructions are allowed in Arabic whereas they are not allowed in English. Two empirical studies investigated three questions: 1) to what extent can L2 learners realise the grammaticality of structures that are not allowed in their L1? 2) To what extent are they able to perceive the ungrammaticality of certain structures in their L2? 3) Which dative structure is acquired earlier? The first investigation was the L2 English study which explored the acquisition of the English dative alternation by native speakers of Arabic. The second investigation was the L2 Arabic study which explored the acquisition of the Arabic dative alternation by native speakers of English. The data were analysed according to four hypotheses: the Fundamental Difference Hypothesis, the Representational Deficit Hypothesis, the Subset-Superset Hypothesis, the Full Transfer and Full Access approach and the Feature Reassembly Hypothesis. The results of the L2 English study generally revealed that Arab leaners of English could not acquire what is absent in their L1 and they generally unlearn the structures that are not allowed in the L2. The results of the L2 Arabic study generally showed that English learners of Arabic could not recognise the ungrammaticality of some Arabic structures. However, they could acquire the SD structures. Overall, the bidirectional results give support to the Subset-Superset Hypothesis and the Full Transfer and Full Access approaches as L2 learners initially transfer their L1 grammar and only gradually restructure themselves and arrive at the L2 grammar, once effective positive evidence is provided.

In line with Talmy’s typology of lexicalisation patterns (1985, 2000), languages differ in the way they express the semantic constituents of motion events into surface elements. English and Arabic motion constructions differ in whether [path] of motion is expressed on a verb, or by a separate particle. Acquisition of the expression of [path] is expected to cause difficulty for second language learners. In recent years, there has been an increased emphasis in minimalist approaches to L2 acquisition on the importance of the lexicon in accounts of syntactic variation across languages as explained by the feature-based contrastive analysis. This study extends the view of feature reassembly articulated by Lardiere (2000, 2005, 2008, 2009) into the realm of motion events in Arabic and English context following this line of research carried out by Stringer (2012) in the area of spatial morphology. Within the Feature Reassembly approach, Lardiere (2008, 2009) argues that reassembling features that are represented in one way in the first language and mapping them into different lexical items in the L2 will present a greater difficulty. Data collected from a total of 120 participants (60 Arabic learners of English, 20 English learners of Arabic and two control groups of 20 native speakers of Arabic and English), who successfully completed acceptability judgment and animation description tasks, corroborate this postulation. The results strongly suggest that meanings that are encoded differently in the L2 from the L1 are the most challenging, whilst those which are comparable to their L1 representations present less difficulty. On the basis of the learners’ developmental patterns observed in this particular study, I argue that feature reassembly appears to be a significant factor in second language development. This study also supports Stringer’s (2012) conclusions that L2 development in this realm is not connected to simple parameter resetting, but to mastery of lexicons.

The current study explores the metaphorical conceptualisations of biomedical knowledge in online articles found in the English/American popular scientific magazine Scientific American and their translation in the Arabic Majallat Al Oloom. The study aims to reveal the translatability of metaphors between the two languages from a cognitive perspective. It seeks to explore the translation techniques that are chosen to transfer the conceptual metaphors between the involved languages. The Conceptual Metaphor Theory initiated by Lakoff and Johnson (1980a/2003), is used as the principal theory for analysing the conceptual representation, typology and metaphorical mappings of these popular biomedical metaphors. The Semantic Field Theory of metaphor, proposed by Kittay and Lehrer (1981), is used to identify the source domains and target domains of these metaphors. The Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), proposed by Pragglejaz Group (2007), is used to determine the metaphorical linguistic representation of these metaphors. The discoursal-pragmatic functions of these metaphors are investigated according to the typology of scientific metaphor, suggested by Boyd (1993), whereas the persuasive function of metaphors, put forward by Cherteris-Black (2004), is used in this discourse to identify their pragmatic functions. An amalgamation of translation methods, suggested by both Schäffner (2004) and Toury (1995), are used to analyse the translation procedures found in the Arabic magazine in order to determine whether the metaphors are retained, modified, paraphrased, deleted, or even if a new metaphor is created in the target texts in addition to new strategies detected in the corpus.