Research on L2 speech perception and production indicate that adult language learners are able to acquire L2 speech sounds that they initially have difficulty with (Best, 1994). Moreover, use of the audiovisual modality, which provides language learners with articulatory information for speech sounds, has been illustrated to be effective in L2 speech perception training (Hazan et al., 2005). Since auditory and visual skills are integrated with each other in speech perception, audiovisual perception training may enhance language learners’ auditory perception of L2 speech sounds (Bernstein, Auer Jr, Ebehardt, and Jiang, 2013). However, little research has been conducted on L1 Mandarin learners of English. Based on these hypotheses, this study investigated whether audiovisual perception training can improve learners’ auditory perception and production of L2 speech sounds. A pilot study was performed on 42 L1-Mandarin learners of English (L1-dialect: Chongqing Mandarin (CQd)) in which their perception and production of English consonants was tested. According to the results, 29 of the subjects had difficulty in the perception and production of /θ/-/s/ and /ð/-/z/. Therefore, these 29 subjects were selected as the experimental group to attend a 9-session audiovisual perception training programme, in which identification tasks for the minimal pairs /θ/-/s/ and /ð/-/z/ were conducted. The subjects’ perception and production performance was tested before, during and at the end of the training with an AXB task and “read aloud” task. In view of the threat to interval validity arising from a repeated testing effect, a control group was tested with the same AXB task and intervals as that of the experimental group. The results show that the experimental group’s perception and production accuracy improved substantially during and by the end of the training programme. Indeed, whilst the control group also showed perception improvement across the pre-test and post-test, their degree of improvement was significantly lower than that of the experimental group. These results therefore confirm the value of the audiovisual modality in L2 speech perception training.

The aim of this thesis is two-fold: to develop an articulated Vietnamese clause structure in two syntactic domains: VP-external and VP-internal in the spirit of generative grammar, and to see how this functional architecture is supported empirically from the perspective of second language acquisition. To address theoretical issues, on the one hand, it brings together interesting semantic and syntactic contrasts of aspectual morphemes in Vietnamese, i.e., the distributional and interpretative independence of Vietnamese tense and aspect as well as the way they interact with other syntactic phenomenon such as negation, quantification and definiteness. On the other hand, it reveals to what extent the mechanisms that Vietnamese recruits to encode aspect are different from those employed in Indo- European languages and other areally-related languages, especially including Chinese. Based on a detailed semantic-syntactic investigation of Vietnamese aspect, the thesis sets out the properties that need to be acquired by Chinese learners. It distinguishes between those properties which are acquirable without difficulties and those that are ‘problematic’ in order to verify the proposed Vietnamese functional clause. It also sets out to validate some recent hypotheses in the realm of second language acquisition. The thesis is organized as follows. Chapter 1 sets out the theoretical approach of the thesis. Chapter 2 systematically reviews a set of semantic and syntactic studies on aspect that are relevant to the discussion. Chapter 3 lays out previous research on Vietnamese tense and aspect as points of departure for my proposals. Chapters 4 and 5 are devoted to an analysis of how tense and aspect are realized in Vietnamese both pre- and post-verbally. Chapter 6 provides a brief comparison between Vietnamese and Chinese aspectual systems, focusing on the particular properties investigated in the following chapter. Chapter 7 presents a set of experiments examining Chinese learners’ acquisition of Vietnamese aspect-related constructions, these shed light on current generativist hypotheses about second language acquisition. Chapter 8 concludes the thesis.

Lexical knowledge bases, such as WordNet, have been shown to be useful in a wide range of language processing applications. However WordNet lacks certain information, such as topical relations between synsets. This thesis addresses this problem by enriching WordNet using information derived from Wikipedia. The approach consists of mapping concepts in WordNet to corresponding articles in Wikipedia. This is done using a three stage approach. First a set of possible candidate articles is retrieved for each WordNet concept. This is done by searching using the article title, and also by searching the full text using an IR engine. Secondly, text similarity scores are used to select the best match from the candidate articles. Finally, the mappings are refined using information from Wikipedia links to give a set of high quality matches. The mappings are evaluated using a manually annotated gold standard set of synset-article mappings. The annotation process indicates that the majority of synsets have a good matching article. The refined mappings are shown to have precision of 88.2\%. The mappings are then used to enrich relations in WordNet using Wikipedia links. The enriched WordNet is then used with a knowledge based Word Sense Disambiguation system. Evaluations are performed on the Semcor 3.0 corpus. Adding the new relations improves performance significantly over the WordNet baseline, demonstrating the usefulness of the mappings on an extrinsic task.

Building on Werth’s (1994) notion of ‘megametaphor’, in this thesis I examine the discourse-level conceptual effects of metaphor in five op-ed articles about the 2008 British financial crisis. I use these analyses to offer three contributions to debates in metaphor studies. Firstly, I attempt to offer a more detailed specification of megametaphor. I argue that whilst megametaphor is a useful concept to start an investigation of discourse-level metaphoric conceptual effects, Werth (1994) does not sufficiently differentiate it from the notion of ‘conceptual metaphor’ (see Lakoff, 1993; Lakoff and Johnson, 1980). I define megametaphors as text-driven discourse-level conceptual structures comprised of multiple metaphors. Secondly, I argue that megametaphors are situated within the broader cognitive environments generated in the minds of discourse participants as they take part in a discourse. Analysts therefore have to account for the relationship between megametaphors and the conceptual contexts in which they appear. I argue that Text World Theory (see Gavins, 2007; Werth, 1999) provides the best account of this conceptual context, and suggest that the text-world structures created in the minds of readers scaffolds the integration of individual clause-level metaphors into megametaphors. Finally, drawing on Werth’s (1977, 1994) notion of ‘double-vision’, Steen’s (2008, 2011a, 2011b) notion of ‘deliberate metaphor’ and Stockwell’s (2009) attention-resonance model, I propose a framework for describing the ways in which megametaphors ‘texture’ (Stockwell, 2009) the text-worlds in which they are situated.

This thesis is concerned with the relationship between colour and certain bi-polar characteristics. This topic has previously been studied through highly controlled laboratory-based experiments but this thesis starts from the question of whether experiments conducted in the laboratory (which are necessarily constrained to have low numbers of participants) can ever hope to capture the full complexity of the relationships being studied, since there are likely to be strong cultural and regional differences. The key advance in this work therefore was to explore the use of a web-­based experiment for collecting data on a large scale and from all over the world. A laboratory-based experiment to explore colour semiotics was carried out and broadly supports the earlier work carried out by Ou et al. A novel paradigm for carrying out colour semiotic experiments based on a large-­scale internet presentation and distributed over large numbers of participants (over 2000 from 58 countries) was then conceived and implemented. Comparison with the laboratory-­based experiment broadly validated the use of this new paradigm. The large amount of data collected allowed an analysis of gender and cultural differences to be carried out and it was shown that cultural and age may be significant factors but that gender is probably not. The thesis has made a contribution in terms of collecting new data, generating new models, and testing a web-­based paradigm for carrying out colour-based experiments. One application of the colour-semiotic models that has been developed at the end of this thesis is in the design process and a potential new software tool that could build a bridge between science and design has been considered.

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This study explored motivation of Thai students who simultaneously studied English and additional L3s (Chinese, Japanese and Korean) in language specialist majors and in English-medium business majors in a Thai university, using Dörnyei’s (2005, 2009) L2 motivational self system and Ushioda’s (2009) person-in-context relational system. Foreign Language Anxiety (FLA) and International Posture (IP) are also investigated in order to find the dynamic interplay between these closely linked variables. The study consists of three parts: 1) a quantitative cross-sectional study with students from year 1to year 4 (N = 356), 2) retrospective interview of 14 students who were studying different languages, and 3) longitudinal case studies of five students over three years. It sheds light on the topic of motivations of multiple language learners across languages and in different learning environments. The findings show that while the increasing importance of English threatened learners’ motivation to study other foreign languages as found in previous research (e.g., Dörnyei et al., 2002, 2006; Henry 2010, 2012), the predominance of English also encourages students to study other languages. International posture was found to link to motivation to learn foreign languages other than English, while FLA does not correlate to IP at all. For both language specialist and English-medium business students, their motivation was mainly generated by immediate need and future use of that particular language.

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This thesis is concerned with a central question in any construction-based, usage-based theory of language acquisition: how children get from more concrete and item-based constructions to more abstract constructions. The overall approach places central importance on meaning and the role of cognition to categorise chunks of linguistic experience into conventional grammatical units. Chapter 1 outlines the historical and conceptual foundations in the field of language acquisition and justifies the usage-based approach taken in this thesis. Chapter 2 then considers what usage-based theories mean when they characterise language acquisition as 'a developing inventory of constructions that are more-or-less schematic'. By bringing together findings from categorisation and analogy, social cognition and construction grammar the aim is to show how argument-structure constructions are learnable. Chapter 3 investigates the topic of how infants construct grammatical categories by taking a cross-linguistic look at the transitive construction in the context of a prototype theory of categorisation. Chapter 4 applies the theoretical investigations of previous chapter to an empirical experiment, specifically, making developmental comparisons of the prototypical semantics of the transitive construction in English. Chapter 5 considers further the role of different cues in children understanding of argument-structure constructions by examining the role of pronoun frames in early comprehension of transitive constructions in English. Chapter 6 focuses on how infants and mothers actually use language in a corpus study. It begins by looking at the role of skewed distribution and cognitive anchoring in schematising the Subject Verb Object construction in English. It then presents a usage-based acquisition model of argument productivity in subject-verb-object constructions. Chapter 7 concludes the thesis by summarising the experimental and theoretical work; identifying some cognitive features and properties of the input that seem to be important in all the studies; providing a critique of the usage-based approach; and finally, suggesting some key issues that future work in usage-based approaches to the acquisition of grammar needs to address.