Labov and Waletzky's (1967) influential six-schema model of personal narratives has often been considered to make claims regarding a 'universal' narrative structure (Hurst, 1990; Hymes, 1996). This study tests how far variations in personal narratives at a schematic level (that is, which schemas are present and how they combine to structure the narrated experience) correlate with aspects of an individual's culture. Oral narratives produced by members of the Greek Cypriot community in London are analysed, to provide data from an alternative group of informants to Labov and Waletzky's, while still using their model as the central framework for analysis. Frequent appearance in the data of an additional schema, 'post-evaluation', suggests that culture is a variable in relation to narrative structure, as are more specific individual and social factors including age and gender. Story topic is also shown to influence how narratives are structured, with different topics resulting in different structures and the general underlying theme of "Trouble" (Burke, 1945; Bruner, 1991; Bruner, 1997) (in fight, danger of death, argument and embarrassing personal experiences) shown to guarantee the 'crisis' required in a narrative. Such findings have implications as regards claims of a universal model of narrative; and the general view that one narrative-structure model may be suitable for all personal narratives is re-examined. By way of conclusion, the study formulates a 'variationist' model of narrative 'grammar' that combines core, optional and culturally variant features. It is suggested that such a model may begin to capture how an individual's social and cultural background, as well as story topic, can function as decisive factors in determining narrative form.

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The present study is an attempt to investigate the use of discourse markers in English and Arabic. The study uses Relevance Theory as a theoretical framework for the analysis of discourse markers in both Syrian and Standard Arabic. It benefits from Blakemore’s (1987, 2002) account of procedural meaning, in which she argues that discourse markers encode procedural meaning that constrains the inferential phase of the interpretation of the utterance in which they occur. According to Blakemore, the procedural meaning encoded by discourse markers controls the hearer’s choice of context under which the utterance is relevant. The study concentrates on ten discourse markers, five of which are only used in Standard Arabic. These are lakinna, bainama, lakin, bal and fa. The other five (bass, la-heik, la-ha-sabab, ma‘nāt-o and bi-ittal ī ) are only used in Syrian Arabic. The choice of these discourse markers has been motivated by the fact that they can be compared and contrasted with Blakemore’s two favoured discourse markers, but and so. The claim is that like so and but, such discourse markers encode procedural meaning that constrains the interpretation of the utterance in which they occur. The study argues that like but in English, bass in Syrian Arabic encodes a general procedure that can be implemented to derive different meanings such as ‘denial of expectation’, ‘contrast’, ‘correction’ and ‘cancellation’. The four discourse markers (lakinna, bainama, lakin and bal) used in Standard Arabic are analysed as lexical representations of these different implementations. The discourse marker fa, in this study, has also been analysed as encoding a general procedure that can be implemented to derive different meanings such as ‘sequentiality’, ‘immediacy’, ‘non-intervention’ and ‘causality’. It has also been argued that the procedure encoded by fa can put constraints on either the explicit or the implicit side of the interpretation of the utterance in which it occurs.

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The thesis is a critique of what in most linguistic and pragmatic theories is treated as "explicit" (as against "implicit") communication. The critique is from the perspective of Burton- Robert's Representational Hypothesis. A central assumption in linguistic and pragmatic theories is that there is a distinction between explicit communication, on one hand, and implicit communication, on the other. Two conflicting theories of the explicit-implicit distinction are discussed and found inadequate. These are Grice's theory of conversation and Sperber and Wilson's Relevance Theory. It is argued that neither Grice nor Relevance Theory succeeds in showing that an explicit-implicit distinction is empirically defensible or theoretically sustainable. In addressing the issue of explicit communication the thesis raises questions about the theoretical significance - and indeed the conceptual validity - of an explicit-implicit distinction. It is argued that the very notion of explicit communication rests on (suspect if not incorrect) conventional assumptions inherited from generative linguistic theory, particularly Chomskyan linguistic theory. To be precise, the notion of the explicit is bound up with Chomsky's double-interface assumption - a foundational assumption in conventional linguistic theory. This is the assumption that there are phonological features and semantic features combined in lexical items and more complex linguistic expressions. The assumption is supposed to be conceptually necessary for conceiving of and modelling what in linguistic theory is called 'sound-meaning' relations. It is argued that the double-interface assumption is deeply problematic and should be rejected. The Representational Hypothesis is presented as a counter-point to the supposed necessity of the double-interface assumption in conceiving of and modelling so-called' sound-meaning' relations. An account of meaning, which follows from the Representational Hypothesis, is defended. By way of illustration, the thesis then draws together a range of issues, problems, questions arising from the supposed necessity of the double-interface assumption. These are approached through the problems of nonsentential speech and ellipsis. The supposed necessity of the double-interface assumption is questioned and the RH is presented as an alternative.

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In marked contrast to metonymy research based on invented examples and intuitive judgments, this thesis presents a picture of metonymy in discourse derived from empirical analysis of authentic language. Using the discourse dynamics framework (Cameron 2010b), metonymy is investigated in a 17,889 word focus group discussion about the risk of terrorism. To aid and enrich the analysis of metonymic expressions identified in the focus group data, they are tracked in the Oxford English Corpus (OEC) and the Nexis UK database (Nexis®UK 2008). The research design applied in the thesis enables a multi-faceted appreciation of the phenomenon of metonymy in language. Responding to an important methodological issue and a gap in the field, the thesis develops and applies a metonymy identification procedure. and offers the first quantitative results to date for metonymy density in language. Findings illuminate the new metonymy category SPECIFIC DATE FOR EVENT HAPPENING ON THAT DATE, instances of interplay of metonymy and metaphor, and cases of what are termed cultural metonymies. The thesis also argues, however, that a vital part of the picture of metonymy is missed if the investigation does not pursue cases which are beyond the procedure. While many metonymies can be identified in discourse by following the procedure, the major advantage of the discourse dynamic framework is it can uncover varying forms of metonymy. Metonymy is found in speakers' use of pronouns in a process labelled .metonymic shifting of pronominal reference (MSPR) and it is involved in metonymic processing of scenarios and metonymic processing of stories stretching over longer fragments of talk. Complexity of metonymic language leads the research to an analytic level which has the potential of revealing more about the core of metonymy and its complex nature.

This thesis investigates the phenomenon of flagging in code-switching. The term 'flagging' is normally used to describe a series of discourse phenomena occurring in the environment of a switch. In spite of a large literature on code- switching, not much is known about flagging, aside from the general assumption that it has signalling value and may draw attention to the switch CPoplack, 1988). The present study aims to offer a more eclectic understanding of flagging, by looking at the phenomenon from both a structural and an interpretive perspective. The analyses are based on two small corpora of naturalistic conversations collected amongst pairs of bilingual English-Italian speakers in the UK and Italy. The structural analysis looks at quantitative patterns of flagging. A relationship is observed between the frequency of an item in the data and its production with or without flagging. Higher frequency generally is related to less flagging. A similar relation holds between flagging and different grammatical categories, with nouns being less flagged than adjectives or verbs. The interpretive approach adopts the methods of Conversation Analysis (Auer, 1998) and investigates how the presence of flagging is instrumental in reconstructing participants' own understanding of the interaction. Through flagging, participants reveal to one another their orientation to single instances of language alternation as belonging or not to the medium (Gafaranga, 2000) of the conversation. While it may be seen as a peripheral occurrence, flagging can reveal the degree and ease of integration of switches in speech; an appreciation of its role can further the understanding of the dynamics of language contact in naturalistic settings. By looking at the results from the two analyses, this study shows how flagging is a patterned phenomenon that speakers interpret as having communicative value, rather than a simple disfluency typical of spontaneous speech.