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This thesis explores how English is perceived in Taiwan and what impact it has on society and culture by drawing on three kinds of data: (i) analysis of policy and documents, (ii) critical discourse analysis of textual data, and (iii) interviews with respondents from different levels of the education system. It aims to provide an indepth study of the role and cultural politics of English in Taiwan. Rather than offering a general and quantitative picture of global English, this research concentrates on qualitative and contextual data. It focuses on issues which arise when English is given an important role in national policy and when English instruction is introduced into Taiwan's elementary education system. By analysing governmental documents, educational publications and media texts, this research identifies a number of ideological assumptions about English in Taiwan and argues that the ideology of English in Taiwan is based on a strong association between English, globalization and economic competitiveness. It also reflects, to an extent, the underlying uncertainty and anxiety regarding Taiwanese's politico-economic future. Furthermore, in the investigation of perceptions of English in Taiwan, informants' responses corresponded somewhat with ideological assumptions embedded in discourses on English. English is highly approved of in areas related to national and personal economic well-being, while the prevalence of English also leads to concern about local languages and cultures. This research suggests that the overall impact of English is considered more positive than negative. Moreover, since the necessity of English is assumed by Taiwanese society, the main concern is thus how to adapt global English effectively without undermining local languages and cultures. Taiwan can be regarded as a typical case among East Asian countries in terms of the socio-economic and educational impact ofEnglish, while the ideological assumptions and perceptions of global English reflect Taiwan's unique cultural, economic and political status in the world.

This studY is an investigg-ation of the spectral and temporal characteristics of the sounds of the Egyptian dialect of Arabic, mainly as revealed by acoustic spectrography. The consonant sounds of Arabic speech are divided into groups according to their manner of articulation and are studied in separate chapters accordingly. Each chapter is divided into two main parts. In the first part we look into the articulatory mechanism for the production of the consonant under study, as well as at its acoustic theory of production. I. We also report the results of the acoustic analyses of sounds produced with the same mechanism in other languages as well as the results of synthetic speech experiments. In the second part of each chapter we report the results of the acoustic analysis of the Arabic consonant under investigation. In this part we study the temporal and spectral characteristics of the particular consonant in different word positions. We also study its effect on the direction and extent of the second-formant transitions of the adjacent vowels, as well as the effect of the adjacent vowel on the frequency positions of the components of the consonant spectrum. This part is then followed by a concluding section in which we provide an overall view of the specifics of the acoustics of that consonant and discuss the relevance of our findins on its -acoustics to the general theories of speech production and perception.

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The author of this thesis claims that Lhasa Tibetan has more tonal contrasts than has hitherto generally been recognized. The proposed tonal classification has interesting consequences for the segmental phonology, in particular for the voicing status of initial stops and for some aspects of the phonology of stem compounds. No attempt has been made to adhere strictly to a specific school of phonology; but the presentation of the material has been influenced by classical phonemic, generative, and natural phonology theory. A special effort has been made throughout the study to give a fair amount of phonetic data in support of the analysis proposed.

After a discussion of some relevant secondary literature, a speaker-orientated model of tense and mood in contemporary German is presented. A semantic description of these categories is given. The basis for the description is the speaker's communicative intention, which is then formalized in logical terms. A sentence is assumed to have three components: speech act, modality, and propositions! content. The basic meaning of a tense is shown to be the temporal relationship between these three components; the tin® of the speech act is taken as the point of reference. It is shown that tense uses which do not correspond to the basic meaning are derived from other tenses by means of transformations, which may be caused by the speaker's wish to emphasize parts of the communicative intention, to achieve special euphonic or rhythmical effects, or to avoid redundancy or complicated morphological forms. It is also shown that a secondary function of tenses is the indication of the temporal ordering of propositional contents in a continuous text. The semantically derived tenses are shown to form the criteria for the choice of morphological tense forms in the syntactical component of the grammar. The modality component is described in terms of formal logic. It is assumed to have four basic functions: The use of Indicative signals the assertion of a proposition. The use of Subjunctive II is shown to be due to a conjoined negatively asserted proposition which is part of the sentence. The use of Subjunotive I is due to the irrelevance of the truth value of a clause to that of the sentence as a whole. The location of a proposition on the spectrum of probable truth is shown to be indicated by the modal auxiliaries.