Previous studies show that corpora are helpful to translation teaching and learning in numerous ways; however, the students' use of and attitudes towards corpus-assisted translation are seldom discussed. This research addresses the following two issues regarding the implementation of a student-centred corpus-assisted translation approach with Taiwanese university students. Firstly, how do students use corpora to learn translation, and what are students' perceived benefits and difficulties in this process? Secondly, is the approach helpful to the students' learning attitudes towards translation? A case study of the approach was conducted to investigate how the designed curriculum was taught and how students responded to it. Questionnaires, student group interviews, students' online feedback pre-test and post-test, and query log analysis were adopted as instruments to verify the results.

This thesis examines the relationship between information density and the use of certain syntactic or discourse features. It analyses how the use of these linguistic features varies across two significant contextual dimensions: (i) societal literacy, i.e. the extent to. which the written medium is used in a particular society, as indicated by a number of measurable factors, and (ii) whether the spoken or the written medium is being used. Drawing on the psycholinguistic and cognitive science literature on discourse processing, the relationship between information density, cognitive processing difficulty and linguistic marking is also a key element of the study. Defining information as semantic (based on semantic propositions), pragmatic, and only measurable in relative terms, a definition of information density is elaborated involving informativity (a relative measure of semantic and pragmatic information) per clause. While information density is seen as too complex to measure globally, a wide-ranging study of both syntactic and discourse features related to semantic propositions and inferences allows a comparison of information density between corpora.

Currently, some prominent forensic linguists rely on notions of the idiolect to undertake forensic authorship comparisons. The first project questions the validity of this doctrine, firstly by examining how authorship and its subsidiary activity of attribution, based on concepts such as style and individual distinctiveness, came into existence. The writings and casework of several forensic linguists are quoted from: it is seen that the notion of distinctiveness has been embraced by these practitioners to the neglect of a balanced observation of variation. A mobile phone corpus was built in order to evaluate the degree of variation in this form of written language. It was found, as expected, that variation is the norm and not the exception - contrary to the claims of some forensic linguists. The second project studies the nature of variability in genre and non genre text, examining factors which can contribute to author or textual variation, including aspects of register and context. An experiment into genre variation is carried out in order to discover the sources and causes of variation. The experiment shows that variation is not author based, but is genre dependent, related mainly to questions of time and tropic factors. The final project outlines an approach to the authorship of mobile phone texts and provides a sample method of authorship comparison based on the notion of range of variation, a concept modified from sociolinguistics. Because all forensic work is carried out within the context of legal requirements and evidence rules these are placed at the heart of the approach and methodology. The research programme reported here demonstrates the importance of a principled, variable-based, selection procedure for test features and the need for an understanding of variation, and it highlights the inadequacy of the notion of the idiolect (as this concept is interpreted by some forensic linguists) for forensic authorship comparison. It underlines the importance of the sociolinguistic observation that style is more usually a property of context and text than it is of the author

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This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed.

The main body of the thesis is divided in three parts, each comprising two chapters. In the first part, I address the notion of scope from the perspective of linguistic economy, by discussing the drawbacks of an economy-based account of scope, and then I put forward an alternative account. In the second part, I apply a similar strategy, this time, with respect to binding. In the third part, I explore the theoretical consequences of the standard economy principles for two theses concerning, respectively, the nature of complex demonstratives and the purported logicality of natural language.

Despite the growth of spoken academic corpora in recent years, relatively little is known about the language of seminar discussions in higher education. This thesis compares seminar discussions across three disciplinary areas. The aim of this thesis is to uncover the functions and patterns of talk used in different disciplinary discussions and to highlight language on a macro and micro level that would be useful for materials design and teaching purposes. A framework for identifying and analysing genres in spoken language based on Hallidayan Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) is used. Stretches of talk sharing a similar purpose and predictable functional staging, termed Discussion Macro Genres (DMGs) are identified. Language is compared across DMGs and across disciplines through use of corpus techniques in conjunction with SFL genre theory. Data for the study comprises just over 180,000 tokens and is drawn from the British Academic Spoken English corpus (BASE), recorded at two universities in the UK. The discipline areas investigated are Arts and Humanities, Social Sciences and Physical Sciences. Findings from this study make theoretical, empirical and methodological contributions to the field of spoken EAP. The empirical findings are firstly, that the majority of the seminar discussion can be assigned to one of the three main DMG in the corpus: Responding, Debating and Problem Solving. Secondly, it characterises each discipline area according to two DMGs. Thirdly, the majority of the discussion is non-oppositional in nature, suggesting that ‘debate’ is not the only form of discussion that students need to be prepared for. Finally, while some characteristics of the discussion are tied to the DMG and common across disciplines, others are discipline specific. On a theoretical level, this study shows that an SFL genre model for investigating spoken discourse can be successfully extended to investigate longer stretches of discourse than have previously been identified. The methodological contribution is to demonstrate how corpus techniques can be combined with SFL genre theory to investigate extended stretches of spoken discussion. The thesis will be of value to those working in the field of teaching spoken EAP/ ESAP as well as to materials developers.

The study of degree modifiers (cf. ‘intensifiers’, Quirk et al. 1985; Allerton 1987; Bolinger 1972) has been a popular topic in English historical linguistics. This is largely due to their markedly emotional function, giving rise to frequent ‘renewal’ (Hopper & Traugott 1993, 2003) for reasons of expressivity (cf. e.g. Klein 1998). However, the vast majority of the previous research focuses on one specific type, i.e. ‘boosters’ (e.g. very, really), cf. Peters 1992, 1994; Lorenz 2002; Méndez-Naya 2003, 2006, 2007. In comparison, other sub-categories distinguished in standard grammars of English (Quirk et al. 1985; Huddleston & Pullum 2002) have received little attention. This thesis begins to address this gap in the literature, by focusing on one of the neglected sub-categories, viz. maximizers (e.g. absolutely, completely). Specifically, two main research aims are addressed: the initial one being to provide individual comprehensive accounts of the development of seven selected maximizers (viz. absolutely, completely, entirely, perfectly, quite, totally and utterly), and a secondary one, through extrapolation of the results of the individual analyses, being to investigate the diachronic characteristics of the English maximizer sub-class of degree modifier as a whole. Following a survey of the various definitions and classifications of degree modifiers in the literature and of previous diachronic studies on other varieties (including details of the historical process of grammaticalization typically involved), the study takes a corpus-based, diachronic approach to the analysis of the maximizer variety, using data from Middle English up until the present day. In accordance with the initial aim, a series of case studies document the findings of the analyses of the seven adverbs, elucidating their emergence and their subsequent development, taking account not only of their maximizer uses, but also of any other functions available to them throughout their history. By way of addressing the secondary aim, the findings of the individual analyses are then compared in order to present conclusions about the English maximizer class overall. On a more general level, the study also highlights important terminological issues arising from the case studies in connection to the distinction between maximizers and emphasizers and the validity of the maximizer class as currently described in the literature (cf. e.g. Allerton 1987 and Paradis 1997, and standard grammars such as Quirk et al. 1985 and Huddleston & Pullum 2002). It also offers several contributions to general discussions of language change and theorising in diachronic linguistics, e.g. concerning the debate on whether it is reanalysis or analogy that is the driving force of grammaticalization processes (cf. Harris & Campbell 1995, Newmeyer 1998, Haspelmath 1998, Fischer 2007, 2008) and regarding the nature of the conceptualization of developmental pathways (cf. Vandewinkel & Davidse 2008).

This thesis takes the form of a pragmatic study of Rhetorical Questions (RQs) in the environment of monologue within the theoretical framework of Relevance Theory (Sperber and Wilson, 1986). Two main research questions are involved. The first is how an addressee manages to identify the rhetorical nature of a question, and infer the possible intended assumptions of the addresser. I aim to show that the Code Model, which holds that communication is achieved by encoding and decoding messages in words, is not sufficient in interpreting RQs. In contrast, I shall show that implicatures (implied propositions) conveyed by an RQ can only be interpreted by an inferential model. The second question is how different types of RQ are used to achieve the addresser’s persuasive intention in monologic environments. My study consists not only of theoretical argumentation but also of a qualitative analysis of corpus data, in an attempt to extend corpus study to rhetoric and pragmatics, beyond the recent concentration (Sinclair, 1991; Biber et al., 1999; Stubbs, 2001a; Hunston, 2002; Renouf, 2013 etc.) on the lexical, semantic, and syntactic domains. The corpora consulted are the BNC and FLOB, complemented by two self-compiled textual corpora, comprising the genres of political speeches, newspaper editorials and sermons. In the first part of the study, I propose a procedure for identifying an RQ based mainly on the concepts of ‘implicature’, ‘mutual manifestness’ and ‘optimal relevance’ in Relevance Theory. In the second part, the proposed criteria are applied to the identification and interpretation of RQs in three monologic genres to analyse their uses, which display both common and distinctive features.

This thesis examines how British newspapers reported corporate fraud between 2004 and 2014. A corpus of approximately 85,000 news articles was collected from seven major daily and three major Sunday British newspapers and examined using corpus-assisted critical discourse analysis. This analysis follows principles set out by Fairclough (2015). The costs of corporate fraud are financial and intangible (Punch, 1996), including the corporate tax gap (HMRC, 2015), the undermining of democratic processes (Punch, 1996), and global wealth inequality (Slater and Kramers, 2016; Kramers, 2017). This thesis draws on Sykes and Matza’s (1957) ‘techniques of neutralisation’, which asserts that those accused of having committed deviant acts employ a specific set of arguments to negate them. Newspapers’ use of these techniques creates a narrative in which corporations are generally relieved of their alleged responsibility for acts of fraud. Corporations are presented as being forced to perform acts that are not always in line with (the spirit of) the law. Responsibility is transferred to regulators and investigators, who are represented as simultaneously too harsh, potentially stifling business growth, and too lenient, allowing corporations to get away with fraud. My original contribution is primarily methodological and analytical. I linguistically analyse a corpus of corporate fraud news, covering a decade of reporting, using a combination of CDA and corpus methods. Previous work on newspaper representations of corporate crime employs little linguistic analysis and covers at most a year of reporting (see Evans and Lundman, 2009 [1983]; Wright et al, 1995; McMullan and McClung, 2006; Williams, 2008; Cavender and Mulcahy, 1998). A further point of originality is theoretical, as I elaborate on the various ways in which techniques of neutralisation (see Sykes and Matza, 1957; Fooks et al, 2012) are expressed.