This thesis investigates the relationships between cohesion in texts and the meanings of the texts. I analyze hard news texts and the summaries written by competent readers for the texts in terms of nuclei (i.e. the combinations of Process and Medium) (Halliday, 1994), and examine the characteristics of the nuclei that recur in a text and are also considered as important to the meaning of the text. There are two main findings of my present study. The first is that when two or more recurrent nuclei in a text are considered as important to the meaning of the text, the relationship in the lead that holds between the nuclei are also thought of as important to the text's meaning. This finding provides evidence for the claim made by many linguists that the conjunctive relations that hold between the propositions in a passage are important to the meaning of the passage. The other main finding of my study is that when the nuclei that are considered as important to the meanings of the texts in which they occur are found in leads, they have a strong tendency to occur in primary or independent clauses; on the other hand, when the nuclei occurring in leads are however not considered as important to the meanings of the texts in which they occur, they tend to occur in secondary or embedded clauses. This finding indicates that the distribution of information in leads is not random. The propositions in a lead that are important to the meaning of the text in which they occur are often foregrounded in major types of clause, while those that are not thought of as important to the meaning of the text are often backgrounded in minor types of clause.

This thesis aims to investigate grammatical metaphor in Vietnamese translations of English official documentation. Building on Halliday’s notion of grammatical metaphor and linguistic theories of translation shift, the thesis situates its argument in the broader context of translation theory and explores the various representations of grammatical metaphor in relation to Catford’s translation shifts. It adopts a corpus approach with the compilation of a 200,000-word English-Vietnamese parallel corpus, and focuses specifically on the translation of nominalisations formed with the suffixes ATION and MENT. The thesis draws on the Vietnamese translations to provide insights into metaphorical modes of expression via nominalisations-as-grammatical metaphor in official texts. The findings reveal the various types of metaphorical meanings embedded in nominalised forms. The identification of this range of metaphorical realisations can be interpreted along a cline from being more verb-like and denoting the Act category, to being more noun-like and denoting the Result category, or stretching along the cline and denoting the Process or Activity indicated in the verbal stem. The thesis supports the argument that several strategies which previous researchers have posited as universals are adopted in translating for adequate equivalence in metaphorisation. Some of these strategies like explicitation and simplification are found to be more powerful and more frequently used than others, and there are more explicitating and simplifying shifts in lexical rather than in syntactic or stylistic terms. Literal translation, though not commonly recognised as a translation universal, is found to be the most prevalent approach in the Vietnamese translation of ATION and MENT nominals in official texts. The thesis claims that the adoption of particular translation strategies generates corresponding translation shifts, and it is found that explicitation and simplification often entail shifts in level and in rank, and shifts in class often occur with shifts in structure. The findings reveal that shifts do not occur singly, but are often intertwined, and overlapping shifts are common in the Vietnamese translation. The thesis also proposes a graded continuum to justify congruence-incongruence shifts, and finally develops taxonomies of possible translation shifts involved in translating English N-GMs into Vietnamese. The findings are hoped to reveal several implications for the teaching about translation and for the practice of translating.

This study investigates modality markers used as expressions of politeness in British and American ambassadorial speeches via a corpus-based method. Results of the research reflect the semantic and pragmatic perspectives of modality markers on the theories of modality and politeness. Although modality and politeness are the central topics in a wide range of studies, the two domains have been discussed separately and their relationship has not been empirically investigated. Moreover, there has been no study on modality markers in British and American discourse, nor has the use of modality markers in British and American ambassadorial speeches been examined. Therefore, this research examines the relation of modality to politeness via the use of British and American ambassadorial speeches. The research contributes to the practice of the discourse community with the analysis of modality markers as politeness strategies in ambassadorial speeches. The results of a comparative analysis of modality markers as speakers’ politeness strategies collected in ambassadorial speeches reveal that American and British ambassadors are strikingly different in their frequency of modality markers expressing particular politeness categories. American ambassadors use more modality markers expressing positive politeness strategies such as paying attention to hearers, expressing strong commitment, hedging on hearers’ positive face, expressing optimism, complimenting to mitigate the force of comments, making claims and minimising the imposition of face-threatening acts. British ambassadors, however, employ more modality markers expressing negative politeness strategies such as hedging on negative face-threatening acts, expressing hypotheses, expressing humbleness and mitigating the force of obligation. Therefore, this thesis claims that American ambassadors use more modality markers expressing positive politeness in terms of personal emotions and directness, while British ambassadors prefer modality markers expressing negative politeness such as tentativeness, indirectness and mitigation. It is noted that modality is represented in a range of syntactic structures and patterns other than single modal auxiliary verbs. In addition, since modality markers as expressions of politeness are culture-specific, the use of modality markers differs from one culture to another. Moreover, modality markers cannot totally be treated as hedges in intercultural communication since some modality markers which seem to be semantically similar between languages are actually different in their pragmatic functions among different cultures.

This dissertation presents a cross-linguistic study of three elliptical predicate constructions: (a) stripping, (b) negative-contrast, and (c) yes/no ellipsis, which are all argued to fall under the scope of a more general type of ellipsis, Bare Argument Ellipsis. From an interpretive point of view, in all three constructions, the constituent that is present in the second conjunct ('the remnant') has a characteristic information role. In yes/no ellipsis, the remnant functions as a contrastive topic whereas in stripping and negative-contrast the remnant is a focused constituent. The latter two constructions are further differentiated with regard to the semantic characteristics of Focus. Based on the assumption that Focus is not uniform, it is shown that stripping involves narrow information focus whereas negative-contrast involves contrastive focus. From a syntactic point of view, I argue that Bare Argument Ellipsis involves overt movement of the remnant to the left periphery of the clause, followed by IP deletion. The PF-deletion approach is extended to all three constructions. Following Rizzi's (1997) split-CP hypothesis, it is proposed that the remnant in yes/no ellipsis moves to TopP, a functional projection in the left periphery of the clause that encodes contrastive topics, by the process of Clitic Left Dislocation. Contrastive topicalization of the remnant forces narrow focus on the polarity marker. Regarding stripping and negative-contrast, it is argued that the semantic difference between narrow information and contrastive focus is directly related to the focus projection that hosts the remnant. Following recent proposals that Focus should be split into several projections, I show that the remnant in negative-contrast ends up in F₁P, a focus projection marked for contrastiveness whereas the remnant in stripping moves to a lower F₂P, which simply encodes new information.

This study aims to explore the two questions: 1) Does the interpreter’s relevant bodily experience help her to achieve coherence in the source text (ST) and the target text (TT)? 2) How does the interpreter’s mental effort expended in achieving coherence reflect the textual structure of the ST? The findings of this study contribute to the general understanding of how coherence is achieved in simultaneous interpreting (SI). The theoretical framework is based on the concept of the Idealized Cognitive Model (ICM), which emphasizes the role of bodily experience in organizing and understanding knowledge. A bodily experience based experiment was conducted with two contrastive groups: experimental group and control group, involving thirty subjects from a China-based university, who had Chinese as their first language and English as their second language. The data collected was recordings of English to Chinese simultaneous interpretations. Coherence in SI was analyzed on the basis of both quantitative and qualitative approaches by virtue of coherence clues. The analysis shows that the interpreter’s bodily experience helped her to achieve coherence and distribute her mental effort in both the ST and TT. As the term ICM suggests, the cognitive model is idealized on the grounds that the ICM does not fit into the real specifics of a textual structure perfectly or all the time. The ICM is an open-ended model in terms of the analysis of understanding abstract concepts especially in this SI discourse and needs more research. This study can contribute to SI research and training, suggesting that specialization is a trend in interpreting education.

This thesis consists of four chapters and an introduction. The first chapter is concerned with cases of purported genericity which are true despite only a minority of the kind in question satisfying the predicated property and whose predicated property is somehow striking. I argue that such cases are pathological, and hence shouldn't be used as evidence for claims about the nature of genericity or the semantics of generics. In particular, these cases pose no difficulty for theorists who want to solve the problem of variability (the main obstacle in providing an adequate theory of generics), at least in part, by appeal to the linguistic property of quantifiers known as (contextual) domain restriction. The second chapter is devoted to defending a quantificational analysis of generics in which the logical form of generics contains an unpronounced quantifier expression Gen. The chapter defends the original argument of Carlson (1989), the multiple readings argument, which has recently come under scrutiny. In addition, it provides a novel argument in favour or Gen. This chapter also responds to various objections to the quantificational analysis, in particular to the linguistic evidence offered in favour of the kind-predication analysis. The third chapter defends the positive view that the unpronounced quantifier expression Gen is an indexical. The chapter argues that a given generic sentence expresses different generalisations in different contexts of utterance. A semantics for generics which treats Gen as an indexical A-quantifier is given. The indexical approach advocated has many virtues which are outlined in the chapter. Objections to the view are also addressed. The fourth chapter discusses two further classes of generics -existential generics and indexical singular generics. Diagnoses of the issues arising from these classes of data is given, and their relation to the positive view developed in the third chapter is outlined.

It has long been observed that speakers systematically employ language from concrete and perceptually rich domains to talk about abstract concepts. One of the paradigm examples of this is the way in which the abstract domain TIME is metaphorically conceptualised in terms of the concrete domain SPACE in a wide range of languages throughout the world. In English, there are various types of spatial metaphors for time, including ‘deictic’ metaphors, which situate events in relation to the ego, ‘sequential’ metaphors, which position events in relation to one another, as part of a sequence and ‘extrinsic’ metaphors, which fix events in relation to the forward-moving flow of time. Of these, particular attention has been paid to two deictic space-time metaphors: the Moving Ego metaphor, which conceptualises the self as moving towards events in time, e.g. We’re approaching Christmas and the Moving Time metaphor, which conceptualises events in time moving relative to the self, e.g. Christmas is approaching. In addition to linguistic evidence, a body of research has provided evidence for the psychological reality of these two metaphors, demonstrating that thinking about spatial motion under various circumstances can prime different construals of time. While research investigating abstract thinking about time has been primarily focused on examining the effects of spatial priming on temporal reasoning, recent research has extended beyond this, providing preliminary evidence that personality differences, emotional experiences and the valence of an event (positive or negative) may also influence people’s perspectives on the movement of events in time. By building upon and extending these findings, the overall aim of this thesis is to shed light on the mechanisms at work during the interpretation of language in context, providing a more fully explanatory framework for the metaphoric representation of time. To do this, a series of studies were conducted to examine further the range of factors that may influence how people reason about events in time, focusing specifically on previously unexplored personality differences, lifestyle differences and behavioural differences (Studies 1 to 8). Next, the focus of the investigation turned to the interpretation and usage of metaphorical expressions about time in prescribed contexts (Studies 9 to 14). The findings of these studies are reported and discussed in terms of the theoretical, methodological and practical issues they raise for the language sciences.

This thesis presents a connectionist theory of how infinite languages may fit within finite minds. Arguments are presented against the distinction between linguistic competence and observable language performance. It is suggested that certain kinds of finite state automata, i.e recurrent neural networks are likely to have suffcient computational power,and the necessary generalization capability,to serve as models for the procesing and acquisition of linguistic structure.

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