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The goal of this thesis is to propose a cognitive approach to intertextuality. Intertextuality has attracted the attention of a number of literary scholars interested in discussing the interrelations between literary texts without, however, focusing on how readers create these connections. On the other hand, despite its reader-oriented approach, cognitive poetics has largely neglected the concept. This project employs recent developments in the field of cognitive linguistics and cognitive psychology and proposes a multi-layered approach to intertextuality in the light of the principles of cognitive poetics. The main part of the thesis draws on the cognitive notion of frames defined as online processing domains. I propose that readers create intertextual links by combining their background knowledge with textual elements in intertextual frames. Three types of frames are identified: semantic, topical and stylistic. The term 'semantic frame' refers to the more impressionistic links that emerge from the identification of a single lexical item, while the term 'topical frame' refers to more complex constructions built by readers through the identification of multiple textual elements. The term 'stylistic frame' refers to links based on quotation identification or genre similarities. A variety of literary texts will be discussed in order to illustrate how these frames may be created. The final part of the thesis is dedicated to the investigation of the relationship between intertextuality and the emotional engagement of readers with literary texts reflecting recent directions in cognitive poetics. This is accompanied with a mixed methods study designed to present empirical data on how readers construct intertextual links and on the effects these have on the reading experience. The overall aim of this project is to provide the foundations and the theoretical point-of-entry for further related research.

Since the publication of Halliday (1988) a number of studies on the linguistic encoding of pain have appeared. These include Lascaratou (2003; 2007) on Greek, Hori (2006) on Japanese, Overlach (2008) on German. Using Systemic Functional Grammar (SFG), this thesis adds another language to the existing body of work on how physical pain gets encoded crosslinguistically. The empirical work undertaken comprises the analysis of an original corpus of interviews with seven Italian speakers living with one of three chronic conditions: Systemic Lupus Erythematosus (SLE), Rheumatoid Arthritis (RA), and Spinal Disc Herniation (SDH). This thesis shows the multiple ways in which the lexicogrammar of Italian encodes bodily pain as THING, (nominally), HAPPENING (through verbs), and as QUALITY of something (adjectivally). The analysis shows that speakers in the corpus favour the first type of encoding and suggests why this might be the case. From pain itself, the scope of the analysis broadens to include the lived experience of physical pain related to chronic illness by looking at the informants’ use of evaluative language. This is analysed by means of Appraisal Theory (Martin and Rose, 2003; Martin, 2005; Martin and White, 2005), which identifies three attitudes encoded through the system of appraisal. These are: affect (the speaker’s feelings and emotive responses), appreciation (the evaluation of things and events), and judgement (evaluations of people’s behaviour). The analysis shows the most frequently encoded attitude is affect, with a tendency to favour indirect over direct encodings. It is suggested that this is because of a desire to avoid coming across as over emotional and therefore unreliable, a sentiment rooted in the informants’ experiences of having their symptoms and conditions doubted in the past, even in medical encounters. A broad narrative analysis approach is then used to explore the types of identities that are constructed and presented by the informants. The notion of agency is used to critique the commonly-held view of chronic illness and pain as completely disempowering. The analysis shows that – within the same individual – feelings of powerlessness coexist, in a fluid state, with notions of heightened agency. My informants work towards preserving a pre-illness identity where contradictions and paradoxes are harmonised through language.

This thesis uses the tools and methods of corpus linguistics to study the process of knowledge encoding in a corpus of texts from the scientific discipline of genetics. It is argued here that the approach taken fits into the tradition of corpus-driven approaches to linguistic questions in that no assumption is made about the linguistic form that this knowledge encoding will take. Instead the study proceeds by identifying a set of keywords using the concept of lexical chains to identify items of terminology. The investigation of these uses the cluster function of WordSmith Tools (Scott 2004) and is qualitative, following Sinclair (1991; 2004) in attempting to develop a picture of the typical linguistic nature of the patterns surrounding these clusters inductively through a process of studying collocation and colligation patterns and identifying phraseology. It is argued here that such an approach is required to discover linguistic aspects of epistemic encoding that have as yet not been identified by those working in the related fields of discourse analysis or corpus linguistics.

Research into modality has tended to focus on modal auxiliary verbs (modals) at the expense of other forms that may express modal meaning. This thesis takes a phraseological, exploratory approach to the investigation of modal meaning by focusing on modal expressions with verbs with wh-clause complementation (the V wh pattern). The approach first tests the hypothesis that the pattern is associated with markers of modal meaning and then goes on to conduct a concordance analysis of samples of frequently-occurring V wh verbs taken from the British National Corpus. This analysis first categorizes these verbs into semantic sets and then explores which realizations of different types of modal meaning – obligation, volition, potential, and uncertainty – are most often found with verbs in particular sets. The presentation of the results of this analysis also involves a discussion of how exponents of modal meaning other than modals extend the range of expression available to users of English, indicating what an exclusive focus on modals will tend to overlook.

This study is broadly concerned with the analysis of ideology in discourse. More specifically, it investigates the role modality plays in reflecting underlying ideologies as well as ideological inconsistencies in three practical analyses of discourse. Achieving these objectives is, I argue, dependent on a view of discourse which is not only functional but also pragmatic. The functional aspect of this view reflects the broad objectives of functional linguistics: i.e. relating linguistic structures to social structures. The pragmatic aspect reflects an emphasis on the need not to exclude 'the reader' from the process of interpretation. Whereas previous studies have either entirely neglected or presented an unsatisfactory account of the reader, the proposed functional-pragmatic approach to discourse analysis resolves this issue by allowing a systematic variance in interpretation. This is done in the light of a systematic account of modality which helps present a realistic and practical consideration of the role of the reader in approaching discourse analysis. Again, in line with a functional and pragmatic view of discourse, the argument put forward in this study is that all 'types' of discourse can be approached in a similar manner for critical analysis. Consequently, practical analyses of ideology through modality in three instances of discourse: literary texts, political texts and scientific texts are presented. The overall aim is to show how a systematic, functional and pragmatic analysis of modality is adequate in critically analysing the ideologies present in all texts.

The theoretical and experimental work presented in this thesis investigates the spray/load and dative alternations. The purpose is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the alternations in terms of their syntactic structures and to account for how contextual information drives differences in the linear order of their VP arguments. This analysis shows that the syntactic structures of the spray/load and dative alternations are identical; each variant in an alternation is characterised by one of two available structures proposed in Janke and Neeleman (2012). Each structure is shown to respect a novel thematic hierarchy that is based on the value of binary feature clusters (Reinhart, 2000) rather than by direct reference to semantic labels. The choice of a particular structure is demonstrated to be affected by the non-semantic context in which the spray/load or dative sentence is generated. This is a consequence of the limited processing capacity of Working Memory and the allocation of attentional resources to a stimulus. Experimental data from an as yet untested variable of the visual context – the egocentric perception of distance – is found to interact with word order preferences of the alternations. I conclude that non-semantic contextual information interacts with the encoding of an event which ultimately has consequences for syntactic choices.

This thesis concerns the form-meaning mapping of multimodal communicative actions consisting of speech signals and improvised co-speech gestures, produced spontaneously with the hand. The interaction between speech and speech-accompanying gestures has been standardly addressed from a cognitive perspective to establish the underlying cognitive mechanisms for the synchronous speech and gesture production, and also from a computational perspective to build computer systems that communicate through multiple modalities. Based on the findings of this previous research, we advance a new theory in which the mapping from the form of the combined speech-and-gesture signal to its meaning is analysed in a constraint-based multimodal grammar. We propose several construction rules about multimodal well-formedness that we motivate empirically from an extensive and detailed corpus study. In particular, the construction rules use the prosody, syntax and semantics of speech, the form and meaning of the gesture signal, as well as the temporal performance of the speech relative to the temporal performance of the gesture to constrain the derivation of a single multimodal syntax tree which in turn determines a meaning representation via standard mechanisms for semantic composition. Gestural form often underspecifies its meaning, and so the output of our grammar is underspecified logical formulae that support the range of possible interpretations of the multimodal act in its final context-of-use, given the current models of the semantics/ pragmatics interface. It is standardly held in the gesture community that the co-expressivity of speech and gesture is determined on the basis of their temporal co-occurrence: that is, a gesture signal is semantically related to the speech signal that happened at the same time as the gesture. Whereas this is usually taken for granted, we propose a methodology of establishing in a systematic and domain-independent way which spoken element(s) gesture can be semantically related to, based on their form, so as to yield a meaning representation that supports the intended interpretation(s) in context. The ‘semantic’ alignment of speech and gesture is thus driven not from the temporal co-occurrence alone, but also from the linguistic properties of the speech signal gesture overlaps with. In so doing, we contribute a fine-grained system for articulating the form-meaning mapping of multimodal actions that uses standard methods from linguistics. We show that just as language exhibits ambiguity in both form and meaning, so do multimodal actions: for instance, the integration of gesture is not restricted to a unique speech phrase but rather speech and gesture can be aligned in multiple multimodal syntax trees thus yielding distinct meaning representations. These multiple mappings stem from the fact that the meaning as derived from gesture form is highly incomplete even in context. An overall challenge is thus to account for the range of possible interpretations of the multimodal action in context using standard methods from linguistics for syntactic derivation and semantic composition.

Following a decline over the twentieth century, Breton has seen an increase in revival efforts, including Breton-medium education. This study investigates the effect of the language transmission gap on the morphosyntax of verbs. Fieldwork was undertaken with three distinct age groups: older native speakers (aged over 65), and two groups which make up a younger generation of speakers: children in Breton-medium education, and young adults who have been schooled in Breton. The question of word order and the placement of verbs in Breton has been controversial, largely because it is complex and variable, making the identification of basic word order difficult. The data show that usage across the older generation is fairly consistent, with V2 word order in matrix clauses. Verbal mutation is also maintained. Despite the transmission gap, younger adults from French-speaking homes do not systematically replace Breton patterns with French SVO. Rather, they avoid SVO in some contexts, and indeed use it less than the senior adults. The amount of input speakers receive is crucial: children in bilingual schooling, with only half of their classes in Breton, tend to oversimplify word order patterns and show French influence. In contrast, those with additional Breton input from a family member are more proficient. Children have difficulty acquiring mutation rules, and do not seem to have grasped the system of verbal mutation, but young adults use mutation proficiently, like the older speakers. Consequently, despite strong French influence, Breton word order has remained consistent. The fact that verbal mutation is variable in children reflects late acquisition, since the young adults rarely diverge from the expected usage. Thus, the changes in Breton morphosyntax are subtler than expected in light of the unusual transmission pattern and close proximity to French. The crucial factor appears to be sustained input in the language.

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