This thesis explores the content and realization of evaluation through the lexico-grammar in comparable corpora of English and Italian opinion articles on the 1999 Kosovo crisis. The evaluations of the war protagonists Nato, Milosevic and the United Nations are compared, and goal-achievement is revealed to be important: negative evaluation of Nato concentrates on lack of achievement in the English corpus, and on lack of clarity of goals in the Italian. The evaluative adjective moral is found to be a banner word in the English corpus. Investigations into the lexico-grammar include an analysis of a) first person verbs and impersonal structures with evaluative functions, in which it is found that the English corpus makes greater use of first person structures; b) reporting markers before that-clauses and che-clauses, where argumentative attitudes towards reported propositions are more frequent in the English corpus, and c) adverbs of stance, which are used more to make argumentation explicit in the English corpus. The functions of interrogatives are investigated: interrogatives in the English corpus are interpreted as closing down debate in the text more than in the Italian corpus. Overall, evaluations in the English corpus are found to have a more overtly argumentative slant than their Italian equivalents.

This thesis is intended as a contribution to the study of the history of phonetic knowledge in the nineteenth century; in particular it aims at identifying some of the processes through which physiologists and philologists, i. e. Indo-European comparativists, came closer to each other and shared some of their learning. The thesis offers a detailed analysis of specific aspects of the pronunciation of consonants in the ancient Indo-European languages, Sanskrit, Greek and Latin, as described by nineteenth century European scholars. It concentrates on three specific aspects of the subject, `gutturals, `aspirates' and W. The term `guttural' (throat-sound), borrowed from Hebrew grammar, was used by most scholars throughout the nineteenth century and well into the twentieth for sounds we now know as `velar', `uvular', `pharyngeal' or `glottal'. The gradual recognition of the cardinal points along this continuum by nineteenth century scholars is discussed, together with their precise place of articulation. Palatal sounds, both the phonetic sounds formed at the hard palate and the ca series of Sanskrit consonants, are also discussed. The term `aspirate' was used by various nineteenth century scholars for the aspirated stops of Sanskrit and Greek, and by some scholars also for fricatives. There were differences of opinion as to the exact pronunciation of the Greek and Sanskrit aspirates; some scholars regarded them as aspirated stops and some as fricatives, while yet others regarded them as stops followed closely by a fricative, whose nature again was disputed: either a homorganic fricative or an h. There were also those who regarded the h element as an aspirated, or delayed, onset to the following vowel. The nature of h also caused controversy. There were those who regarded it as a full `letter', and those who saw it as merely one of several possible initial vowel sounds. This argument was influenced by the fact that in written Greek h appears as a superscript diacritic, the spiritus aspen, which has a corresponding spiritus lenis, regarded by some scholars as a glottal stop. There seems to have been no doubt that the voiced Sanskrit h was a full `letter'.

This thesis is an investigation of some aspects of staging and thematization in English expository texts, with a view to evaluating these concepts within an applied linguistic framework. Staging is a metaphorical label referring to a dimension of prose structure which gives relative prominence to different parts of a text. The term is used in two senses, (i) as a superordinate label of a number of surface structure manifestations ranging from the lexical to the semantic that highlight parts of the message for the reader, and (ii) as a hypothesis about a possible state of affairs reflected in surface structure manifestations. The functions of staging are, (i) to give relative prominence to various segments of the message, (ii) to convey the speaker's perspective on the information conveyed, in the message, and (iii) to organize the message into information blocks with a particular point of departure. Because there are varied and multi-levelled surface manifestations of staging, it was necessary to restrict this study to specific aspects of staging, namely those concerned with theme and thematization. The first part of the thesis examines a corpus-based study of the use and function of passives and it- and wh-clefts in context. These 'grammatical highlighting' devices were investigated in terms of their thematic, textual and communicative functions. Syntactic, semantic, functional and textual criteria were taken into account in this discuss¬ ion. The main contribution of this thesis lies in the presentation of a comprehensive discussion of it- and wh-clefts in the corpus. The second part of the thesis consists of a psycholinguistic investigation of some aspects of 'staging' and thematization in terms of two experimental paradigms. The first paradigm attempts to test some aspects of the notion of staging at the textual level and its effect on the perspective from which information from prose is recalled. This paradigm was also used to show the similarity between the notions of staging the textual level and 'thematization' at the sentence level. The second experimental paradigm has a more direct applied linguistic rationale. It attempts to compare the thematic preferences of a native speaker group with those of a group of undergraduate Egyptian learners of English. This set of experiments constrains the surface manifestations of staging to the thematic structures discussed in the first part of the thesis, namely passives, wh-clefts, and it-clefts; these structures are investigated within a text. The purpose of this set of experiments is to show that the learner group has problems in the area of thematization with the use of passive and cleft constructions in context. It is argued on the basis of both parts of the study that the two notions, those of 'staging' and 'thematization', form an important part of any text production and comprehension model, and that the teaching of such thematic devices in context should form an important part of the teaching of rhetoric in reading and writing to foreign learners of English.

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À partir d'un corpus vidéo de conversation spontanée en anglais, notre travail de thèse s'attache à déterminer si plusieurs types syntaxiques de constructions subordonnées expriment le même degré d'intégration à leur environnement co-textuel, d'une perspective multimodale. La littérature syntaxique décrit les subordonnées comme des formes dépendantes, qui spécifient ou élaborent le contenu d'une autre proposition. En montrant que les constructions sous étude n'expriment pas une dépendance uniforme à leur environnement selon la façon dont les locuteurs utilisent les modalités prosodique et gestuelle pour exprimer plus ou moins de démarcation, les résultats en production comme en perception suggèrent d'une part que les appositives sont produites avec davantage de rupture que les autres types syntaxiques, et d'autre part que la création d'une rupture s'appuie majoritairement sur des moyens davantage prosodiques que gestuels. / Based on a video recording of conversational British English and within the framework of Multimodal Discourse Analysis, this study tests whether three different syntactic types of subordinate structures are evenly integrated to their environment. Subordinate constructions have been described in syntax as dependent forms elaborating on primary elements of discourse. Beyond showing that subordinate constructions are not evenly dependent on their environment depending on how speakers use the prosodic and kinetic modalities to express greater (in)dependency, our results in production as in perception suggest on the one hand that appositive clauses show more break than the other syntactic types, and on the other hand that the creation of a break mainly relies on prosodic cues.

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