This qualitative case study explores the language learning experiences of a sample of Gujarati women in London and uses tools of qualitative inquiry including 20 semi-structured interviews, two focus groups, observation and document analysis. The process of learning English as a second language is explored through an intersectional lens that takes account of gender, race and class and the corresponding identity constructions of Gujarati women. An inability to speak English for these women is further complicated by inequities brought about by classed structures, private/public patriarchy and processes of ‘othering’ for migrant women. This study is situated during a period of both rising nationalistic ideas in the UK, and during a precise moment of cultural nationalism in South Asia which is framed by concerns with race, ethnicity, class and gender which informs the formation of British-Asian femininities. This research supports other work that conceptualises identity as being in a constant state of flux, which is made explicitly visible within language learning processes that highlight identity as socially constructed, contradictory, and fluid. The poststructuralist conception of social identity as multiple, as a site of struggle, and subject to change is forms the basis of the theoretical framework. The concept of ‘investment' is employed to describe immigrant women’s involvement in language learning processes. The findings suggest implications for immigrant language training policies and further research. While the women interviewed in this research experience ‘race’ and patriarchy along class lines, they also face a dilemma of balancing their personal lives and protecting themselves from the ‘corrupting Western’ culture through imposed cultural definitions which might result in them taking up an ‘oppressed’ South Asian femininity. However, with time and age, the women’s subjectivities are reworked through acts of resistance, and examples of subtle manipulation which manifest as expressions of opposition as they perform an appreciation of ‘their own culture’ while simultaneously appropriating white spaces. Here, through this appropriation, the respondents construct ‘resistant identities’ and define a new ‘third space’. The dichotomies between East and West and tradition and modernity dissipate as the women’s agency allows them the actual construction of their identities as they go on learning English and changing their lives. These women’s oral histories speak of the gendered and sexualized discourses of assimilation, racism, and ‘otherness’, as well as other multiple points in which they break down. The conceptual insights gained from studying these Gujarati women are plentiful.

Die Arbeit ist eine korpusbasierende Analyse von Stimmbeschreibungen in englischsprachigen fiktionalen Texten, die sowohl einen sprachwissenschaftlich-semantischen als auch einen literaturwissenschaftlichen Ansatzpunkt wählt. Ersterer geht dabei auf den "Pool" des Stimmbeschreibungsmaterials ein, letzterer untersucht die Funktion von Stimmdarstellungen in der Gesamtkonzeption von Figuren und Texten und betrachtet dabei auch Aspekte wie das Verhältnis von Autor-Figur-Leser und die Informationsvergabe in fiktionalen Texten. Für die Analyse wurde ein Korpus aus Romanen, Kurzgeschichten und Dramen des 20. Jahrhunderts erstellt. Um ein möglichst breites Spektrum zu erlangen, wurden Texte von britischen, amerikanischen und Commonwealth-Autoren gewählt. Zudem wurden Trivialromane genauso berücksichtigt wie Werke der "höherstehenden" Literatur. Im Zentrum von Teil I der Analyse steht die semantische Klassifizierung von Stimmbeschreibungen nach klangbeschreibenden (z.B. shrill, rumbling, husky)und sprecherbezogenen Angaben, bei denen auch emotionale, pragmatische und machtstrukturierende Stimmangaben (z.B. happy, apologizing, condescending) eingeschlossen sind, die dem Leser Aufschluß über das Innenleben und die Beziehungsstrukturen von fiktionalen Charakteren geben. Da die Schwierigkeit der Stimmklangwiedergabe für Autoren geradezu eine willkommene Einladung für das Spiel mit Metaphern und ungewöhnlichen Vergleichen ist, wird den metaphorisch-bildhaften Stimmdarstellungen in Teil II ein Sonderkapitel gewidmet. Teil III geht schließlich auf die funktionalen Aspekte der Stimmdarstellungen ein. So dient das Zusammenspiel von Meta- und Objektsprache als Verständnissicherung für den Leser, kann aber auch Einblick in den Figurencharakter geben. Entscheidend ist jedoch die Wirkung der Stimme in der Gesamtkonzeption von Figuren, denn häufig gehen optische und akustische Figurenbeschreibungen Hand in Hand, so daß über die beiden Wahrnehmungskanäle ein komplexes Charakterbild entsteht, über das Sympathie und Antipathie des Lesers gesteuert werden können. Autoren arbeiten dabei häufig mit Stereotypen und Klischeebrüchen. Letzlich dienen die Stimmdarstellungen der Verlebendigung von Figuren und unterstützen somit die Pseudo-Realität von fiktionalen Texten. Die scheinbar unendliche Fülle von Stimmbeschreibungen zeigt, daß Figuren für den Leser nicht nur durch ihr Aussehen, sondern auch durch ihre habituelle und situationelle Stimme "lebendig" werden. / This paper is a corpus-based analysis of voice description in English fictional texts, combining a linguistic-semantic with a literary viewpoint. While the former is concerned with the "pool" of language material available for describing the human voice, the latter investigates the function of voice description in the overall conception of literary characters and texts. It also includes aspects such as the author-character-reader relationship and the flow of information in fictional texts. The corpus includes 20th century novels, short stories and plays by British, American and Commonwealth authors that show consistency in the use of voice description. No distinction was made between light fiction and "real" literature. Part I focuses on a semantic classification of voice description, distinguishing between labels devoted exclusively to describing sound - e.g. shrill, rumbling or husky - and labels that characterize the speaker, e.g. voice descriptions concerned with emotions or power relations such as happy, apologizing or condescending, offering the reader insight into the inner life of a character and his/her relationship with other characters. The difficulty of accurate voice description is greeted by many authors as a welcome invitation to make use of metaphor and often quite unusual simile. Part II of this paper is therefore dedicated to the intriguing field of metaphorical voice description. Part III is concerned with the functional aspects of voice description in fictional texts. The interplay between meta-language and object-language may serve to ensure reader understanding of the narrative, but at the same time it may open a path into the character's mind. The vital point, however, is the importance of voice in the conception of fictional characters, because optic and acoustic description are often equally important in evoking a vivid picture of the figure in the mind of the reader. Voice description has therefore a fundamental role to play in the construction of the mock reality of ficitonal texts. Voice is also regarded by the reader as a personality trait or a "mirror of the soul" and authors very often employ stereotypes and the breaking of clichés to steer the reader's sympathy or antipathy. The paper concludes that the "translation" of the human voice into a written text, i.e. the change from the acoustic to the visible medium, triggers an almost infinite variety of descriptive tools. Furthermore, since readers are not interested in what a character looks like but also in what he/she sounds like, voice description is an integral part of many fictional texts.

In demokratischen Regierungssystemen sind die Minister als Agenten der exekutiven Staatsgewalt gegenüber dem Parlament für ihre Handlungen verantwortlich. Die ministerielle Fragestunde ist hierbei ein gewichtiges Kontollinstrument und Gegenstand der vorliegenden kontrastiven Metaphernanalyse unter spezieller Berücksichtigung von pragmatischen und kulturellen Gesichtspunkten. Neben einer Diskussion und Kontextualisierung kognitiver Metapherntheorien wird vor allem im Rahmen einer Korpusanalyse festgestellt, welche Quelldomänen in diesem Diskursgenre quantitativ am häufigsten und qualitativ am bedeutsamsten für das zum Zeitpunkt der globalen Wirtschafts- und Finanzkrise relevante Makrotopik der Wirtschaftsrezession auftreten; außerdem welche interkulturellen Variationen und Konventionaliäten in den konzeptuellen Metaphern bestehen. / In the course of this contrastive metaphor analysis the metaphoric source domains in the parliamentary discourse of question time are qualitatively and quantitatively examined against the background of cognitive metaphor theories . A detailed original corpus analysis of three versions of question time reveals which intercultural variations and conventionalities exist in the assessed conceptual metaphors

Study of international communication strategies in small and medium-sized companies; focus on foreign language strategies; quantitative empirical analysis of the following areas: global marketing, international trade fairs, press and media relations, foreign language training, internet presentation and sales material; qualitative linguistic analysis of English-language brochures published by SMEs, identification of areas of improvement, discussion of the services of a communications consultant with the objective of coordinating foreign language communication tasks in SMEs. / Untersuchung internationaler Kommunikationsstrategien in mittelständischen Unternehmen; Schwerpunkt: (fremd)sprachliche Umsetzung; quantitative empirische Analyse folgender Bereiche: globales Marketing,internationale Messen, Pressearbeit, fremdsprachliche Weiterbildung, Internetpräsentation, Werbematerialien und Broschüren; qualitative sprachwissenschaftliche Analyse von englischsprachigen Broschüren mittelständischer Unternehmen; Aufdeckung von Schwachstellen und Handlungsbedarf, Diskussion der Dienstleistungen eines Communications Consultants (Sprachenberaters) zur Koordination fremdsprachlicher kommunikativer Aufgaben in Unternehmen

Although the significant influence of lecturers’ beliefs on their practices in the classroom is well known, not much is known about teachers’ beliefs and the extent to which they influence reading instructional techniques (Woods, 2006). Furthermore, no comprehensive studies have been carried out in the context of Libyan universities, where lecturers in English are non-native speakers of the language and have only minimal resources and limited access to published research and scholarship regarding this topic. The present qualitative study aims to fill this gap in knowledge, considering contextual factors such as limited access to expert knowledge, a fixed curriculum, time restrictions and the isolation of lecturers, in an analysis of the beliefs that lecturers in English hold and the correspondence between these beliefs and their teaching practices. The study explores the factors that shape lecturers’ beliefs and examines the relationship between their beliefs and practices. Twenty-three unstructured observation sessions were conducted with male and female lecturers teaching English reading. Each class was observed 3 times, giving a total of 69 classes. In addition, semi-structured interviews were conducted with twenty male and female lecturers. The observation and interview data were analysed inspired by grounded theory. The findings revealed that lecturers held a variety of beliefs, and these did not always inform their practices in the classroom. This study provides a more in-depth understanding of the multifaceted relationship between what lecturers believe and what they practise regarding the teaching of English reading. The study acknowledges the themes of the differences and similarities between lecturers’ beliefs and practices, with observations such as ‘lecturers knew, but did not do’; ‘lecturers did, but were not aware that they did’; and ‘lecturers did, and they knew’. In addition, the study demonstrates that correspondence between beliefs and practices does not necessarily result in positive pedagogical consequences, while a lack of such correspondence may not have negative results. The research also reveals that, irrespective of the relationships between beliefs and practices, the underpinning rationales are linked to the complex relationship between lecturers’ beliefs and practices and a range of other factors. The findings of this study could be of benefit to both current and future EFL lecturers of reading and should also provide directions for further research in this field.

The object of the research reported in this thesis was to investigate the effects of word characteristics on children's reading performance. The experiments investigating word imagery and age of acquisition showed that imagery was a highly significant word characteristic for less skilled readers. There was an age of acquisition effect which was inversely correlated with reading ability. Probabilistic measures of orthographic regularity (such as Initial Bigram Frequency and Versatility and First Order approximation to English) were shown to be significant predictors of reading for good and poor readers and lexical decision performance for average readers. It also appeared that as reading ability improved, word properties such as the Orthographic Neighbour Ratio, which takes into account neighourhood size and frequency affected reading accuracy in the good and average reader in the lexical decision task. Other measures of orthographic regularity-orthographic neighbourhood size and body type were also shown to affect reading accuracy although effects appeared less marked for skilled readers. The regularity effect was seen to be dependent upon hostility and frequency of word neighbours, and the frequency of the target word itself, rather than due to a regularity-irregularity dichotomy.

Cette recherche propose d’examiner les marqueurs de l’anglais à la lumière du concept de polyphonie, abondamment utilisé en linguistique du français. Cette étude du cas de l’interro-négative en anglais questionne le caractère opératoire de ce concept : renseigne-t-il aussi le fonctionnement de la langue anglaise ?Pour répondre à cette question, nous proposons tout d’abord un retour sur les bases théoriques qui ont inspiré notre travail, pour les mettre ensuite à l’épreuve de nos occurrences d’interro-négatives extraites de notre corpus de nouvelles de Raymond Carver. Nous analysons ainsi, dans un premier temps, les interro-négatives sans pronom interrogatif, introduites par isn’t, don’t et didn’t. Dans un deuxième temps, nous portons notre attention sur la question ouverte introduite par le pronom interrogatif why. Enfin, les question-tags sont abordées : elles permettent d’asseoir notre thèse quant à la place importante qu’occupe l’interlocuteur dans la construction de message. A cet égard, nous réhabilitons son rôle dans le processus de construction de message en lui attribuant celui de co-constructeur / This research examines English linguistic markers using the concept of ‘polyphony’, i.e. intersubjectivity, a concept that is key to many studies in French linguistics. More precisely, we examine how negative interrogative constructions in English work, while also exploring the possibility that they may shed light on how the English linguistic system functions as a whole.To do so, we begin by reviewing the theoretical work that inspired our study. This earlier work is then applied to our corpus of negative interrogatives, which were sourced from a collection of short stories by Raymond Carver. Our analysis begins by looking at negative interrogatives that do not contain interrogative pronouns – more precisely, those introduced by isn’t, don’t and didn’t. Then, we focus our attention on wh-questions introduced by the interrogative pronoun why. Finally, we look at tag questions: this allows us to anchor our work in a place that accords primary importance to the interlocutor in the construction of linguistic messages. As far as this is concerned, we redefine the interlocutor’s role in this process by considering them a co-constructor of the linguistic message