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This thesis is a corpus-based investigation from a pragmatic perspective or the phenomenon of idiomatic creativity. The ultimate aim of the thesis is to provide comprehensive empirical evidence of the intertwining relationships between different factors of idiomatic creativity and the effects of such relationships on the reassessment of the determinants of idiomatic creativity in context-specific communicative events. It has often been suggested in the psycholinguistics tradition that the semantic transparency of some idioms facilitates the creative manipulations of such idioms in discourse, while the lack thereof hinders creativity in some others. In other words, the internal characteristics of idioms, including compositionality, analysability and motivation, which contribute towards transparency, arc postulated to determine idiomatic creativity. While theoretical arguments and illustrative examples appear to support such a hypothesis, empirical validation of the hypothesis using large bodies of authentic data is still required for it to gain acceptance in the linguistic community. In the first half of the thesis, therefore, quantitative analyses of corpus data and statistical tests arc carried out to empirically validate the psycho-linguistic hypothesis concerning the semantic determinants of idiomatic creativity. It is found in the analyses and tests that there are significant trends in the data that point towards the prevalence or transparent idioms over opaque ones in terms of both the range and the frequency of their creative manifestations in authentic English discourse. In the second half of the thesis, with a view to flesh out the otherwise decontextualised and superficial results from such quantitative analyses, qualitative analyses of individual instances of idiom variants in the data are carried out, thus elaborating on the varying degrees or importance of the underlying factors of idiomatic creativity and, notably, their interaction with one another in specific contexts. The results suggest that, together with idioms' semantic characteristics, external factors, including context, cognitive constraints and phraseological constraints, also contribute to idiomatic creativity. It is further revealed that the roles of the facilitating and constraining factors of idiomatic creativity vary according to the particular context-specific types of variant, in which context has the overarching power to overrule certain constraints as well as to disambiguate unusual creative uses. As such, the true functional profile of idiomatic creativity is argued to be best described and predicted in relation to context. A context-based model of idiomatic creativity in authentic English discourse is therefore proposed in this thesis in the hope that it will contribute to the existing literature on idiomatic creativity and offer a better understanding of the possibilities and constraints on the phenomenon in real life discourse.

This thesis aims to introduce the theoretical concept of stance, as an aspect of interpersonal meaning, into the discipline of Translation Studies and to explore the reproduction of stance in translations of a heavily opinionated political genre commissioned by newspapers. It seeks to provide an account of how patterns of stance are conveyed in newspaper opinion articles on the ‘Arab Spring’ originally published in English in the Washington Post and the New York Times and then how these patterns are re-conveyed in full translations of these articles for two quality Arabic-language newspapers with divergent editorial policies: Al-Ghad and Al-Ittihad. A triangulation of methods is employed for providing a coherent analysis of stance at different levels: lexico-grammatical, textual, and contextual. Accordingly, the methodology chosen for the purposes of the study is a combination of corpus- and discourse-analytical methods that operate within the tradition of descriptive translation studies. The former is drawn from the lexicogrammatical framework of stance (Biber et al., 1999; Biber, 2006), while the latter is drawn from appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005). Also, the combined methodology is complemented by some aspects of Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (1992, 1995a) and Baker’s narrative theory (2006), which, to varying degrees, allow for the contextualisation of the findings and the explanation of translational behaviour. The main contribution of the thesis is that it introduces a new theoretical concept into the field – the concept of stance. This has not previously been approached within translation studies, although it has been high on the research agenda for the past two decades or so within the field of linguistics and its neighbouring disciplines. Also, the thesis has designed and tested a new combined theoretical approach to analyse this phenomenon within the tradition of descriptive translation studies. Moreover, this thesis contributes to the field as well by addressing a new form of shifts in translation, namely shift in stance. The examination of the conveyance and reconveyance of stance reveals that significant shifts in stance occurred in the Arabic translations produced by Al-Ghad and Al-Ittihad. These shifts result in the weakening, accentuation, and entire loss of original stance.

Muslims across the world memorize the Quran in Arabic for verbatim recall. Memorizers can be native speakers of Arabic, non-native speakers of Arabic, or non-Arabic speakers. The last category of speakers constitutes an unusual learner population, in that they cannot draw on primary linguistic knowledge to assist their memorization. Research on memorization suggests that memorization may instil sensitivity to patterns that can be used to bootstrap learning. The purpose of this study is to investigate if memorization of the Quran by non-Arabic speaking memorizers leads to pattern recognition in Classical Arabic. Memorizers of the Quran with no knowledge of Arabic were tested on their awareness of language patterns through a grammaticality judgement task (study 2). Contrary to implicit predictions in the research literature, findings from the language tests indicated that the participants had not developed any sensitivity to the morphological patterns of Classical Arabic. These results are discussed in the light of expert Quran memorizers’ reflections on their memorization practices (study 1), including what they brought to the act of memorization and what, according to them, underlay their success in memorization. It is proposed that memorizers’ extreme risk aversion in memorization stands in their way of developing awareness of the language patterns. This interpretation is further evidenced by results from a follow up study on native speakers of Arabic, who also did poorly on the grammaticality judgement task. The conclusion drawn is that Quran memorizers recite accurately because they don’t learn the language. It is further concluded that Quran memorization is a special case, in which a range of extra linguistic factors such as identity, motivation and intention play an important role.

This thesis is a study of the literary practice of shared reading as practised by The Reader Organisation (TRO) in its Get into Reading (GIR) project. The first and shorter half of the thesis offers an introductory location of the key elements of GIR practice within TRO’s sense of the English literary tradition. The first two chapters thus examine the foundations for the reading of poetry (in chapter one with regard to the Elizabethan lyric) and prose (in chapter two in relation to Victorian realism) within GIR. Part two investigates the actual praxis of shared reading aloud in groups. Chapters three to five provide an account of the methodology and findings of research into the practice of GIR. ‘Bibliotherapy’ is problematised here as a term which, whilst it appeals to the idea of the relevance and use of books, and points to the existence of a place for reading within a specifically prescribed area, also risks narrowing down the idea of the shared reading model. Chapters three and four, forming the central part of the thesis, set out the terms of a literary-critical analysis of transcripts collected from GIR sessions, and outline the discovery within these transcripts of evidence of a varied model of literary thinking prompted by the reading-group leaders trained by TRO. Chapter three concentrates on the group-session transcripts; chapter four on individual case-studies across sessions. These chapters provide the focus for the thesis as a study of the non-specialist responses of real readers to what literature is. A toolkit is offered to identify certain tools and values that are implicit within the experience. It is to be hoped that future studies might refine, correct, or build upon the analyses set out in these chapters in particular through the use of established formal techniques such as conversation and discourse analysis. But the initial aim here was to investigate the phenomena in literary terms ahead of any such alignment with the categories of linguistics. In chapter five the findings of the present study are consolidated through a series of individual interviews with a number of the participants, offering their experience at another level and in reflective aftermath. Increasingly GIR is being introduced as a form of intervention within modern mental health care, and the thesis closes with a consideration of the place of shared group reading within the context of health and the languages of cure or therapy.