The chief aim of this study is to investigate the impact of context on written peer response. A second aim is to explore students’ attitudes towards peer response. The investigation has taken place at an upper secondary school in the south-east of Sweden, involving 20 students in grade 2 and 3 in the course Swedish C. The investigation is based on the students’ comments on their peers’ speech drafts and six qualitative interviews. The material embraces 211 comments, all of which are analysed by use of methods from SFL. The theoretical frame is founded on Grice’s (1975) principle of communication and Brown & Levinson’s (1987) principle of politeness. The investigation shows, among other things, that in the choice between giving effective response (according to the principle of communication), or giving response that maintain the social balance (according to the principle of politeness), the students in general choose the latter. This is reflected in the results of the linguistic analysis and confirmed in the six interviews.

The purpose of this study is to investigate how different fitness Instagram influencers use persuasive speech acts in their marketing posts. Another aim is to look at the similarities and differences between the influencers’ use of linguistic strategies and speech acts. A study was conducted on 200 Instagram posts from four different fitness influencers. A total of 638 speech acts were coded using a typology by John Searle (1979). The typology consists of the speech acts representatives, directives, commissives, expressives and declaratives. Two speech acts were also added by the researchers; inquires and quotations. Furthermore, the speech acts were also coded for sentence forms (declarative, imperative and interrogative) and also whether they were direct or indirect speech acts. The study also discusses the different aspects of online communication and how these might affect someone’s marketing decisions. This shows that the language someone uses online might affect his or her online identity. There was also a comparison of the results to identify similarities and differences among the selected influencers. The results show a variation of usage of Searle’s (1979) speech acts. All speech acts were used at least once but directives showed the highest frequency among all influencers since they would often command or request their followers to perform a certain action. Another result was that many of the speech acts had a certain sentence structure but a different intention or function, namely, they were indirect speech acts. The intention and function of these speech acts were often to persuade the audience and were therefore persuasive speech acts.

This study is about language use in text messaging. In this study there are 338 text messages: 206 of them written by girls and 132 written by boys. The informants in the study are 16 years old and they live in the countryside on the outskirts of a small town in southern Sweden. The purpose of this study was to investigate characteristic linguistic features in the messages, in order to determine what significant meaning an emoticon such as a smiley brings to a text and further, to explore what speech acts smileys occur in. The results show that the language in the messages is a mix of spoken and written language. The characteristic features that were found in the messages were short sentences, onomatopoetic expressions, words written in capital letters, English expressions and use of smileys. Most of the speech acts in the messages were expressions of feelings or attitude. In the investigated corpus, 181 emoticons were found, scrutinized and placed into categories, which show various kinds of implicit information. The girls have used 97 emoticons and the boys 84. The most common emoticon was ,  which appeared 66 times in the messages and mostly served the purpose of making the message nice and friendly and sometimes to alleviate a direction. The reason for using emoticons in text messages was to bring life to it by expressing feelings, without an emoticon the true emotion of the message can easily be misunderstood.

L'un des objectifs de l'enseignement d'une langue est de rendre les apprenants conscients de la façon d'utiliser cette langue en fonction de leurs objectifs communicationnels. Cette compétence relève du champ de la pragmatique. Cette recherche porte sur l'enseignement de la pragmatique dans un contexte d’Anglais de Spécialité (ASP), à savoir la Faculté de médecine à l'Université de Taiz. Elle étudie le niveau de compétence pragmatique chez les étudiants en médecine dans le but de l’intégrer dans la salle de classe. L'étude fait appel à une enquête par questionnaire composé de “Discourse Completion Tasks” afin d'examiner la capacité des étudiants à produire des actes de langage, et d’un test de conscience visant à mesurer leur capacité à identifier les énoncés appropriés et inappropriés. L'interview est un autre outil que nous avons conçu pour explorer les perceptions des étudiants diplômés envers la compétence pragmatique. Une approche qualitative et quantitative est adoptée pour l’analyse des données. Les résultats de l'étude montrent que les étudiants ont un niveau de compétence pragmatique faible en ce qui concerne la production et aussi la conscience pragmatique. De plus, les étudiants ont fait preuve d'une réceptivité accrue quant à l'importance de la compétence pragmatique. Par conséquent, un modèle provisoire est proposé pour favoriser l’intégration de cette compétence en ayant recours à une série télévisée qui pourrait les motiver à apprendre l'anglais. / One of the goals of teaching a language is to make learners aware of how to use it to serve a communicative purpose. This lies within the scope of pragmatic competence. This research deals with teaching pragmatics in a context of English for Specific Purposes (ESP), namely the faculty of medicine at Taiz University. It investigates medical students’ level of pragmatic competence with the ultimate aim of integrating it in the classroom. The study makes use of a questionnaire composed of a Discourse Completion Task to examine students’ ability to produce speech acts and an awareness test to measure their ability to identify appropriate and inappropriate utterances. The other tool is an interview conducted to explore graduate students’ perceptions towards pragmatic competence. The data are analysed qualitatively and quantitatively. The study findings reveal a low level of pragmatic competence among students in the production and awareness levels. Besides, a positive tendency is shown towards the importance of pragmatic competence. Accordingly, a tentative model is proposed to incorporate pragmatic competence with the help of a medical TV show which will keep them motivated in learning English.

This work from the field of pragmatics introduces the application of the concept of speech acts (see J. L. Austin, J. Searle) to the literary sample of 15 chosen dialogues i.e. 1122 sentences from the novel Pride and Prejudice by the classical English author Jane Austen. It introduces an eight-member modified classification of speech acts: representatives, assertives, directives, connissives, expressives, interrogatives, requestives and daclarations. There are eight literary characters included in the research together with marginally Charlotte Lucas, who use speech acts to express their communicative intentions. The main heroine Elizabeth occurring in 12 dialogues uses mostly representatives, assertives and expressives. The remaining three dialogues involve Mrs Bennet and her husband Mr Bennet. Jane Austen's language is very rich and complex, with frequent occurrence of politeness turns of phrase. Some mixed and multiple categories also add to this complexity (there are 55.8% of simple ones; 39.1% of double, 4.6% of triple, quadruple only 0.5 % of the 969 sentences counted). This work also contains some comments on stylistic analysis featuring selected interesting literary and pragmatic aspects of the dialogical samples.

M.A. / This study investigates the connection between the biblical references to the Gospels in Actae Thoma, or the Apocryphal Acts of Judas Thomas, and the text of the Vetus Syria. The main objective is to verify whether the author of Actae Thoma was dependent on the Vetus Syria which was one of the largest and oldest Syriac text families containing the separate Gospels. An independent study in this regard has not yet been undertaken. Both Klijn and Burkitt touched on the biblical references in Actae Thoma but they did not attempt to investigate the references as the sole object of their research. The present study attempts to investigate all the biblical references in order to verify whether the author of Actae Thoma was indeed dependent on the Vetus Syria. The function of these references within the new context of Actae Thoma is also investigated. The value of the study lies in its contribution to our understanding of the Syriac textual history and of the function of these references. It seems that they were used to propagate the ideals of asceticism, to enhance the figure of the Apostle and bring the reader under the impression that he finds himself in a Biblical milieu. A basis for further study is also provided.

D.Litt. et Phil. / This study began with a premise that there is a need to guide the Christian community in Mozambique to know and put in practice biblical principles to address the scourge of corruption. This is motivated by the belief that the functional moral concerns should be shaped in accordance with the New Testament vision of Christian discipleship. The Church of the Nazarene in Mozambique serves as case study to understand the views and needs of the Christian community in the area of teaching and preaching on issues of material possessions. The intent was to come to exegetical answer on the question posed in this study of the meaning and function of metadidonai and related concepts in the Lukan corpus, not only in theological terms but also in a broader economical framework. There are many people who live in dire poverty in Africa, many through no fault of their own. Most of the poverty is the result of systematic and structural evils. These evils result from human policies designed to increase the profit and power to controlling individuals and corporate bodies. Corruption is one of the major setbacks for alleviation of poverty in Africa. There is no greater scourge that affects the proper functioning of any economic system than corruption. The effects of corruption also have legal ramifications, often undermining the rule of law. But fundamentally, corruption falls squarely in the moral realm because it is symptomatic of the original sin that marks the heart of every person (Gregg and Schenone 2003). I argue in this study that these systematic evils (greed and corruption) are the result of depravation of the heart. Therefore, to address these issues it is necessary to interpret the biblical text with the soteriological agenda. To accomplish this I contend that social scientific approach is vital because it allows the current read to access meaning of the text that can only be understood in light of social context of the original audience and the author of the text. However, beyond the unveiling of the meaning within its canonical context the current exegete must reinterpret the meaning for today. This will require not only the understanding of the meaning of the text in its original context but also the understanding of the current social systems that influence and impact the lives of the people in a particular community. Furthermore the interpreter must be true to his/her theological heritage. Thus, as a Nazarene with a Wesleyan theological heritage I sought to reinterpret metadidonai principle as found in Luke-Acts from a Wesleyan perspective. I emphasise in the study that human kind can not free themselves from depravation of the heart, but by God’s grace humanity has hope for deliverance from sin and from the power of sin (original sin). This is what Africa needs to be freed from corruption. In Luke-Acts text salvation is central motif for discipleship. The soteriological tone sets the frame within which the metadidonai is to be done.

Mobbning på arbetsplatsen kan definieras som återkommande psykiska kränkningar, ofta riktade mot en person från en eller flera kolleger. Dessa handlingar sker frekvent och över en längre period. Konsekvenser till följd av mobbning är psykiska, psykosomatiska och sociala besvär. Olika mätmetoder kan ge upphov till skilda resultat och frekvenser för förekomsten av mobbning på arbetsplatsen. Ett korrekt mått på utsatthet för mobbning är viktigt för samhälle och organisation för att kunna anpassa resurser för att hantera problemet. Ett internationellt ofta använt verktyg för att mäta utsatthet för mobbning på arbetsplatsen är Negative Acts Questionnaire Revised (NAQ-R), som har dokumenterad validitet och visat på goda psykometriska egenskaper. Syftet med den aktuella studien var att översatta och validera NAQ-R till svenska samt att jämföra resultaten med tidigare valideringar. Ett urval på 133 personer besvarade en webbenkät med NAQ-R, skalor för arbetsbelastning, rollkonflikter samt hälsa. Ett antal analyser genomfördes för att testa reliabilitet, begreppsvaliditet, samband med variabler som tidigare visat sig ha ett samband med mobbning, samt faktorstruktur. Resultatet visade hög intern konsistens, begreppsvaliditet samt starka samband med arbetsbelastning och rollkonflikter vilka är faktorer som i tidigare forskning visats kunna leda till mobbning på arbetsplatsen. Resultatet visar också ett starkt samband med ohälsa som en konsekvens av mobbning vilket går i linje med tidigare forskning. Sammantaget tyder aktuell studie på att den svenska översättningen av NAQ-R (NAQ-R-S) är ett tillförlitligt och trovärdigt instrument för att mäta mobbning på arbetsplatsen.

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[pt] Esta pesquisa consiste em uma investigação sobre o ato de fala pedido em e-mails em ambiente acadêmico. Baseando-se em conceitos da Pragmática, da Sociolinguística Interacional e do Interculturalismo, analisam-se pedidos encaminhados por estudantes brasileiros de graduação e de pós-graduação a diferentes professores. A análise preliminar dos e-mails envolve a identificação dos atos principais e a categorização dos pedidos segundo uma escala de diretividade. Em seguida, a pesquisa propõe-se a identificar as estratégias predominantes utilizadas para a elaboração de pedidos, verificar como pedidos de diferentes graus de imposição se relacionam com o grau de diretividade empregado e com elementos mitigadores para a preservação da face e investigar como as escolhas dos estudantes podem ser influenciadas por fatores culturais. Após a análise de dados, é apresentada uma proposta pedagógica com aplicabilidade em sala de aula de português para estrangeiros a fim de estimular a reflexão sobre a importância de se considerar a competência intercultural como um objetivo pedagógico. Por fim, os resultados desta pesquisa podem servir como subsídio para professores que desejem trabalhar com ato de fala pedido, conferindo especial atenção à relação entre diversidade cultural e aprendizagem de uma língua, e para futuras pesquisas que tenham como objetivo investigar se há diferenças no modo como falantes nativos e aprendizes de português fazem pedidos por meio de e-mails em ambiente acadêmico. / [en] This research consists of an investigation on the speech act of request in e-mail interaction within the university context. Relying on concepts from Pragmatics, Interactional Sociolinguistics and Interculturalism, the research examines email requests sent by Brazilian undergraduate and graduate students to their professors. The preliminary analysis of the emails involves the identification of each head act and its categorization with regard to the degree of directness. Then we propose to identify the request strategies preferred by the students to make requests and verify how requests of different levels of imposition on the professor relate to the directness levels employed and to mitigators to protect face. This study also accounts for cultural factors which influence students choices and decisions. After the data analysis, we present some pedagogical suggestions for Portuguese language teaching for foreigners in order to promote reflection on the importance of considering intercultural competence as a pedagogical goal. Finally, the results of this research may not only serve as an important resource for teachers wishing to teach the speech act of requests, paying particular attention to the relationship between cultural diversity and language learning, but also for future researchers interested in investigating whether there are differences in the way native speakers of Brazilian Portuguese and learners of Brazilian Portuguese make email requests in the university context.