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Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / There is increasing awareness among linguists that discourse analysis inevitably involves analyses of meanings arising from the combination of multiple modes of communication. The evolving multimodal pedagogic environment for teaching English as a foreign language (henceforth EFL), among other communicative contexts, calls for a social, semiotic, and linguistic explanation. Situated within the theoretical landscape of social semiotics and in the pedagogic context of EFL education, the present study aims to elucidate how linguistic and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe interpersonal meaning in multimodal textbooks. The data drawn upon are eighteen EFL textbooks for primary and secondary schooling, published by People’s Education Press between 2002 and 2006. The research design consists of three complementary sub-studies. First, it investigates the ways in which the semantic regions of ENGAGEMENT and GRADUATION can be modelled in multimodal texts, with special reference to the interplay of voices in textbook discourse. The second sub-study analyzes how verbal and visual semiotic resources are co-deployed to construe the ‘emotion and attitude’ goal highlighted in curriculum standards, with a particular focus on verbiage-image relations. Third, it extends the linguistic concept ‘modality’ to multimodal discourse, exploring coding orientation in texts for different educational contexts and between different constituent genres. The main findings of this thesis are as follows: (1) A range of multimodal resources (i.e. labelling, dialogue balloon, jointly-constructed text, illustration and highlighting) are identified as enabling editor voice to negotiate meanings with reader voice and character voice. It is found that the way in which an ENGAGEMENT value can be scaled is strongly associated with the intrinsic property of the given multimodal resource. The interaction between multiple voices is closely related to contact, social distance, and point of view. (2) It is shown that images play an essential role in realizing attitudinal meanings. Together with verbal APPRAISAL resources, visual semiotic features work to position the readers in ways that align them to set pedagogic goals, guiding them in completing jointly-constructed texts. Moreover, an attitudinal shift from an emotional release to a more institutionalized type of evaluation can be identified as students advance through the school years. (3) It is argued that what counts as real in multimodal texts is socially defined and specific to a given communicative context. The nature of pedagogic discourse should be taken into account when visual displays are produced for pedagogic materials. The implications of this study include both theoretical and pedagogic aspects。Theoretically it adapts and extends APPRAISAL analysis to multimodal discourse, exploring the intersemiotic complementarity and co-instantiation in construing global evaluative stance. This semiotic exploration, in return, suggests ways in which discourse analysis may help textbook users better understand and interpret the multimodal features. With the affordances as well as limitations of semiotic resources made explicit, we may have one step further towards a comprehensive and critical understanding of multimodal construal of interpersonal meaning in pedagogic materials.

This thesis surveys patterns of production and use of greeting cards in Australia and analyses a corpus of greeting cards, examining the organisation of semiosis by greeting cards.As a commodity consumed for the express purpose of being given away, individuals using greeting cards enact themselves through a commodified technology of the self simultaneous with a performance that enacts relations with others.Particular focus is given to the 'fun-and- love' card, within the industry category of non-occasion greeting cards. This type of card is situated within a complex of performances which are constitutive of a contemporary nexus of commodification, public-private spheres, gender, interpersonal relations and discources of intimacy.As this is an inquiry into a commodity that is a texted cultural artefact, it is informed by both cultural and textual theories. The organisation of the thesis into two parts reflects its twin concerns: the first is akin to a study of the greeting card as a commodity that is given away, paying attention to practices of production, consumption and use within personal relationships. In symmetry with that exploration, Part Two is contiguous with the 'linguistic turn' that has taken many disciplines in productive directions over the duration of the twentieth century.In doing both these kinds of 'discourse analysis' articulated to an empirico-ethnographic study of a cultural artefact that embodies emotion, the thesis seeks to contribute to dialogues that are concerned with moving forward with respect to theorising relations among sociocultural practices and language and discourse. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis describes the development of a model of the relationships between the designer and their visual outcome that is intended to assist the designers understanding and management of the viewer experience. To date the focus of design discourse has been towards theories of interpretation that offer methods to decode messages, one of the more significant being semiotics. The application of semiotic theory to the field of design has enabled a greater understanding of how meaning is produced in visual communication, it does not account for how the designer affects the type of engagement the viewer has with the material which is a significant aspect of the communication process. The aim of this research is to develop a model of the design/visual outcome relationship that will assist designer’s management of viewer experience. To develop this model, the author examined literary theory as it is a discourse that has analysed its own creative process extensively. While there are many useful parallels that can be drawn between design and literary discourses, it is the notion of distance that is the most useful for this research. Through modifying the textual devices used by an author to create these varying distances, a model that identifies four types of visual narrators was developed – Idiosyncratic, Implicit, Imperative and Esoteric. This research demonstrates the effectiveness of the design concept of distance as a method of analysis for design and proposes how the designers might adopt distance method for considering the viewer experience during the design process, as opposed to leaving it to semioticians to critique post-publication / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) (Design)

This thesis surveys patterns of production and use of greeting cards in Australia and analyses a corpus of greeting cards, examining the organisation of semiosis by greeting cards.As a commodity consumed for the express purpose of being given away, individuals using greeting cards enact themselves through a commodified technology of the self simultaneous with a performance that enacts relations with others.Particular focus is given to the 'fun-and- love' card, within the industry category of non-occasion greeting cards. This type of card is situated within a complex of performances which are constitutive of a contemporary nexus of commodification, public-private spheres, gender, interpersonal relations and discources of intimacy.As this is an inquiry into a commodity that is a texted cultural artefact, it is informed by both cultural and textual theories. The organisation of the thesis into two parts reflects its twin concerns: the first is akin to a study of the greeting card as a commodity that is given away, paying attention to practices of production, consumption and use within personal relationships. In symmetry with that exploration, Part Two is contiguous with the 'linguistic turn' that has taken many disciplines in productive directions over the duration of the twentieth century.In doing both these kinds of 'discourse analysis' articulated to an empirico-ethnographic study of a cultural artefact that embodies emotion, the thesis seeks to contribute to dialogues that are concerned with moving forward with respect to theorising relations among sociocultural practices and language and discourse. / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

Doctor of Philosophy(PhD) / This thesis is a contrastive genre study which explores newspaper commentaries on terrorism in Chinese and Australian newspapers. The study examines the textual patterning of the Australian and Chinese commentaries, interpersonal and intertextual features of the texts as well as considers possible contextual factors which might contribute to the formation of the newspaper commentaries in the two different languages and cultures. For the framework of its analysis, the study draws on systemic functional linguistics, English for Specific Purposes and new rhetoric genre studies, critical discourse analysis, and discussions of the role of the mass media in the two different cultures. The study reveals that Chinese writers often use explanatory rather than argumentative expositions in their newspaper commentaries. They seem to distance themselves from outside sources and seldom indicate endorsement of these sources. Australian writers, on the other hand, predominantly use argumentative expositions to argue their points of view. They integrate and manipulate outside sources in various ways to establish and provide support for the views they express. It is argued that these textual and intertextual practices are closely related to contextual factors, especially the roles of the media and opinion discourse in contemporary China and Australia. The study, by providing both a textual and contextual view of the genre under investigation in the two languages and cultures, aims to establish a framework for contrastive rhetoric research which moves beyond the text into the context of production and interpretation of the texts as a way of exploring reasons for the linguistic and rhetorical choices made in the two sets of texts.

Contrary to common folk and expert theory, the human self is not unitary. There is no Cartesian theatre or homunculus functioning as a metaphorical overlord. Rather, it is an abstractum gleaned from a person�s experiences-a centre of narrative gravity (Dennett 1991). Experiences are a person�s cognisance of her ventures in life from a particular unique perspective. In perspectivising her experiences, the person imputes a certain structure, order, and significance to them. Events are seen as unfolding in a certain inherently and internally coherent way characterised by causality, temporality, or intentionality, etc. In other words, a person�s self emerges out of her innumerable narrativisations of experience, as well as the different protagonist roles she plays in them. Her behaviours in different situations can be understood as different life-narratives being foregrounded, when she is faced with different stimuli different experiences/events present. In real life, self-reflective discourse frequently alludes to a divided, partitive self, and the experiences/behaviours that it can engage in. In academic study, this concept of the divided and narrative-constructivist self is well-represented in disciplines ranging from philosophy (e.g., Dennett 1991, 2005), developmental psychology (e.g., Markus & Nurius 1986; Bruner 1990, 2001; Stern 1994), cognitive psychology (e.g., Hermans & Kempen 1993; Hermans 2002), neuropsychology (e.g. Damasio 1999), psychiatry (e.g., Feinberg 2001), to linguistics (e.g., McNeil 1996; Ochs & Capps 1996; Nair 2003). Depending on the particular theory, however, emphasis is often placed either on its divided or its narrative-constructivist nature. This thesis argues, however, that the two are coexistent and interdependent, and both are essential to the self�s ontology. Its objectives are therefore: (i) to propose a partitioned-narrative model of the self which unifies the two perspectives by positing that the partitioned-representational (Dinsmore 1991) nature of narratives entails the partitioned structure of the self; and (ii) to propose that the partitioned-narrative ontology of the self is what enables and motivates much of our self-reflective discourse and the grammatical resources for constructing that discourse. Partitioning guarantees that a part of the self, i.e., one of its narratives, can be selectively attended to, foregrounded, objectified, and hence talked about. Narrativity provides the contextual guidance and constraints for meaning-construction in such discourse. This claim is substantiated with three application cases: the use of anaphoric reflexives (I found myself smiling); various usages of proper names, including eponyms (the Shakespeare of architecture), eponymic denominal adjectives (a Herculean effort), etc.; and partitive-self constructions which explicitly profile partitioned and selectively focal narratives (That�s his hormones talking). When analysed using the proposed model, these apparently disparate behaviours turn out to share a common basis: the partitioned-narrative self.

This thesis examines how the reification of the concept of ' self - esteem ' has been achieved discursively. It investigates how the concept of self - esteem has been developed over time and how it operates as an explanatory construct across a rage of areas and disciplines. The analyses in this thesis examine texts coming from psychiatry, self - help publications and public policy. These disciplines have taken up, utilized and, consequently re - constructed the concept of self - esteem according to their own specific needs and their particular discursive organizations. The thesis adopts the assumption that abstract psychological constructs are linguistically achieved and thus can be most effectively studied through focusing on the ' workings of language ', rather than on ' discovering ' some inner phenomena. Informed by Wittgenstein, critical psychology, and critical linguistics, the analyses undertake grammatical investigations into the concept of self - esteem. These investigations, based on the analysis of patterns in the lexico - grammar, examine ' meanings ' accumulated in the concept of self - esteem. These examinations extend to the level of social, cultural, and political contexts which have influenced our understandings of the concept of self - esteem. The investigations of ' meanings ' embedded in the notion of self - esteem make possible an exploration of the values, assumptions and connotations carried by this concept. The analyses demonstrate that self - esteem has been constructed over time as an increasingly more tangible, internalized and cognitive phenomenon. This intensified reification produced a ' self - esteem ' that is not only a consistent and measurable ' feature ' of the human psyche, but is an agentive force shaping human lives. Moreover, these constructions of self - esteem promote particular ethical principles and ultraconservative values. Paradoxically, while discourses of self - esteem have become a part of neo - liberal philosophies emphasizing personal liberty and freedom of choice, they serve to limit the choices of many social groups. / Thesis (Ph.D.)--Medical School, 2005.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2007. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.

<p>The study investigates the social stratification of albinos in Tanzania. This is done by conducting a case study in Babati and decoding and generalising the attitudes in a national context. This is combined with a litterateur study which has been made analysing the attitudes towards albinos in the media. The study has used a critical as well as continental discourse analysis and decoded the data by using the theories of social constructivism and of stigma. Semi-structured interviews as well as a litterateur study was conducted.</p><p>The result proved that the albinos in Tanzania are stigmatised in the society and that people treat them based on myths and preconceptions. This stratification sometimes goes as far as to murders and mutations of albinos. The respondents as well as the media and government refer to the lack of education as the main cause behind the killings of albinos. A combination of the myths about albinos and the lack of education is the reasons that are accurate when analysing the reasons behind the ongoing murders.</p><p><strong> </strong></p><p><strong></strong> </p><p><strong> </strong></p>