This three-article dissertation emerges from interests in corpus linguistics (CL), corpus-based discourse analysis, and corpus-informed pedagogy for second language (L2) writing classrooms. A brief summary of each article follows: Article #1: Using the localized, place-based discourse of the Rosemont Copper Mine debate of southern Arizona, the first article produces a corpus-based discourse analysis of texts from the primary interest groups involved in the mine proposal. The ecolinguistic analysis details linguistic patterns within the interest groups' texts and discusses how these grammatical and semantic features form rhetorical constellations, i.e. patterns of linguistic features performing a shared rhetorical purpose, within the debate. Findings show that the industry group produces rhetoric of authority, certainty, and dominion through deployment of particular constellations of lexicogrammatical features while the linguistic elements in the environmental advocacy texts construe uncertainty, doubt, aesthetic value, and environmental stewardship. Article #2: The second article details an integration of geographical information system (GIS) and CL techniques with an ecolinguistics-informed analytical framework for the analysis of the same contentious environmental debate from southern Arizona. The application of GIS and CL procedures enabled the mapping of place name mentions present within two interest group corpora as well as the frequency of particular semantic tags and semantic tag sets that co-occur with specific places prominent in the debate. The findings and the GIS visualizations exhibit how different interest groups refer to and represent geographical places within their discourse and how these references to places index ideological positions towards the environment. Article #3: The final article details a study in which twenty-one international students in the second course of an undergraduate writing program sequence at a U.S. university studied the local debate regarding the Rosemont Copper Mine. The participants analyzed texts from two primary interest groups, a local, environmental group and an international mining company, and participated in a series of corpus-aided activities using corpus data derived from texts from the opposing groups. The contrastive analyses made possible through the study of texts and corpus data from the two sharply distinct groups enabled students to notice, analyze, and discuss the meaningful and purposeful variation in word choice and rhetorical strategies present in the texts, the data, and the debate. The article provides a model for how corpus data can be integrated into writing classrooms for advancing students' abilities to analyze language and increase rhetorical awareness. The introductory chapter provides an overview of the Rosemont Copper Mine debate, ecolinguistics, and corpus linguistics. This opening chapter is followed by three articles (corresponding to Chapters 2, 3, and 4), and the dissertation concludes with a discussion of implications of the findings and potential for future research.

Though both literary critics and anthropologists have sometimes recognized converging aims and methods between ethnography and narrative fiction, few interpretive studies of fiction have been undertaken using the framework of ethnography of communication. Because ethnography of communication centers attention on language in situated communicative interaction, it could be a useful tool for exploring literary texts, especially texts within the genre of "realistic fiction," which sometimes also depend upon observation or creation of situated social interaction. This dissertation uses ethnography of communication to interpret a Victorian novel, Anne Bronte's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall. Ethnography of communication may also serve as a general framework for teaching literature, combining close linguistic or stylistic analysis of the language, detailed examination of the cultural and social situation, and re-creation of the meaning of the event as it may have been experienced by the participants. This approach may be especially appropriate in the case of L2 learners taking literature courses in university programs. The overall framework of the analysis, ethnography of communication, will be supplemented by Goffman's model of interaction ritual and the concept of co-construction of reality. These frameworks will be employed in the analysis of brief communicative events within the novel. Insights about the characters and the speech communities deriving from ethnographic interpretation will be used to build more precise understanding of the events of the novel, thereby contributing to traditional areas of literary criticism, and offering options for literary study in L1 and L2 contexts.

In a description of language, Ellis (1994) claims that "the bedrock of L2 is its vocabulary" (p. 11); while for Lewis (1993), language consists of "grammaticalized lexis", not "lexicalized grammar", and Nation (2001) adds that attention to vocabulary is unavoidable. This status of vocabulary determines its pervasiveness and implies the need for attention as claimed by Meara (1980). In second and foreign language teaching and learning, instruction is an important contributor in the development and consolidation of vocabulary knowledge while Computer-Assisted Language Learning has been described as facilitative in mediating instruction and improving learner independence (Chapelle 1998, 2001; Warschauer, 1998).The present study investigates narrative comprehension, immediate and delayed vocabulary retention as a result of implicit and explicit teaching and learning of vocabulary (Hunt & Beglar, 2005), with a hypertext reading task. Many researchers support that enhanced vocabulary activities and reading for meaning affect vocabulary acquisition (Krashen, 1989, Zahar et al., 2001; Paribakht & Wesche, 1997; Lee & VanPatten, 2003). For others, the degree of involvement in the processing and the noticed properties of words determine the degree of retention (Groot, 2000; Smith, 2004).Seventy-eight fourth-semester students of French as a foreign language from six classes at an American university participated in the study. They were randomly assigned to either the implicit or the explicit conditions, and received differential treatments. The subjects read the same enhanced electronic text with permanently highlighted target items in the explicit condition, and temporarily highlighted target items in the implicit condition. The target items were hyperlinked to the same textual, auditory, and graphic enhancements. The study also makes an overview of the effect of the motivation type on the subjects' performance levels.The statistical analyses reveal both strengths and weaknesses in the two modalities with regards to immediate and delayed retention; as one of the modalities favors immediate gain and the other longer-term retention. It is thus suggested that both modalities can be jointly implemented in a Computer-Assisted Teaching and Learning condition in order to achieve higher learning outcomes. The combination may favor the dual improvement in gain and retention in the learning process.

Wir berechnen L²-Invarianten bestimmter nichtuniformer Gitter in halbeinfachen Lie-Gruppen mithilfe der Borel-Serre-Kompaktifizierung arithmetisch definierter lokalsymmetrischer Räume. Als Hauptergebnisse erhalten wir neue Abschätzungen für Novikov-Shubin-Zahlen und das Verschwinden der L²-Torsion für Gitter in Gruppen mit geradem Fundamentalrang. Wir diskutieren Anwendungen auf Gromovs Null-im-Spektrum-Vermutung sowie auf eine Proportionalitätsvermutung für die L²-Torsion maßäquivalenter Gruppen. Im Schlussteil der Arbeit beschreiben wir einen Anpassungsvorgang für Chevalley-Basen komplexer halbeinfacher Lie-Algebren. Zu einer gegebenen Realform liefert dieser eine Basis mit halb- und ganzzahligen Strukturkonstanten, die wir durch das Wurzelsystem mit Involution ausdrücken.

Inflectional verbal morphology, the system of correspondences between grammatical meanings and their means of expression, is an area of language which is difficult for adult L2 learners. The purpose of this thesis is to develop a pedagogical tool for Anglophone adult learners presenting French verbal morphology with a focus on semantics. This thesis adopts the view that explicit teaching of grammar is the most effective with these learners. Using theoretical insights from the Meaning-Text Theory, Le Morpheur, an Internet-based conjugator, has been developed. In order to see a fully-conjugated form using Le Morpheur, the user selects from a table of inflectional meanings those he wishes to express. In this way, the user becomes aware of all the meanings which must be combined to produce a verbal form. This resource was tested with a group of first-year French students at Dalhousie University. The participants were enthusiastic about Le Morpheur and the manner in which it presents French verb conjugation. These encouraging results indicate that continuing development and evaluation of this semantic-based pedagogical approach is desirable.

This paper applies an intuitive approach based on stock market data to a unique dataset of large concentrations during the period 1990-2002 to assess the effectiveness of European merger control. The basic idea is to relate announcement and decision abnormal returns. Under a set of four maintained assumptions, merger control might be interpreted to be effective if rents accruing due to the increased market power observed around the merger announcement are reversed by the antitrust decision, i.e. if there is a negative relation between announcement and decision abnormal returns. To clearly identify the events' competitive effects, we explicitly control for the market expectation about the outcome of the merger control procedure and run several robustness checks to assess the role of our maintained assumptions. We find that only outright prohibitions completely reverse the rents measured around a merger's announcement. On average, remedies seem to be only partially capable of reverting announcement abnormal returns. Yet they seem to be more effective when applied during the first rather than the second investigation phase and in subsamples where our assumptions are more likely to hold. Moreover, the European Commission appears to learn over time. (authors' abstract)

One of the most conspicuous features of mergers is that they come in waves that are correlated with increases in share prices and price/earnings ratios. We use a natural way to discriminate between pure stock market influences on firm decisions and other influences by examining merger patterns for both listed and unlisted firms. If "real" changes in the economy drive merger waves, as some neoclassical theories of mergers predict, both listed and unlisted firms should experience waves. We find significant differences between listed and unlisted firms as predicted by behavioral theories of merger waves. (author's abstract)

Ce mémoire est une étude exploratoire des représentations d'un groupe d'étudiants universitaires, relatives à l'apprentissage de l'anglais. Dans cette étude, les apprenants sont des étudiants de DUT donc la vocation est de devenir techniciens en Réseaux et Télécoms. L'étude s'est déroulée à l'IUT de Mont de Marsan qui fait partie de l'université de Pau et des Pays de l'Adour. Dans ce travail, nous nous sommes également attachés à étudier les représentations des enseignants dans le but de détecter des inadéquations entre les représentations des apprenants et celles des enseignants. Dans le but d'explorer le phénomène des représentations de différentes perspectives, nous avons utilisé diverses approches méthodologiques et théoriques. Nous avons utilisés des questionnaires (pour les étudiants et pour les enseignants), et des entretiens individuels (d'étudiants et d'enseignants). Nous avons ainsi pu rassembler des données à la fois quantitatives (issues des questionnaires) et qualitatives (issues des entretiens) que nous avons alors triangulées afin de pouvoir expliquer les données obtenues. Un des principaux résultats de cette étude fût de mettre en lumière que les représentations fondamentales des apprenants énonçaient que l'apprentissage d'une langue devait se concentrer sur la communication (compréhension et expression). Cette étude a aussi montré qu'il existait des liens entre les représentations des apprenants, leurs attentes et le type de leur motivation (intrinsèque ou extrinsèque). La plupart du temps, cette étude n'a pas montré beaucoup de différences entre les représentations et les pratiques des enseignants d'une part et les représentations et les attentes des apprenants d'autre part.

The present study investigated how 6 Korean graduate students at a Canadian university used a suite of multiple Web-based reference resources (named i-Conc), consisting of concordancers and dictionaries, as a cognitive tool for solving linguistic problems encountered over the course of completing—in English, their second language (L2)—an academic writing assignment for one of their graduate courses. Using a mixed methods design employing surveys, interviews, screen recordings, a query tracking log, and detailed case studies, the thesis provides rich descriptions of (a) the processes, and outcomes of the 6 participants’ uses of i-Conc as a reference tool for their writing authentic academic tasks and (b) their perceptions of the suite as a means of writing assistance. Overall, i-Conc served as an intellectual partner that aided the participants in strategically solving lexical and grammatical problems during their writing assignments: About 70 % of the problems they addressed with i-Conc resulted in correct text formulations or revisions. The different resources in i-Conc were each shown to have unique functions for which they were best suited, suggesting that concordancing may optimally be consulted in combination with, not in place of, other resources. The benefits of consulting i-Conc for L2 writing went beyond simply helping the participants’ problem solving to potentially facilitating their language acquisition. Input-feedback interactions with the reference suite prompted the participants to carry out robust meaning negotiations in their efforts to verify their intuitive hypotheses and to venture beyond their current linguistic repertoires. Participants acted on these potential benefits somewhat differently. Case studies and cross-case analyses demonstrated complex interactions between the participants’ individual traits and goals, the educational contexts for which they were writing, and their perceptions and evaluations of particular affordances provided by i-Conc. These findings imply that to build meaningful cognitive partnerships with reference tools, L2 writers should receive progressive guidance on principles for effective reference resource consultation along with training in strategies for using different types of resources, contingent on individuals’ abilities and ongoing needs arising from their macro and micro contexts for writing and for language learning.

The present study investigated how 6 Korean graduate students at a Canadian university used a suite of multiple Web-based reference resources (named i-Conc), consisting of concordancers and dictionaries, as a cognitive tool for solving linguistic problems encountered over the course of completing—in English, their second language (L2)—an academic writing assignment for one of their graduate courses. Using a mixed methods design employing surveys, interviews, screen recordings, a query tracking log, and detailed case studies, the thesis provides rich descriptions of (a) the processes, and outcomes of the 6 participants’ uses of i-Conc as a reference tool for their writing authentic academic tasks and (b) their perceptions of the suite as a means of writing assistance. Overall, i-Conc served as an intellectual partner that aided the participants in strategically solving lexical and grammatical problems during their writing assignments: About 70 % of the problems they addressed with i-Conc resulted in correct text formulations or revisions. The different resources in i-Conc were each shown to have unique functions for which they were best suited, suggesting that concordancing may optimally be consulted in combination with, not in place of, other resources. The benefits of consulting i-Conc for L2 writing went beyond simply helping the participants’ problem solving to potentially facilitating their language acquisition. Input-feedback interactions with the reference suite prompted the participants to carry out robust meaning negotiations in their efforts to verify their intuitive hypotheses and to venture beyond their current linguistic repertoires. Participants acted on these potential benefits somewhat differently. Case studies and cross-case analyses demonstrated complex interactions between the participants’ individual traits and goals, the educational contexts for which they were writing, and their perceptions and evaluations of particular affordances provided by i-Conc. These findings imply that to build meaningful cognitive partnerships with reference tools, L2 writers should receive progressive guidance on principles for effective reference resource consultation along with training in strategies for using different types of resources, contingent on individuals’ abilities and ongoing needs arising from their macro and micro contexts for writing and for language learning.