The thesis explores the mysticism of service and moral living of the nāyaṉmār through a comprehensive study of the Tamil literary and devotional masterpiece i.e. the Periya Purāṇam or the ‘Great Epic Narrative’. As a twelfth century poetical hagiography that reflects the lives of the nāyaṉmār or Tamil spiritual leaders, the mysticism of this sacred and canonical text of Tamil Śaivism is neither appreciated, as it deserves to be, nor has it been sufficiently studied in academia. The modest research is intended to fill a vacuum in the literature of Tamil Śaiva mysticism. Besides this primary purpose, the research aims to make an academic contribution by introducing this mysticism of service and moral living of the nāyaṉmār as narrated in the Periya Purāṇam to a wider academic community and to the Tamil Śaiva religious community at large. The claim is that this mysticism that is embedded in the text has been largely overlooked. Through an integral approach of hagiographical and thematic exegesis, it is argued that Cēkkiḻār, the author, by imbuing himself in the mystical quest of the early Tamil literary, moral and devotional traditions, textured around these nāyaṉmār, initiates a way to Śiva that was foreign to the Tamil tradition of his milieu. Cēkkiḻār shapes his mystical theology and ideology in the form of two aims i.e. service and moral living. By his radical theology of Siva, he presents a theology of service and moral living which is ‘Person’ centred and a mystical thirst for Transcendence which is ‘Divine’ oriented. This interplay of cosmic and meta-cosmic levels of mystical experience provided a worldview, an alternative vision for political and social change in Tamil society.

This study investigates the writing strategies that Saudi university students utilise and the linguistic challenges they encounter during the process of writing in English. The study also compares the writing behaviour of two groups of writers: skilled vs. less skilled and male vs. female writers. Further, the possible inter-relationships between the main writing strategies and major linguistic challenges are explored. Data was collected using a writing proficiency test, think-aloud protocols (TAPs), observation, written compositions and stimulated recalls. The main sample consisted of 28 participants (14 skilled vs. 14 unskilled writers, 18 male vs. 10 female writers). Data analysis reveals that the writers frequently use ten writing strategies and encounter ten linguistic challenges. Some of the strategies are used more frequently by the skilled writers while others are more common among the unskilled ones. Similarly, male writers generally utilise fewer writing strategies than their female peers. While no significant differences are found between male and female writers in any one type of error, unskilled writers were found to make a larger number of errors in each category compared to the skilled writers. The study concludes with implications and recommendations for English writing pedagogy and research.

Travel writing criticism has sometimes suggested that little travel writing has been produced by Africans. This thesis shows that this is not the case, through a literary study of writing about travel published in Yoruba-speaking southwestern Nigeria between 1914 and 2014. This is a study of writing about domestic travel – Nigerians travelling within Nigeria – and of both Yoruba- and English-language texts. It is both a study of conventional ‘travel writing’ such as first-person travelogues, and of the motif of travel in writing more broadly: it encompasses serialised newspaper columns, historical writing, novels, autobiography, book-length travelogues and online writing. As well as close readings, this study draws on archival research and an in-depth interview with travel writer Pelu Awofeso. This is not an exhaustive study but rather a series of case studies, placed in their historical context. I examine southwestern Nigerian writers’ re resentations of laces within Nigeria and changing communal identities: local, translocal, regional and national. I explore their ideas about the benefits of travel and travel writing, knowledge and cosmopolitanism. I argue that we can read these texts as products of a local print culture, addressed to local readers, as well as in relation to the broader travel writing tradition.

In the late 1990s, the donor community espoused a new metanorm, poverty reduction. Against this backdrop, Lionel Jospin, elected French Prime Minister in 1997, promised a shift in French aid policy away from a paternalistic and interest-driven approach towards a more needs-focused, empowering strategy. This thesis asks, with reference to the 1997-2015 period and to the Cameroonianian case, how far, how and why France’s aid discourse on poverty reduction and empowerment has been translated into practice. Our introduction sets out this research question. Our literature review demonstrates that there have been no detailed studies of French aid to Cameroon and looks more broadly at research on French coopération, empowerment and African agency. Chapter three identifies our methodological and theoretical framework, focusing particularly on neo-classical realism and a template of hard, soft and smart power. Chapter 4 shows how French aid sructures and instruments were neo-colonial in the early post-colonial decades. It then highlights reforms under Jospin and President Jacques Chirac’s second term, paying particular attention to the aid instruments deployed in Cameroon and their ‘fitness for the purpose’. Chapter 5 sets out the aid promises of French Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, identifying the reformist pressures they faced. Chapter 6 explains why important but ultimately limited changes took place in the French assistance programme to Cameroon. Drawing on a neoclassical realist framework, it shows how the French policy-making establishment was divided between the conservative old guard resisting and modernisers promoting aid conditionalities. Chapter 7 addresses weaknesses in the NCR framework, notably its crude definition of power and failure to include African agency. It shows how francophone Cameroonian elites facilitate or constrain the implementation of French aid. Our conclusion summarises our findings, identifies future aid trends and explores the wider significance of this research.

Personal names form one of the most important sections in the system of proper names that are traditionally studied within the field of onomastics. Personal names contain history, tradition, culture as well as all characteristic features of each ethnic community. The general aim of this research project is to have a cross-cultural approach to personal naming based on the systems of Vietnamese and English. Due to the broad scope of the topic of personal names, my research focuses on given names only. First of all, to establish a theoretical background, I dwell on onomastic problems with the focus on the semantic characterisation of proper names, and cultural issues in the study of personal names. I then argue that the views on meaning of names espoused by the Millian and Fregean schools can be reconciled, and that as a cultural universal, names convey both denotational and connotational contents but the content of names can only be determined in each specific language community based on clarification of traditional and cultural values embodied in naming process. Next, the thesis approaches Vietnamese and English given names by reviewing their historical and linguistic characteristics and then classifying them into relevant groups and subgroups. The main purpose of these taxonomies is to bring out the topological characteristics of Vietnamese and English given names as well as the naming trends and forces that have formed the two cultures over the past centuries. Finally, I present a comparison and contrast of Vietnamese and English given names covering all the aspects on the basis of which I institutionalise the theoretical reconciliation of Vietnamese and English personal naming systems, and establish that a reconciliation of the two naming systems is possible within a single overarching framework for their theoretical discussion.

Many English teachers posed the problem that their Arab students were able to construct grammatically correct sentences, but were frequently unable to form them into paragraphs or cohesive texts. In my attest to investigate this problem, I started from the assumption that differing patterns of cohesion in English and Arabic probably account for many difficulties Arab students have in writing English. Sane attempts to look at this, based on a contrastive approach, have already been carried out. For my part, I felt the time had came to look at the systems of Arabic in their own terms, which has not yet been done. For this I followed two avenues of study: Functional Sentence Perspective as developed in the Prague School and Halliday and Hasan's work on textual cohesion. For my purpose I selected four lengthy Arabic texts belonging to different text-types which I first analysed from the Functional Sentence Perspective point of view. For this, I followed Dane's (1974) study of thematic progressions, in order to find out what theme-rheme patterns the different Arabic text-types use. In the next step, I investigated the cohesive ties used in written Arabic Halliday and Hasan's model of textual cohesion (1976). I also compared my texts in order to discover if there is a difference in textual cohesion between text-types in Arabic. My analysis of textual cohesion and text development suggests that: 1. Arabic descriptive texts tend to reiterate the same there in successive sentences. 2. Arabic instructive texts favour the use of the linear thematization of rhemes. 3. Arabic makes inter-clausal relationships explicit. 4. Repetition and parallelism are favoured cohesive devices in all text-types. The thesis consists of an introduction followed by a chapter reviewing various approaches to discourse analysis, a chapter on the text-typological approach which has governed my selection of texts; followed by an account of my methodological approach and my analysis.

This thesis begins by showing the important part that the text plays in disambiguating the temporal interpretaions of the verb forms in Modern Standard Arabic. Proceeding from this point, it shows how, in translation, depending solely on the morphologically-based temporal interpretations of the verb forms or the semantic classifications of the situations represented by the clauses is misleading and cripples the cohesion and coherence of the target text (Chapter One). In order to show the need for this work, the views on the subject of determining the temporal interpretation of the verb-form held by traditional Arab grammarians, Arabists and modern Arab linguists are critically reviewed (Chapter Two). In the body of the thesis (Chapter Three) a method of dealing with this problem is proposed, based on an examination of the text viewed as a whole, not as a combination of decontextualized clauses or forms. Also in this part of the thesis (Chapter Three) a description of the texts analyzed is provided in order to show the authenticity of our data. The approach suggested in chapter three is then given a realistic test by applying it to a fairly large corpus of short news reports produced by and for native speakers of Arabic (Chapter Four). The motivation for this research is the felt need for translators of Arabic and English texts to be made aware of this problem in order to improve the quality of the work they are involved in. The approach that is proposed should also be of benefit to those interested in studying and teaching translation as a process (Chapter Five).

This mixed design research doctorate seeks to explore the rationale for a selected sample of English schools that are introducing Mandarin Chinese as a new language, specifically, investigating the teaching goals and teaching methods that were applied. It also focuses on pupils’ views based on their personal learning experiences. This research starts with an overview of the research into the teaching and learning of Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language, globally, which was then narrowed down to the context of introducing Mandarin Chinese into the educational curriculum in England within the context of the relevant teaching approaches. The methodological approach of the research combined quantitative and qualitative methods. Interviews were conducted with two Head Teachers and five Heads of foreign language departments in order to investigate the rationale for a sample of schools deciding to introduce Mandarin Chinese and the current situation of teaching. Interviews with five Teachers of Mandarin Chinese were carried out to gather data in order to investigate teachers’ experiences in teaching Mandarin Chinese as a foreign language abroad. Additionally, data was collected through classroom observations, in total 59 lessons were observed to gather in-depth data to investigate teaching methods and teachers’ interaction with pupils during day-to-day practice. Data was also collected through a questionnaire survey sent to 84 pupils who participated in Mandarin Chinese language classes from a sample of five schools, which represented pupils’ views about the teaching and learning of Mandarin Chinese. Qualitative and quantitative data analyses revealed a range of factors that may contribute to the promotion of Mandarin Chinese in schools in England, for example, the impact on the global context; the schools’ needs and pupils’ professional development requirements. There are two teaching goals identified in this research: GCSE Chinese examinations and Asset Languages test. Teachers employed different teaching methods to meet various requirements for different teaching aims. The findings revealed several problems and challenges existing in current teaching and learning, such as school funding; teachers’ professional training; a shortage of suitable instructional materials; administrative infrastructures; and progression and continuity amongst others. Pupils’ feedback regarding their learning experiences showed that pupils had a positive attitude towards learning Mandarin Chinese; however, their motivation was affected by their teachers’ teaching methods and attitudes towards teaching Mandarin Chinese. This is not a not a comparative study, however, through different data gathered from GCSE and non-GCSE classes, the author commented on the differences in teachers and pupils’ experiences and opinions about teaching and learning Mandarin Chinese, as well as exploring their perceptions and reactions by investigating their experience of participating in and reflecting on this research.

This thesis sets out to investigate the ways in which Caribbean authors have responded to the canonical texts of the coloniser, and how they have rewritten certain genres, modes and the ideological biases that inform them. In Chapter One, the continuing presence of representations of the Caribbean as paradise or Eden – evident, I suggest in my Introduction, in the first works of Caribbean literature, such as James Grainger’s The Sugar-Cane (1764), and later in J. E. C. McFarlane’s ‘My Country’ (1929), Tom Redcam’s ‘My Beautiful Home’ (1929), H. S. Bunbury’s ‘The Spell of the Tropics’ (1929) – is revised in the works of Una Marson, Alejo Carpentier, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, Gisèle Pineau, and Shani Mootoo; while the more direct canonical rewritings of Maryse Condé and Derek Walcott are the subject of Chapter Four. Behind these readings of the contemporary Caribbean canon lies a fundamental question: what makes these engagements with legacy a postcolonial, rather than counter-colonial, response? In turn, through a critical reading of Peter Hallward’s Absolutely Postcolonial (2001) in Chapter Two, I argue that the postcolonial may be defined as that which is specific to various colonial legacies and histories, but not specified by them. Chapter Four elaborates this model, drawing on Glissant’s The Fourth Century (1997) and David Dabydeen’s ‘Turner’ (1994). Creolization is a cultural, linguistic, ontological, and literary term that focuses on the emergence of a creolized culture/expression/identity/text from the meeting and synthesis of the informing elements. Through the writings of creolization’s foremost theorist, Édouard Glissant, I stress that what results from this form of relation is not a sum of its parts, but a wholly new and original existent. In other words, the process of creolization is distinguished by its ability to affect singular forms that remain specific to the elements which engender it – the social, historical, and geographical contexts elements which engender it – the social, historical, and geographical contexts specific to the site of its articulation – but which, nevertheless, exceeds the limitations of the ‘original’ components. This fundamental contention is developed through my analysis of Glissant’s theoretical expositions, Caribbean Discourse (1981), discussed in Chapter One, and Poetics of Relation (1990) outlined in Chapter Two alongside Glissant’s poetry and the contributions of Peter Hallward and Derek Attridge. Importantly, the distinct model of creolization that emerges at the end of Chapter Two as a process of relation that generates new forms, resonates with the poetics of another celebrated Caribbean author and theorist: Wilson Harris. It is through Harris’s essays and novels such as Jonestown (1996), The Mask of the Beggar (2004), and The Ghost of Memory (2006) that the significance of my reading of creolization to the Caribbean canon becomes clear.

The thesis deals with the problems of translating "soft-sell" advertisements between Arabic and English. It is argued that a standardisation strategy of any international advertising campaign across cultures of soft-sell advertising is unsuccessful at any time in the case of Arabic and English. This stems not only from, besides the huge differences already existing between the two languages and cultures, such as socio-economic and socio-political, but also from the different methods and strategies adopted by the copywriters in employing various elements of humour, irony, persuasion, taboos (e.g. sexual connotations), conceptual sarcasm and cultural intertextuality, which are aimed at particular audiences, and the translation of which is determined by the elements of time and space. Localisation, according to the characters of the local market is thus the best solution for any successful cross-cultural advertising. The development of the role of culture and language in a given society has also been illustrated, followed by various approaches to cultural translation equivalence and cultural translation difficulties between Arabic and English. The thesis also contains a study of the techniques and methods of advertising. This includes elements of persuasion, strategies of standardisation, language and paralanguage of advertising, style of advertising and deviation in advertising from the norm of standard English.