The purpose of this study is to analyse the development of a modern form of Arabic prose literature, the autobiography of childhood, and explore its generic characteristics. The basis of this investigation is a representative corpus of Arabic autobiographies rich in childhood material published between 1929 and 1988 by twenty writers from Egypt, Lebanon, Syria, Palestine and Morocco. The study adopts a formal approach to autobiography. The literary genre is understood as a "pact" between writer and reader concluded by way of specific "generic markers" in the text, which the study sets out to describe. Starting from a wider sample of autobiographical texts it contrasts autobiography with its contemporary adjacent genres and historical cognates in Arabic literature. Special interest is accorded to the divergence of autobiography from the novel. The study goes on to discuss in what sense the autobiography of childhood is independent of the type which narrates the author's adulthood as well. To this end it investigates the variation of time-span in a number of life-stories, the existence of a characteristic "plot" in them and typical beginnings and endings. Further, it analyses the literary spectrum in terms of narrative technique and style. The last chapters of the thesis present interpretative readings of the works of the corpus against a historical background. Here, the literary trends and tendencies of the texts are outlined in greater detail. The study reaches the conclusion that childhood autobiography is a distinct genre in modern Arabic literature with a tradition of its own, but that there also exist many mixed forms of autobiography that relativize this independence. It also identifies three typical themes of the genre developed by the Arab authors to express their personal identity: the eternal imprint of their birthplace, escape from poverty and rebellion against the family.

In this thesis, I have presented my translation of the novella Rakushō no goku (落照の獄) by Ono Fuyumi, preceded by a critical introduction. In this introduction, I have provided brief biographical information about the author, context for the story and its place in the Twelve Kingdoms series of novels, an analysis of the story's use of the death penalty as allegory, and an explanation for some of my choices in the translation. In my introduction, my main purpose was to present the author, who has written multiple best-selling, award-winning novels that have received both popular and critical acclaim, yet has received little notice abroad and even less scholarly attention both in and out of Japan, as a writer meriting further study. To this end, I have used my own translation of Rakushō no goku as a primary example of the depth and value of her work, presenting my reading of the conflict in Rakushō no goku as an oblique criticism of the death penalty in Japan, and attempting to tie the story into a longstanding literary tradition of using the fantastic as allegory in order to comment on and critique contemporary culture.

According to the Unaccusative Hypothesis (Perlmutter 1978), intransitive verbs fall in two distinct classes: the <strong>unaccusatives</strong> (whose subjects originate as direct objects) and the <strong>unergatives</strong> (whose subjects originate as subjects). Although there are studies of split intransitivity in Modern Japanese and European languages, very few exist for earlier stages of Japanese. To fill in part of this gap, this thesis presents a comprehensive investigation of split intransitivity in Old Japanese (largely, 8th century Japanese). The descriptive and analytic work of this research is based on the newly developed ‘Oxford Corpus of Old Japanese’ (OCOJ). It consists of original and romanized Old Japanese texts, with a wide range of information including the original orthography, part-of-speech, morphology and syntactic constituency in the form of XML tags following TEI conventions. It is part of a larger collaborative research project: ‘Verb semantics and argument realization in pre-modern Japanese: A comprehensive study of the basic syntax of pre-modern Japanese’, in which my DPhil project is situated. As part of my DPhil project, I took part in the analysis and tagging of the OCOJ, in addition to contributing to translation. My original contribution to knowledge is a comprehensive investigation and in-depth analysis of the lexical-semantic aspects of split intransitivity in relation to its morpho-syntactic expressions in Old Japanese. This includes: exploring to what extent intransitive verbs could be classified as unaccusative and unergative, what factors are involved in the classification, how they interact, what are the possible ways of representation, and the theoretical implications it brings to linguistic theory in general. Syntactically, I looked into manifestations specific to Old Japanese (e.g. perfective auxiliary selection), and also examined to what extent diagnostics – which show split intransitivity in English, Italian and Modern Japanese (e.g. N+V compounding and resultative construction) – could be applied to Old Japanese. Semantically, I investigated various semantic factors and proposed basic and complex models of the interaction between intentionality and affectedness in Old Japanese. I also proposed a ‘complex format for representing simple event structures’ which enhances the understanding of semantic aspects of split intransitivity. As such, the results of my research not only contribute to a detailed understanding of Old Japanese verbs, but also have implications for linguistic theory in general.

This thesis examines the use of folklore and the folkloresque in Haruki Murakami’s novel Hitsuji wo meguru bōken, or, as it is translated by Alfred Birnbaum, A Wild Sheep Chase. Murakami blends together Japanese and Western folklore to present a Japan that has been colonized by a post-national, global capitalistic force. At the same time, Murakami presents a strategy to resist this colonizing force by placing agency onto the individual and suggesting that it is still possible to craft a meaningful identity within the Japanese/Western blended, globalized society in which these individuals now exist. Alongside examining the use of folklore in this novel, issues of translation are also considered by comparing Murakami’s original Japanese text to Birnbaum’s English translation. The fields of folkloristics and translation studies inform this comparison, and a new way to discuss translations (especially those that come from a text in which folklore is central) is developed. These two major threads are pulled together in an analysis of Murakami’s role as a multinational writer. His blending of multiple cultural references and languages make his message on constructing an identity from a globalized culture more accessible to those outside of Japan; rather than focusing on what is lost in Birnbaum’s translation, this thesis uses a folkloristic perspective on translation studies and explores how Birnbaum expands upon Murakami’s process.

Steeped in tradition for over a thousand years, bathing culture in Japan remains relevant due to the preservation of the traditional, innovative modernization of existing bathing structures, and the diversification therein. This thesis will examine the significance of bathing culture, focusing largely on onsen and sento, account for its historical evolution, analyze how it functions in modern society and forecast its future viability. More specifically, the concept that Japan's vibrant bathing culture was able to flourish due to mythological creation stories, politically motivated access to baths, propagated therapeutic value, and scientific reinforcement of the benefits of a hot bath will be explored.

One of the challenges students face in studying an East Asian (EA) language (e.g., Chinese, Japanese, and Korean) as a second language is mastering their selected language’s written component. This is especially true for students with native fluency of English and deficient written fluency of another EA language. In order to alleviate the steep learning curve inherent in the properties of EA languages’ complicated writing scripts, language instructors conventionally introduce various written techniques such as stroke order and direction to allow students to study writing scripts in a systematic fashion. Yet, despite the advantages gained from written technique instruction, the physical presence of the language instructor in conventional instruction is still highly desirable during the learning process; not only does it allow instructors to offer valuable real-time critique and feedback interaction on students’ writings, but it also allows instructors to correct students’ bad writing habits that would impede mastery of the written language if not caught early in the learning process. The current generation of computer-assisted language learning (CALL) applications specific to written EA languages have therefore strived to incorporate writing-capable modalities in order to allow students to emulate their studies outside the classroom setting. Several factors such as constrained writing styles, and weak feedback and assessment capabilities limit these existing applications and their employed techniques from closely mimicking the benefits that language instructors continue to offer. In this thesis, I describe my geometric-based sketch recognition approach to several writing scripts in the EA languages while addressing the issues that plague existing CALL applications and the handwriting recognition techniques that they utilize. The approach takes advantage of A Language to Describe, Display, and Editing in Sketch Recognition (LADDER) framework to provide users with valuable feedback and assessment that not only recognizes the visual correctness of students’ written EA Language writings, but also critiques the technical correctness of their stroke order and direction. Furthermore, my approach provides recognition independent of writing style that allows students to learn with natural writing through size- and amount-independence, thus bridging the gap between beginner applications that only recognize single-square input and expert tools that lack written technique critique.

The Go-Tsuchimikado Shinkan-bon ~ Izumi Shikibu Shū is a 15th century manuscript of 150 poems by the 10th/11th century poet, Izumi Shikibu. This thesis includes translations for all 150 poems with detailed translation notes and an examination of the arrangement of the poems. It seems likely that the Shinkan-bon would have been organized in a sequence that links poems together in such a way as to create a larger poetical work for the collection as a whole. Sequences are developed through a natural progression of temporal and spatial elements in the poems, as well as connections through mood, theme, imagery, associations, and the repetition of words. This method of anthology arrangement had been common in Japanese literature for hundreds of years prior to the assumed date of creation for the Shinkan-bon in the early 13th century. Three sections of the Shinkan-bon were examined in this thesis to determine if there was continuity between the poems. The first section is made up of the first twenty-five seasonal poems, running from spring to winter. This section does show continuity between some of the poems but does not contain an over-all sequence. The second section is made up of fifteen poems in the middle of the collection and the third section is made up of the final ten poems in the Shinkan-bon. There is no sequencing in the second and third sections, and thus it can be determined that the Shinkan-bon collection has no sequential significance to its order, and that the poems are organized by another method.

In the late 18th century an artist named Torii Kiyotsune 鳥居清経inherited and mastered a style of ukiyo-e that was soon to go out of fashion. Few of his prints survived and he left little impression on Japanese art history, despite his association with such a prominent school as the Torii. Yet the very association may have contributed to his obscurity. The assumption that Kiyotsune was primarily an ukiyo-e artist led to the overshadowing of his work in another arena, popular books known as kusazōshi. In fact he was quite prolific in that medium, illustrating over 130 kibyōshi, as well as works in other genres. Analysis of one of his kibyōshi, Kaminari no hesokuigane 雷之臍喰金, shows that there is still much to be learned about him and his contributions to early modern Japanese visual culture. Through an analysis of Kaminari no hesokuigane this thesis also explores the unique set of characteristics that distinguishes kibyôshi from other forms of visual-verbal narratives such as comics or illustrated books. Moreover it argues that, despite their having served as cheap, disposable fiction in their time, kibyōshi can serve as an informative lens through which to examine how the ordinary inhabitants of Edo identified with their city, creating a culture of their own and developing the Edokko type that has survived into the modern era.

Task-based language teaching has received increasing attention in second language acquisition research over the past decade (Révész, 2007). However, the target form comprises conveyance of meaning in task-based classroom to some degree. In the area of Chinese acquisition as a second language the role of recasts and explicit feedback has not been the subject of much investigation, as two types of technique to compensate learners’ attention on form. Few empirical studies have explored their short-term and long-term effects on Chinese language acquisition in task-based classroom. To test the conclusions of some research about corrective feedback in the area of SLA, the present study examined the effects of these two techniques respectively. The study employed an immediate-test and posttest design. The participants were 53 adult, beginning level Chinese language learners who study Chinese as a second language, naturally assigned to one of the two comparison groups and a control group. The comparison groups differed as to whether they received recasts or explicit feedback while completing communicative tasks. The control group also practiced the tasks; however, they received neither recasts nor explicit feedback from their instructors in the process and they participated in the testing sessions. Results analysis of collected data yielded three main findings. First, learners receiving explicit feedback immediately outperformed those who received recasts for certain structures. Second, learners receiving explicit feedback sometimes yielded some long-term advantages over those who did not receive any feedback, followed by the recast group even after a period of time. Third, the performance of the participants varied according to the complexity of the target forms. The results imply that explicit feedback and recasts can facilitate the production of certain target language forms in beginning Chinese communicative class. The effects of explicit feedback and recasts depend on the chosen forms. It is congruent with Long’s (1998) and Ellis’s (2007) speculation that the roles of various feedbacks differ according to different linguistic features. It also provides further evidence for Leeman’s (2000) conclusion that recasts may be differentially effective when the learnabililty of the target linguistic feature vary. Finally, the findings lend some support to the insight derived from Long that focus-on-form should be integrated into task-based language teaching (Long, 1996, 2000; Long & Robinson, 1998).

There are four major patterns of the plural forms of personal pronouns in Modern Chinese, which are: Same Wording, Suffixation (Multisyllabic and Monosyllabic Suffixations), Sound Combination (Coda Suffix and New Wording), and Tonal Changes. Same Wording was the original plural pattern since the singular form was also used as plural form in Old Chinese. Suffixation was already appeared in Middle Chinese. Author suspects that Suffixation was a concept inspired by non-Han languages such as the Buddhist Sanskrit. Each Chinese dialect chose a way to represent this concept based on its dialectal characteristic, thus there are many dialects in China. For example, the [men] suffix in many northern dialects are phonologically and semantically related to the Tang dynasty suffixes, while the m- initial might has been originated in Tang dynasty dialects, the -n ending might be a result of Altaic language influences. Northern dialects have a simpler pattern due to the influence of Altaic languages, in comparison, the plural pattern of southern dialects are more complex due to the contact with Miao, Yao, Zhuang languages.