This essay analyses a selection of poems written by the American poet Emily Dickinson. The essay aims to explore the function of the meter in Emily Dickinson’s poetry. Earlier studies have combined Emily Dickinson’s poetry with meter, but the research of metrical pattern and form has not been sufficient enough to show Emily Dickinson’s full potential with the different meters. The purpose of this essay is to analyse how the metrical patterns are used by the poet as metrical strategies to impact the reader’s perception. One assumption is that structure and form are fundamental to her writing style. It justifies the reading of her poetry in relation to meter. The main focus was the physical structures of the poems, such as line length, metrical patterns, and systematic rhymes. The second most important aim was to analyse her other poetic devices, such as dashes and capitalizations. The findings were analysed together with the vocabulary and figurative language. The analysis shows Emily Dickinson’s poetic artistry in meter and rhyme and clarifies how she creates poetry with lyrical qualities. The result is important because it also shows that she can create poetry with metrical patterns, without in that sense being bound to meter.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The study investigates how English Home language teachers use the English Home language textbook in the grade 11 classroom. It aspires to generate an understanding of the strong relationship between the teacher, textbook and the learner thereby illustrating how a recognition of the various ways the textbook can be used. By addressing methodological issues and text relevancy as a tool for learner connection, the research appraises the use of text relevancy in the grade 11 classroom. In upholding a constructivist view of teaching the research postulates that the use of textbook material that holds a connection to learners’ lives can help increase the proficiency of the learners in the classroom and bring a deeper motivation for increase learner participation. The investigation uses a qualitative methodology to study and describe the dynamics of using the textbook. The research captured teaching methods that are already known. However, the research in this thesis also added some new dimensions that many teachers might not know of or might not be using in their classroom. These teaching methods revealed the extent to which effective teachers will go to make a difference for their learners. The teaching methods harnessed the ability from the learner to recreate, imagine and empower their understanding of the world they live in with an understanding of current topics that surfaces in a teenager’s life. The findings indicate that the textbook is still relevant and can be used in some creative ways of teaching. The study also affirms that it is possible to develop your own textbook, which can add a greater connection between the teacher and the learner.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / The study investigates how English Home language teachers use the English Home language textbook in the grade 11 classroom. It aspires to generate an understanding of the strong relationship between the teacher, textbook and the learner thereby illustrating how a recognition of the various ways the textbook can be used. By addressing methodological issues and text relevancy as a tool for learner connection, the research appraises the use of text relevancy in the grade 11 classroom. In upholding a constructivist view of teaching the research postulates that the use of textbook material that holds a connection to learners’ lives can help increase the proficiency of the learners in the classroom and bring a deeper motivation for increase learner participation. The investigation uses a qualitative methodology to study and describe the dynamics of using the textbook. The research captured teaching methods that are already known. However, the research in this thesis also added some new dimensions that many teachers might not know of or might not be using in their classroom. These teaching methods revealed the extent to which effective teachers will go to make a difference for their learners. The teaching methods harnessed the ability from the learner to recreate, imagine and empower their understanding of the world they live in with an understanding of current topics that surfaces in a teenager’s life.

The principal objective of this paper is to investigate the use of Hurston’s figurative language in the novel Their Eyes Were Watching God. Metaphors, symbolism, and personification have always been present in the African American language. Hurston uses the richness of figurative language to depict the African American experience in the United States during the first half of the twentieth century. Figurative language is observed in various instances in the novel, such as when the author places special importance on the porch and the “lies” told there. Other significant examples of figurative language include the kiss and the bloom. Hurston also uses the seasons in a symbolic manner to reflect the main character’s state of mind through winter, spring, and summer.

Multiword units (MWUs) is a term used in the current study to broadly cover what second language acquisition (SLA) researchers refer to as collocations, conventional expressions, chunks, idioms, formulaic sequences, or other such terms, depending on their research perspective. They are ubiquitous in language and essential in both first language (L1) and second language (L2) acquisition. Although MWUs are typically learned implicitly while using language naturally in both of these types of acquisition, the current study is an investigation of whether they are acquired in implicit knowledge when they are learned explicitly in a process called deliberate paired association learning. In SLA research, it is widely accepted that explicit knowledge is developed consciously and implicit knowledge is developed subconsciously. It is also believed that there is little crossover from explicit learning to implicit knowledge. However, recent research has cast doubt on this assumption. In a series of priming experiments, Elgort (2007, 2011) demonstrated that the formal and semantic lexical representations of deliberately learned pseudowords were accessed fluently and integrated into the mental lexicon, convincing evidence that deliberately learned words are immediately acquired in implicit knowledge. The current study aimed to extend these findings to MWUs in a psycholinguistic experiment that tested for implicit knowledge gains resulting from deliberate learning. Participants’ response times (RTs) were measured in three ways, on two testing instruments. First, subconscious formal recognition processing was measured in a masked repetition priming lexical decision task. In the second instrument, a self-paced reading task, both formulaic sequencing and semantic association gains were measured. The experiment was a counterbalanced, within-subjects design; so all comparisons were between conditions on items. Results were analyzed in a repeated measures linear mixed-effects model with participants and items as crossed random effects. The dependent variable was RTs on target words. The primary independent variable was learning condition: half of the critical MWUs were learned and half of them were not. The secondary independent variable was MWU composition at two levels: literal and figurative. The masked priming lexical decision task results showed that priming effects increased especially for learned figurative MWUs, evidence that implicit knowledge gains were made on their formal and semantic lexical representations as a result of deliberate learning. Results of the self-paced reading task were analyzed from two perspectives, but were less conclusive with regard to the effects of deliberate learning. Regarding formulaic sequencing gains, literal MWUs showed the most evidence of acquisition, but this happened as a result of both incidental and deliberate learning. With regard to semantic associations, it was shown that deliberate learning had similar effects on both literal and figurative MWUs. However, a serendipitous finding from this aspect of the self-paced reading results showed clearly that literal MWUs reliably primed semantic associations and sentence processing more strongly than figurative MWUs did, both before and after deliberate learning. In sum, results revealed that the difficulties learners have with developing fluent processing of figurative MWUs can be lessened by deliberate learning. On the other hand, for literal MWUs incidental learning is adequate for incrementally developing representation strength. / Language Arts

El lenguaje figurado representa una de las tareas más difíciles del procesamiento del lenguaje natural. A diferencia del lenguaje literal, el lenguaje figurado hace uso de recursos lingüísticos tales como la ironía, el humor, el sarcasmo, la metáfora, la analogía, entre otros, para comunicar significados indirectos que la mayoría de las veces no son interpretables sólo en términos de información sintáctica o semántica. Por el contrario, el lenguaje figurado refleja patrones del pensamiento que adquieren significado pleno en contextos comunicativos y sociales, lo cual hace que tanto su representación lingüística, así como su procesamiento computacional, se vuelvan tareas por demás complejas. En este contexto, en esta tesis de doctorado se aborda una problemática relacionada con el procesamiento del lenguaje figurado a partir de patrones lingüísticos. En particular, nuestros esfuerzos se centran en la creación de un sistema capaz de detectar automáticamente instancias de humor e ironía en textos extraídos de medios sociales. Nuestra hipótesis principal se basa en la premisa de que el lenguaje refleja patrones de conceptualización; es decir, al estudiar el lenguaje, estudiamos tales patrones. Por tanto, al analizar estos dos dominios del lenguaje figurado, pretendemos dar argumentos respecto a cómo la gente los concibe, y sobre todo, a cómo esa concepción hace que tanto humor como ironía sean verbalizados de una forma particular en diversos medios sociales. En este contexto, uno de nuestros mayores intereses es demostrar cómo el conocimiento que proviene del análisis de diferentes niveles de estudio lingüístico puede representar un conjunto de patrones relevantes para identificar automáticamente usos figurados del lenguaje. Cabe destacar que contrario a la mayoría de aproximaciones que se han enfocado en el estudio del lenguaje figurado, en nuestra investigación no buscamos dar argumentos basados únicamente en ejemplos prototípicos, sino en textos cuyas características / Reyes Pérez, A. (2012). Linguistic-based Patterns for Figurative Language Processing: The Case of Humor Recognition and Irony Detection [Tesis doctoral]. Universitat Politècnica de València. https://doi.org/10.4995/Thesis/10251/16692

A majority of Latino adolescents are reading below a proficient level, according to federal data, and there is a significant gap between overall reading proficiency of Latino and non-Latino, Caucasian adolescents. The purpose of this study was to investigate the linguistic underpinnings of Latino students' text comprehension. A positive relationship appears to exist between idiom comprehension and academic achievement, as well as idiom comprehension and reading comprehension, in typically developing, monolingual adolescents. Since reading comprehension and idiom comprehension share many of the same linguistic processes, idiom comprehension may provide a unique perspective for investigating Latino adolescents' reading comprehension. Using the Global Elaboration Model (GEM, Levorato, Nesi, & Cacciari, 2004) as the conceptual framework, the present study examined the relationship between idiom comprehension and reading comprehension with a population that had not been studied in this manner: bilingual (Spanish-English) adolescents in West Central Florida and their monolingual (English-only) peers. The GEM posits that idiom comprehension develops in tandem with other linguistic development requiring inferencing ability; and that idiom x comprehension ability can be predicted by reading comprehension ability. The present research design included the evaluation of idiomatic familiarity, semantic transparency, and contextual support, as well as three other linguistic measures: a) a reading comprehension task, b) an error detection task, and c) a synonym task. Results indicated that the three linguistic measures predicted 33% of the variance in idiom comprehension accuracy; and error detection was the strongest predictor of idiom comprehension accuracy. Furthermore, monolinguals outperformed bilinguals on all measures. The synonym task, a measure of lexical depth, best predicted language group membership. There was a three-way interaction among idiomatic familiarity, semantic transparency, and contextual support; and a three-way interaction among familiarity, transparency, and language group. Lastly, the three linguistic measures significantly predicted the bilinguals' amount of English experience, with qualitative differences emerging between sequential and simultaneous language learners. Findings lend support to the psychological reality of the GEM and provide insight into the linguistic foundations of reading comprehension in Spanish-English bilinguals.

Diese Dissertation untersucht das Verstehen figurativer Sprache, im Besonderen die zeitliche Verarbeitung von verbaler Ironie. In sechs Experimenten wurde mittels ereignis-korrelierter Potentiale (EKP) die Gehirnaktivität beim Verstehen ironischer Äußerungen im Vergleich zu entsprechenden nicht-ironischen Äußerungen gemessen und analysiert. Darüberhinaus wurde der Einfluss verschiedener sprachbegleitender Hinweisreize, z.B. von Prosodie oder der Verwendung von Satzzeichen, sowie außersprachlicher Hinweisreize, wie bspw. pragmatischen Wissens, auf das Ironieverstehen untersucht. Auf Grundlage dieser Ergebnisse werden verschiedene psycholinguistische Modelle figurativer Sprachverarbeitung, d.h. 'standard pragmatic model', 'graded salience hypothesis', sowie 'direct access view', diskutiert. / This dissertation investigates the comprehension of figurative language, in particular the temporal processing of verbal irony. In six experiments using event-related potentials(ERP) brain activity during the comprehension of ironic utterances in relation to equivalent non-ironic utterances was measured and analyzed. Moreover, the impact of various language-accompanying cues, e.g., prosody or the use of punctuation marks, as well as non-verbal cues such as pragmatic knowledge has been examined with respect to the processing of irony. On the basis of these findings different models on figurative language comprehension, i.e., the 'standard pragmatic model', the 'graded salience hypothesis', and the 'direct access view', are discussed.

1 Summary My dissertation focuses on Mishima Yukio and the way the author, who strongly occupied himself with reflections on the imperfection of human language during the last decade of his life, conveyed the things that he was not able to or did not want to express explicitly. The dissertation is based on the metaphor of four rivers flowing into the Sea of Fertility, one of the arid lunar maria, that the writer used for his 'inconsistent' life shortly before his death. The four rivers that merged in Mishima's final work, the grandiose tetralogy The Sea of Fertility, represented four areas of the author's life. Each of them allowed him to express his ideas and feelings in a slightly different way. The River of Writing represented his fiction, the River of Theater showed his plays and his acting, the River of Body emphasized the role of bodybuilding and other sports in his life and finally, the River of Action revealed how the effeminate writer had transformed himself into a 'man of action'. The first section of my dissertation deals with Mishima's view on verbal communication. Although Mishima was a renowned writer and playwright who for the most part led a hardworking life and poured most of his energy into his writing, his attitude towards words was rather ambivalent. On the one hand, Mishima loved...

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