The aim of this research is to shed light on the application of Relevance theory to the translation of modality between Arabic and English with special reference to the language used in newspaper reports.

Translations of the meaning of the Quran in English are becoming amongst the most read books in the world. Unfortunately, almost all the existing renditions fail to transfer the original clearly into the target language. They suffer from serious shortcomings that cause incomprehensibility in parts of the text. These renditions contain some elements that make the target reader struggle to understand the meaning. This research aims to contribute to overcoming the shortcomings of existing translations. It discusses the reasons why the English target reader of the Quran struggles to follow and comprehend the meaning of some of its verses, and attempts to find a workable methodology for translating the meaning of the Quran. It tries to find new methods to help tackle the weaknesses in the translations of the meaning of the Quran and provides suggestions for improving them. It is hoped this methodology will lead to producing a more accurate and comprehensible translation of the meaning of the Quran in which the meaning is transferred clearly in a natural-sounding targetlanguage text, and that will improve comprehensibility for both Muslim and non- Muslim native speakers of English. This research also studies the role and importance of the translator in achieving a good translation, and tries to establish a set of criteria for the attributes and conditions of the translator of the Quran.

I have chosen to be assessed as an interpreter and conductor of British wind band music from the earliest writings for wind band up to, and including, the present day; a period covering 220 years of original compositions of wind band music, This critical evaluation represents asummary of my work on the four required projects of the DMA course, in which I hope to demonstrate an erudite knowledge, creative imagination and maturity of interpratation in the performance of wind band repertoire.

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The traditional view of systems memory consolidation is that it is a gradual process that takes place over days or weeks. Within this approach, the hippocampus (HPC) is thought to be involved in the rapid encoding of specific events, whilst neocortex is thought to be involved in slow learning. An idea posited recently is that systems consolidation can occur rapidly if an appropriate “schema” into which the new information can be incorporated has been previously created. Using a hippocampaldependent paradigm, rats were trained to learn a schema involving 6 flavour-place paired-associates (PAs). Once the schema was acquired, relevant new information then became assimilated into extra-hippocampal regions and rapidly became hippocampal-independent. Building upon this foundation and the PAs schema paradigm, this thesis has explored several aspects of the neurobiology of schemas in animals. The first part of the thesis examined the importance of a relevant schema in new information processing. Rats were trained in both a consistent and inconsistent schema. In the consistent schema, rats could learn new PAs in a single trial; however, in the inconsistent schema, rats failed to learn the new PAs as they had not established an appropriate schema that could facilitate rapid learning. The second part of the thesis investigated the role of hippocampal NMDA receptors and dopamine receptors during encoding of new PAs. Bilateral hippocampal infusion of either the NMDA receptor antagonist D-AP5 or the D1/D5 dopamine receptor antagonist SCH23390 before encoding of new PAs resulted in impaired memory tested at 24 hr. This result suggests that the encoding of new PAs is dependent upon NMDA receptors in the HPC and also that dopamine is involved in the modulation of encoding new PAs. The final chapters of the thesis attempted to identify the extrahippocampal regions in which these new PAs are integrated with the schema during encoding. To identify the regions that may be involved, immediate early genes (Zif268 and Arc) were used. In a group of cortical structures, including the prelimbic cortex, there was significantly higher Zif268 and Arc expression when encoding 2 new PAs compared to the reactivation of previously learned (original) PAs or the encoding of 6 new PAs. These findings indicate that the prelimbic cortex may be critical for rapid assimilation of new information into a pre-existing schema. Finally, the last experiment in the thesis investigated this finding using bilateral microinfusions of either the AMPA receptor antagonist CNQX or the NMDA receptor antagonist D-AP5 into the prelimbic cortex. Infusions of CNQX and D-AP5 resulted in poor learning of the new PAs in the schema task. This indicates that parallel encoding of new PAs occurred in the prelimbic cortex and the HPC. The experimental results presented in this thesis suggest that the prelimbic cortex, in particular, plays a crucial role along with the HPC during encoding of new information in rapid memory formation.

This thesis aims to introduce the theoretical concept of stance, as an aspect of interpersonal meaning, into the discipline of Translation Studies and to explore the reproduction of stance in translations of a heavily opinionated political genre commissioned by newspapers. It seeks to provide an account of how patterns of stance are conveyed in newspaper opinion articles on the ‘Arab Spring’ originally published in English in the Washington Post and the New York Times and then how these patterns are re-conveyed in full translations of these articles for two quality Arabic-language newspapers with divergent editorial policies: Al-Ghad and Al-Ittihad. A triangulation of methods is employed for providing a coherent analysis of stance at different levels: lexico-grammatical, textual, and contextual. Accordingly, the methodology chosen for the purposes of the study is a combination of corpus- and discourse-analytical methods that operate within the tradition of descriptive translation studies. The former is drawn from the lexicogrammatical framework of stance (Biber et al., 1999; Biber, 2006), while the latter is drawn from appraisal theory (Martin and White, 2005). Also, the combined methodology is complemented by some aspects of Fairclough’s model of critical discourse analysis (1992, 1995a) and Baker’s narrative theory (2006), which, to varying degrees, allow for the contextualisation of the findings and the explanation of translational behaviour. The main contribution of the thesis is that it introduces a new theoretical concept into the field – the concept of stance. This has not previously been approached within translation studies, although it has been high on the research agenda for the past two decades or so within the field of linguistics and its neighbouring disciplines. Also, the thesis has designed and tested a new combined theoretical approach to analyse this phenomenon within the tradition of descriptive translation studies. Moreover, this thesis contributes to the field as well by addressing a new form of shifts in translation, namely shift in stance. The examination of the conveyance and reconveyance of stance reveals that significant shifts in stance occurred in the Arabic translations produced by Al-Ghad and Al-Ittihad. These shifts result in the weakening, accentuation, and entire loss of original stance.

Patients with category-specific agnosia (CSA) of the biological type have a disproportionate deficit in recognizing objects from biological categories. Bukach et al. (in press) have shown that a similar pattern of category specificity (CS) arises in normal subjects due to the interaction of structural and conceptual knowledge in the episodic retrieval of object knowledge. The current set of studies extends these findings in two ways: The first series of 4 experiments uses the newly learned attribute recall developed by Bukach et al. to investigate CS in the verbal modality. When word reading is mediated by meaning, recall of newly learned attributes assessed in the verbal modality showed a CS pattern, just as it does in patients with CSA of the biological type.. The second serie.s of 3 experiments examines recognition of object form and the nature of structural similarity by using novel stimuli that vary in the number of structural dimensions that are required to uniquely identify an object. I demonstrate that structural similarity can be understood as the proximity of exemplars in a multidimensional space defined by the diagnostic structural features that have been integrated in the current task. Competition of retrieved episodes based on their structural similarity comes from 2 sources: When the values of diagnostic dimensions are poorly specified, errors reflect competition from exemplars that are close (dimensional proximity). When an insufficient number of diagnostic dimensions are integrated, errors reflect competition from exemplars that share values on diagnostic dimensions (dimensionuZpaucity). I also present preliminary evidence that conceptual relatedness modulates the structural integration process. These results are related to CSA of the biological type, and are discussed in terms of an episodic model of object recognition in which object information is retrieved and integrated from distributed episodic memories.

There is evidence that a sizeable proportion of adults distrust children's testimony. An analysis of individual expressions of this distrust suggests that it is based on four main ideas. These are that there are age trends in the reliability of children's testimony such that: firstly, the tendency to confabulate, or recall on the basis of what was probable rather than on what was seen, decreases with age; secondly, the tendency to confuse fact with fantasy decreases with age; thirdly, the tendency uncritically to accept misinformation about a witnessed event after the event decreases with age, and finally, susceptibility to social pressures which may distort testimony decreases with age. The experiments reported in this thesis were designed to test these hypotheses. Only the final hypothesis was supported in its simplest form, and even this hypothesis was not supported if subjects had already committed themselves to an account of the details of an event, prior to being exposed to social pressures on these details. These findings suggest that age is an unreliable predictor of distortions in children's event recall, and that problems with children's testimony may be specific to situations rather than to particular age groups. The results of the experiments are compared with traditional ideas about child witnesses, and the idea that it may be possible to enhance the reliability of children's testimony is considered.

<p>People are always at risk of making errors when they attempt to retrieve information from memory. An important question is how to create the optimal learning conditions so that, over time, the correct information is learned and the number of mistakes declines. Feedback is a powerful tool, both for reinforcing new learning and correcting memory errors. In 5 experiments, I sought to understand the best procedures for administering feedback during learning. First, I evaluated the popular recommendation that feedback is most effective when given immediately, and I showed that this recommendation does not always hold when correcting errors made with educational materials in the classroom. Second, I asked whether immediate feedback is more effective in a particular case—when correcting false memories, or strongly-held errors that may be difficult to notice even when the learner is confronted with the feedback message. Third, I examined whether varying levels of learner motivation might help to explain cross-experimental variability in feedback timing effects: Are unmotivated learners less likely to benefit from corrective feedback, especially when it is administered at a delay? Overall, the results revealed that there is no best “one-size-fits-all” recommendation for administering feedback; the optimal procedure depends on various characteristics of learners and their errors. As a package, the data are consistent with the spacing hypothesis of feedback timing, although this theoretical account does not successfully explain all of the data in the larger literature.</p> / Dissertation