The dissertation explores word order phenomena in a 'free' word order language, Russian. It has been proposed in the literature that in simple sentences like 'John sees Mary', six word orders are equally possible in Russian. The dissertation questions the equal acceptability of these word orders and shows that some of the "felicitous" word orders have a degraded status compared to others. The word order findings are based on experimental evidence from elicitation, perception and grammaticality judgment psycholinguistic studies with 237 adult native speakers of Russian. The results of the experiments demonstrate that Russian speakers have a strong preference for producing some word orders over others. For example, Russian native speakers produce transitive SVO, OVS and SOV felicitous word orders, but consistently do not produce VSO, VOS and OSV felicitous word orders, which they still recognize as acceptable, but as having a degraded grammaticality status. On the basis of the experimental evidence and analysis of the various constituent movements within the Minimalist Program approach, a model of grammar is proposed which adds a pragmatic component responsible for word order permutations. According to this model, the syntactic component of grammar generates only SVO sentences (the basic word order) in Russian. All discourse-dependent sentences result from realignment in the post-syntactic pragmatic component. In contrast to the hierarchical structure of syntax, the pragmatic component of grammar has a linear structure and operates with Optimality Theory-type constraints determining the optimal output word order in a particular discourse structure. The underlying assumption of this model is that this pragmatic component is present in all languages. However, the language specific ranking of the constraints in this component results in word order variations. In contrast to the previous structural approaches to word order permutations in Russian, the proposed model has obvious advantages. The model accounts not only for grammaticality and ungrammaticality, but also for the degraded grammaticality of different word order permutations in Russian. In addition, this approach accounts for the variation between 'fixed' word order languages like English and 'free' word order languages like Russian.

The issue of corporate governance (CG) has taken central position in debates after the major financial crisis in almost all parts of the world. Numerous endeavours have been made to improve CG in Pakistan. However, these efforts did not produce the required results. Moreover, the existing literature fails to establish the impact of these efforts and CG norms on the performance of listed companies in Pakistan. Therefore, this study intends to investigate the CG framework of Pakistan, identify its weaknesses and explore opportunities for its improvement. For this purpose, the four variables of CG amongst others have been selected which include: the investigation of Code of Corporate Governance (CCG) of Pakistan (law in books), enforcement mechanisms in relation to the implementation of CG standards (law in action), the role of board of directors (BODs) and the role of institutional investors (IIs) in enhancing the companies’ performance and improving the CG practices. This study is conducted by employing a socio-legal research methodology due to its mixed nature of being legal and corporate. A qualitative research method is utilised by employing an inductive approach, interpretative research philosophy and exploratory strategy. The results of this study declare important for regulators to update CCG regularly by assessing its impact on companies’ performance and evaluating the attitude of companies towards the full and partial adoption of CCG. This practice will increase compliance with CCG. Moreover, this thesis develops a ‘Board Effectiveness Model’ in order to make BODs diverse and independent. Furthermore, this thesis explores strategies to enhance the part of IIs in the CG of their investee companies. The researcher believes that the recommendations proposed by this thesis, if implemented, could make considerable improvement in the corporate sector of Pakistan which will enhance investor confidence and will also attract foreign investment.

Premièrement, ce travail de recherche a pour objet d’esquisser une étude syntaxique des wh-questions, et d’analyser les aspects de la formation des wh-questions dans deux langues différentes : l’anglais et l’arabe , dans le cadre de la Grammaire Générative et de l’Approche Minimaliste. Il sera démontré et allégué que dans les deux langues respectives, le wh-mot qui se trouve au début de la phrase interrogative est déplacé vers le [Spec, CP] et que le wh-movement est visible.Deuxièmement, cette thèse tente d’examiner et d’analyser la traduction des wh-questions de l’anglais vers l’arabe par trois systèmes de traduction automatique, employant différentes méthodes de traduction selon trois méthodes d’évaluation. Nous décrirons les problèmes liés aux différences linguistiques entre les deux langues. Ces problèmes ont une grande influence sur la qualité et l’acceptabilité de l’output. L’évaluation de l’output nous permettra de présenter les informations concernant les aspects positifs à conserver et les aspects négatifs à faire évoluer des systèmes. En se basant sur l’étude syntaxique préalable des wh-questions, nous fournirons une étude comparative qui déterminera le meilleur système quant à la qualité de la traduction et à la performance de ce système. A travers l’analyse des résultats de l’évaluation, nous spécifierons les raisons pour lesquelles le système produit des traductions de mauvaise qualité. Enfin, nous proposerons quelques recommandations qui pourraient être nécessaires aux concepteurs et aux développeurs de systèmes de traduction afin de résoudre les problèmes linguistiques et opérationnels susceptibles d’entraver le processus de traduction. / Firstly, this research aims to outline a syntactic study of the wh-questions, and analyse aspects of wh-question formation in typologically two different languages: Arabic and English within the framework of Generative Grammar and Minimalist Approach. It will be shown and argued that in both languages, the wh-phrase, which is in initial position, is moved to [Spec, CP] and that wh-movement applies overtly.Secondly, the thesis attempts to discuss and analyse the translation of English wh-questions into Arabic by three machine translation systems using different methods of translation through different methods of evaluation. We describe a set of important problems related to linguistic differences between the two languages. These problems have great influence not only on the quality of the output but also on its acceptability. The evaluation of the output will help us to present a diagnostic information about where a given system succeeds or needs improvement, relative to its intended users and use based on the syntactic study of wh-questions, to provide a comparative information which allows identifying the best system with respect to the translation quality and performance, to specify through the analysis of the results of evaluation the sources of problems that are responsible for producing ill-formed translations and inadequate systems’ performance and finally to outline some recommendations that are useful for system’s designers and developers to overcome various linguistic and operational problems that might impede the translation process.