This thesis provides a description and analysis of the copula in Arabic. More precisely, it concerns the copula in Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). First, the thesis describes the copula syntactically. This includes defining the copula in Arabic, stating strategies used to form copular sentences, indicating possible complements of the copula and clarifying contexts in which the copula is absent. Second, the thesis classifies copular sentences in MSA into four types: equational sentences, predicational sentences, specificational sentences and identificational sentences. However, it concludes that equationals and predicationals are the basic copular sentence types in MSA. Third, the present study analyses the overt copula in MSA syntactically within the Head-Driven Phrase Structure Grammar (HPSG) framework. With regard to the semantic contribution of the copula, the thesis shows that MSA has two copulas: a copula of identity and a copula of predication. The former licenses equational sentences, while the latter licenses predicational sentences. Fourth, within HPSG this study analyses verbless sentences in MSA. It argues that there is a null copula in verbless sentences. It also argues that there are two types of the null copula: an equative null copula and a predicative null copula. Fifth, as there is a verbal element in verbless sentences and sentences with an overt copula, the thesis provides a unified account for the copula in MSA by postulating a system of types and constraints. Essentially, the last four points represent the thesis’ original contribution to knowledge.

Previous studies have used a genre approach and move-based analysis as a tool for unpacking discourse organisation of text. Likewise, corpus-based approaches, as a bottom-up method, have been applied to investigate vocabulary patterns, their distribution and typical linguistic characteristics within the text. These two approaches are considered complementary, offering insights into the discourse patterns of a genre. Few studies, however, have attempted to combine these two methodological perspectives and then develop a pedagogic intervention based on the description. This study integrated move-based and phraseological approaches with the specific objectives of scrutinising the macro- and micro-structure of applied linguistic research articles written in English and indexed in the Thai Citation Index (TCI) database, along with investigating Thai novice researchers’ and graduate students’ perceptions of article writing for publication and responses to a workshop. The research comprised two constitutive strands: one descriptive, and one interventionist. The descriptive phase began with developing a move-based coding protocol. I then examined the four conventional sections of 50 research articles (RAs) to identify the ways in which the discourse of these texts was organised. A corpus-based approach, with qualitative support, was then applied to extract pedagogically interesting n-grams: functional n- grams and content-based n-grams, from a dataset of 110 RA texts (the original group of 50 plus an additional 60). Concerning the interventionist strand, I carried out workshops applying the knowledge obtained from the descriptive phase to raise Thai novice scholars’ and graduate students’ awareness vis-à-vis article writing. Data regarding perceptions of this process were elicited through semi-structured interviews with six faculty members and two graduate students.

This study investigates linguistic variation in a case of dialect change and maintenance, for a Northern (NT) Thai dialect in a Northern Industrial Estate (NTIE) of Thailand, in Lamphun province. The target area is the Ban Klang Municipal (MBK) community where locals use the NT Thai dialect. However, due to internal immigration over the past 30 years, MBK has undergone a dramatic change in socio-economics and culture, from an agriculturally-based society, swiftly transforming into an urbanised and industrialised one. The national standard Bangkok (BKK) Thai, has influenced and motivated dialect shift among MBK speakers who speak the NT Thai dialect. The quantitative variationist approach can clarify the changing linguistic situation in the MBK area. The dependent linguistic variables include rhotic consonant onset (r) incorporating [r], [ɾ], [l] and [h] as its variants, such as [rɯa:n0], [ɾɯa:n0], [lɯa:n0] and [hɯa:n0], "house". The consonant cluster onset with rhotic (Cr) comprises {Cr}, {Cɾ}, {Cl} and {C∅}, such as [khrap3], [khɾap3], [khlap3] and [khap3], "male polite final particle". Only the (r) onset includes the local variant [h] in NT Thai dialect; only (Cr) includes a deleted variant. The independent variables comprise Labovian style factors, demographic social factors, social network strength (SNS) factors and phonological constraints. The dyadic interviews included 66 respondents. Defined by geographic origin differences, the 57 MBK locals were the focused group, while the 9 BKK speakers were the control group. A friend-to-friend method and judgment sampling were employed. The total length of interviews was around 120 hours. The study revealed the following: 1. In both (r) and (Cr) variables, the study showed that [l] and {C∅} were the most commonly-used forms. Stylistic stratification occurs, with formal styles favouring the standard rhotic variants. 2. Style plays a major role in linguistic variability, followed by social factors and linguistic constraints, respectively. LMC women are the linguistic trailblazers in certain variants. MMC elderly local males are the primary dialect maintainers. The MMC and WC locals used the covert prestige form [h] more often, but with different underlying social meanings. 3. Social network (SN) analysis employed an ego-centric network approach. SN factors were significant in the model but not a strong explanatory predictor. MBK networks were largely ethnically homogeneous. Contact frequency and intimacy scores were highly correlated. This confirms that all attributes forming the SN are highly interrelated and dependent. 4. The corresponding variants of (r) and (Cr) reveal non-parallel linguistic patterns. The relationship between variable (r) and (Cr) exhibited weak associations, with the rhotic variants patterning similarly, while the lateral variants were not aligned. The emergence of laterals in (Cr) might be derived partly from articulatory errors, while [l] patterned in line with {C∅} as the neutral variants in casual styles. 5. The stylistic and social factors played greater roles in linguistic variability than the internal linguistic factors. This might be due to the social structure that has an effect on the linguistic structure, particularly in these Tai-Kadai family and related non-Western languages. The style and social factor elements are an important determinant of linguistic structure.

This study investigates gender inequality as embodied in the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia. To do so, the study draws on critical discourse studies (CDS), in particular the socio- cognitive approach (Van Dijk, 1998, 2008, 2013). The socio-cognitive approach emphasises the importance of investigating the social, cognitive and discursive dimensions of social problems such as dominance and gender inequality. This study, hence, investigates gender inequality as exemplified in the ban on women driving in Saudi Arabia in relation to society, cognition and discourse. The social analysis of this study includes an investigation of how sexism is reproduced through the micro level of society: social practices, including laws and regulations and the macro level of society, social structures such as dominance and groups relations. The cognitive and discursive analyses, on the other hand, mainly concern the matter of women driving. The study carries out a detailed textual analysis of texts written by prominent religious and conservative figures in order to delegitimise women’s right to drive. The aim of this analysis is to identify the impact of sexism on cognition; how women’s driving is understood and interpreted and the impact of sexism on discourse; how women’s driving is represented in text. The latter includes an investigation of the discursive strategies employed in the texts in order to delegitimise women’s right to drive. The social analysis shows that gendered power relations in Saudi Arabia emanated primarily from the historical alliance between the monarch, on the on hand, and tribal leaders and Wahhabi clerics on the other hand. Such historical alliance resulted in the state appropriating tribal (patriarchal) values and Wahhabi perspectives of social reality (male centred interpretations of religious teachings) in the formation of public policies. However, gender relations have been, ii also, constantly influenced by other different factors such economic development, modernisation, activism and politicisation. Regarding the textual analysis, the analysis shows that the texts analysed employed two discursive strategies in order to delegitimise women’s rights to drive. Women’s right to drive was discouraged through, first, the delegitimation of the advocates of women’s right to drive. The texts utilized religious and national identities in order to conceal its sexist facet and hence discredit the advocates of women’s right to drive as the enemy of country and religion. Women’s right to drive was also discouraged through the problematisation of women’s driving. The analysis shows that the texts were controlled by a sexist mental model whereby women driving was interpreted and evaluated in terms of patriarchal norms and values.

Corpus linguistics has been used for over three decades in language teaching but not until now has it become a mainstream approach to language learning in the classroom. Thus, this thesis explores how the use of corpora can be successfully integrated into the English Foreign Language classroom, specifically in the Saudi classroom context. The integration is explored through two studies. Study One addresses the learners’ actual use of corpora in the classroom for learning general verbs patterns. General verbs patterns are selected through a multi-level approach which consists of a corpus-based approach as a first level, a phraseological approach as a second level and a pedagogical approach as a third level. The study relies on data collected from 51 participants who were at the intermediate level studying general English in the foundation year. The study ran for five weeks and included three training sessions, in which the learners were trained in how to use the corpus resource and how to read and analyse concordance lines and two testing sessions. The participants were tracked via software tracker in both training and testing sessions. The data were collected through tracking logs, activity sheets, reflective forms and interviews. The findings of Study One show that the intermediate-level learners were able to use the corpus resource in the same way as they had been trained, which indicates that the training was successful. The learners were also able to identify general verbs patterns through the use of concordance lines. Most participants had a positive attitude towards the use of corpora in the classroom besides identifying a few difficulties related to the use of corpora. Study Two investigates teachers’ attitudes towards the use of corpora in the classroom which included 56 in-service teachers who attended a training course on the uses of corpora in the classroom. The data collected included questionnaires (pre-course and post-course questionnaires) and interviews. The findings show that the questionnaires had a good reliability value and the teachers’ attitudes were moderately positive towards the use of corpora in the classroom. In addition, Study Two finds that there are some factors that seem to influence teachers’ attitudes, such as the training course, the level of computer literacy and the teachers’ perceptions of their role and learners’ roles within the communicative approach. The interviews constitute an in-depth investigation of teachers’ views about the use of corpora in the classroom by listing possible factors that facilitate or hinder the implementation of corpora in everyday teaching practice. Through the discussion of these findings from Study One and Study Two, a full integration of corpus linguistics into the Saudi classroom is possible taking into consideration the hindrances. These difficulties can be overcome through the offered proposal for implementing the use of corpora in the classroom.

This thesis analyses the professional discourses and gendered identities of working women manifested within Malaysian media targeting a female audience. It also interrogates the ideologies of gender that inform, and are espoused by, these discourses and identities. Through the integration of feminist critical discourse analysis and feminist conversation analysis, it examines career advice texts and interviews with high-achieving women produced over a 12-month period in three print and broadcast media: Her World, a Malaysian magazine; Clove, a Sunday pullout in a mainstream newspaper; and Capital FM, a commercial radio station. The analysis of discourses expressed in the conception of women’s professional selves and occupational lives fills a discernible gap in gender and language research, as previous empirical work on media directed at women has largely emphasised on beauty, relationships, sex, and parenting. By interrogating which professional discourses find expression across the different media genres, this thesis makes another key contribution to the field, given that earlier studies often focused on a single media source. In this research, the similarities and variances in the discourses and identities produced by the three media outlets are related to the tensions and relations between wider sociocultural norms, media commodification, institutional roles, and women’s agency. While the radio has been relatively under-valued in gender and language research, in this study, we shall see the potential it holds for disrupting established hegemonic discourses, which is significant in a media landscape where the production of oppositional and alternative discourses is rare. The analysis identifies a range of mutually reinforcing and oppositional professional discourses that work together to articulate paradoxical female subjectivities that are empowered yet deficient, and strongly associated with stereotypical femininity and motherhood. These discourses and subjectivities mobilise postfeminist and neoliberal ideas in service of the status quo, as the resignification of freedom, choice and agency depoliticises women’s work issues in the media. With the widespread proliferation of neoliberalism and postfeminism, this thesis makes a timely contribution to understanding their effects on discourses on women and work in an under-researched socio-cultural context.

The aim of this thesis is to provide a description of comparative constructions in Modern Standard Arabic (henceforth MSA) and develop an analysis for some of the facts framed within Head - driven Phrase Structure Grammar (henceforth, HPSG). To the best of my knowledge, MSA comparative constructions have not been addressed before but present an interesting challenge for Arabic and general linguistics. MSA has simple and complex comparatives, which look rather like their counterparts in many other languages. Simple comparatives are indeed like those of other languages, in that it involves adjectives with a distinctive form and semantics and an extra PP complement. Complex comparatives, however, are quite different. They involve an adjective with a nominal complement, which may be an adjectival maṣdar (known in English as adjectival noun) or an ordinary noun, and are rather like so-called 'adjectival constructs'. Complex comparatives in English and many other languages might be analysed as involving periphrasis, where a slot in a paradigm is filled not by a single word but by a pair of words. My analysis, however, argues that MSA complex comparative construction is not a case of periphrasis. Instead, it is an independent construction that expresses the meaning that would otherwise be expressed by certain missing forms. Simple comparatives, complex comparatives, and adjectival constructs can all be analysed with lexical rules within HPSG. With a 'real' nominal comparative that quantifies a noun, the thesis shows that in MSA kutubun ʔakṯar 'more books' and kutubun ʔaḥsan 'better books' are syntactically essentially the same in which we have nouns with an attributive adjective. The thesis also shows that MSA has both ordinary clausal comparatives and phrasal comparatives. The former is introduced only by maa and involves adjectival and nominal gaps and adverbial gaps in subcomparative cases and the latter is introduced by free relatives maa , man and allḏai and have either nominal gaps or resumptives. It was also shown that maa comparatives with nominal gaps are ambiguous and can be either a clausal or a phrasal complement.

This thesis investigates, within the framework of Relevance Theory (RT), the semantics and pragmatics of the discourse connective but in English and its counterparts in Modern Standard Arabic, namely lākinna , lākin, and bal. The study focuses mainly on Blakemore’s (2002) relevance-theoretic account of but in which she argues that but encodes a procedural meaning that guides the hearer to interpret what follows as contradicting and eliminating an assumption. She claims that but encodes a unified meaning that accounts for its different uses of contrast, correction, denial of expectation and utterance-and discourse-initial use. In this study, however, I highlight a number of gaps in Blakemore’s analysis of but and argue that, although a unified account of but is desirable, it cannot be maintained. Hence, I argue that there are two different buts in English, each associated with a different meaning and a different syntactic distribution. The correction but seems to be available only when preceded by an explicit negation and followed by a constituent smaller than a full clause. On the other hand, a preceding negation is not a prerequisite for the denial but which allow s its conjuncts to be full clauses or constituents smaller than a full clause. I propose that but in English encodes two different procedures. The first procedure which is associated with the denial but constrains the inferential processes that result in the contradiction of a manifest assumption that cannot be relevant as an explicature. The other procedure which is associated with the correction but constrains the inferential processes involved in the interpretation of the second conjunct and the context for its interpretation as a replacement of an explicitly denied assumption . This analysis works for the Arabic counterparts of but as well. I show that both lākin and lākinna are the equivalents of denial but , whereas the equivalent of correction but is bal and lākin when preceded by negation and followed by a phrase.

Recent decades have brought an extensive amount of research that informs our understanding of the complex relationship between the languages in a multilingual mind and how this is shaped by biological, cognitive and external factors. The current study is an attempt to contribute to this understanding by providing a comprehensive picture of the structural and lexical development of Turkish as an immigrant and heritage language in the UK and its predictors. It specifically aims to gain insights into the roles of age at onset of bilingualism (AaO) and quantity/quality of L1 contact in this development by bringing together the body of research that was traditionally carried out separately either with early bilinguals/heritage speakers or late bilinguals (attriters). The spoken performance of a total of 92 Turkish - English bilinguals with a wide AaO range (0–42) divided into three age ranges and of 44 monolinguals was investigated. This approach allowed us to control for the quality of input available to the speakers within this community and test the impact of AaO to see whether these factors remain equally predictive of L1 knowledge across a wide range of linguistic abilities including past tense, overall structural complexity, foreign accentedness, and word formation. The synthesis of the findings obtained from three empirical studies written as chapters of this thesis suggested that this was not the case. The productivity in word formation, for example, was largely independent of AaO effect and past L1 experience, while both factors were at play in the remaining properties showing a dynamic, nonlinear interaction between the two. While in older bilinguals the transfer from the L2 to L1 was mostly subtle (due to late AaOs), for younger bilinguals, L1 development was variable and affected by a range of additional factors. Findings are discussed within the premises of various theoretical approaches.

There are various types of educational contests held across disciplines and institutions in China every year, including debate contests, speech contests, reading contests, writing contests, spoken English contests, and teaching contests. The Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press National College English Teaching Contest (hereafter SFLEP contest) is such an example. It is a large-scale teaching contest held annually throughout 1,500 Chinese universities for Chinese EFL teachers engaged in tertiary education. Every year, 20 winning contestant teachers are chosen from the contest and their mock teachings (a particular contest segment in which the contestant teachers teach in a quasi-classroom environment) in the finals of the SFLEP contest are recorded and presented to the public through various media, such as Youku (a very popular online video website in China, www.youku.com). Moreover, the contest adjudicators make comments on these privileged examples and their comments are published by one of the contest sponsors, the Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press, as well. As these mock teachings are not authentic classroom teaching, but the teaching performances in the contest, they represent the privileged meta-pedagogical examples that the contest organizers want to present to the contest audience. For the same reason, these comments of the mock teachings also represent the meta-pedagogical opinions of the contest adjudicators in the contest, which the contest organizers want the contest audience to access. There are studies which explore the collective identity types reflected in the contest discourses and studies which discuss the impact of teaching contest on authentic teaching. The former type of study offers ways of understanding teaching contest practices as spontaneous events which put forward their particular meta-pedagogical models to the contest audience; the second type of study offers ways of understanding the impact and washback influences of these models on authentic teachings. No prior studies, however, explore how the teaching practices in authentic teachings are borrowed into the teaching contest. It is the hypothesis of the present thesis that the classroom-based pedagogic models are borrowed in and adapted in the contest discourses before they are presented to the contest viewers. The research purpose of the thesis is to test this hypothesis with discourse analytic approaches. The data used in the thesis include the published recordings of 20 winning mock teachings in the finals of 2nd SFLEP contest, together with 40 published adjudicators’ comments on these mock teachings. The analytic approach used in the thesis is primarily Martinian systemic functional linguistics (e.g. Martin, 2004). The thesis goes through a three-step analysis of the data. Firstly, it analyzes the register configuration of the mock teaching discourse; secondly, it compares these analytic results with a prior study of ESL pedagogic genre (Lee, 2011); thirdly, it analyzes the contest adjudicators’ post-contest comments as to what genre instances and individuations are valued / devalued in these comments. The research results are three-fold. First, the research reports the particular register features of the mock teaching data used. Second, the mock teaching discourse as a genre is no different from the ESL pedagogic genre at its stages; however, it is different from the ESL pedagogic genre at its sub-stages, phases, and register configurations. Third, certain stages, sub-stages, and phases of the mock teaching genre are chosen and further evaluated by the contest adjudicators in their post-contest comments. Within these evaluated segments of the genre, instances are either valued or devalued. Moreover, the valued genre instances all point to Interventionism, a certain pedagogic type according to Bernsteinian pedagogical classification (see also Chapter 2). The research results lead to this thesis’ primary contribution by giving a new dimension for the explanation of the teaching contest discourse. Based on its research results, the thesis proposes that the teaching contest discourse as a macrogenre has the social function of borrowing in and changing the classroom pedagogic genre and then refining this genre for the purpose of representing a privileged meta-pedagogic identity in the contest. Apart from this, the thesis also makes contributions to SFL genre theories. First, it proposes that the genre changes in the mock teaching discourse are a phenomenon of genre blurring, as they maintain the abstract form of pedagogic genre while adapt this genre to the contest environment at more constitutional levels. Although prior SFL genre theories can define the mock teaching genre as a genre generated from pedagogic genre, there are no explanations of how the genre changes happen along with the register shift and ideological control. Second, it proposes that the evaluation of genre instances and individuations in the contest adjudicators’ post-contest comments is a phenomenon of genre solidification as the evaluation re-classifies a genre and picks certain instances to represent a privileged narrowed-down genre form in the contest. It is therefore a more delicate way to classify and solidify genre types.