The functional and formative properties of speech sounds are usually referred to as acoustic-phonetics in linguistics. This research aims to demonstrate acoustic-phonetic features of the elemental sounds of Sindhi, which is a branch of the Indo-European family of languages mainly spoken in the Sindh province of Pakistan and in some parts of India. In addition to the available articulatory-phonetic knowledge; acoustic-phonetic knowledge has been classified for the identification and classification of Sindhi language sounds. Determining the acoustic features of the language sounds helps to bring together the sounds with similar acoustic characteristics under the name of one natural class of meaningful phonemes. The obtained acoustic features and corresponding statistical results for a particular natural class of phonemes provides a clear understanding of the meaningful phonemes of Sindhi and it also helps to eliminate redundant sounds present in the inventory. At present Sindhi includes nine redundant, three interchanging, three substituting, and three confused pairs of consonant sounds. Some of the unique acoustic-phonetic features of Sindhi highlighted in this study are determining the acoustic features of the large number of the contrastive voiced implosives of Sindhi and the acoustic impact of the language flexibility in terms of the insertion and digestion of the short vowels in the utterance. In addition to this the issue of the presence of the affricate class of sounds and the diphthongs in Sindhi is addressed. The compilation of the meaningful language phoneme set by learning their acoustic-phonetic features serves one of the major goals of this study; because twelve such sounds of Sindhi are studied that are not yet part of the language alphabet. The main acoustic features learned for the phonological structures of Sindhi are the fundamental frequency, formants, and the duration — along with the analysis of the obtained acoustic waveforms, the formant tracks and the computer generated spectrograms. The impetus for doing such research comes from the fact that detailed knowledge of the sound characteristics of the language-elements has a broad variety of applications — from developing accurate synthetic speech production systems to modeling robust speaker-independent speech recognizers. The major research achievements and contributions this study provides in the field include the compilation and classification of the elemental sounds of Sindhi. Comprehensive measurement of the acoustic features of the language sounds; suitable to be incorporated into the design of a Sindhi ASR system. Understanding of the dialect specific acoustic variation of the elemental sounds of Sindhi. A speech database comprising the voice samples of the native Sindhi speakers. Identification of the language‘s redundant, substituting and interchanging pairs of sounds. Identification of the language‘s sounds that can potentially lead to the segmentation and recognition errors for a Sindhi ASR system design. The research achievements of this study create the fundamental building blocks for future work to design a state-of-the-art prototype, which is: gender and environment independent, continuous and conversational ASR system for Sindhi.

This thesis considers the scientific status of linguistics and the historical and contemporary attempts to view linguistics as closely aligned to, or one of, the natural sciences. Such attempts share certain common features that make up what is identified here as the ‘Formalist Attitude'. The question ‘what is a language?' is central to the discussion of the scientific status of linguistics, so a central task of the thesis is to show how answers to this question display the features of the Formalist Attitude. In particular it is shown that attempts to constrict the theoretical purview of linguistics around a view of language that sustains claims to natural scientific status fail to account for the social ontology of language and the role of speakers within the creation and reproduction of language. A consequence of this failure is an inability to explain important language phenomena such as language change, arbitrariness and knowledge of language, which the alternative conception of language defended here successfully accounts for. ‘Language' is best seen as a power of speakers to communicate with one another, a view which emphasises the motivated, social, reproductive and transformative aspects of actual speech. The negative and positive arguments jointly defended, support the view that linguistics, considered with respect to its object of knowledge, methodology and ability to offer explanations and predictions, is not akin to natural science but should be considered a social science. Besides historical contextualisation of the problem, the thesis looks at current trends, such as cognitive and integrationist linguistics, that are broadly consistent with its criticisms and conclusions. The purpose of the thesis then is twofold; to identify, explain and criticise a problematic and influential tradition within linguistics and then to provide some Lockean underlabouring for contemporary linguistics that will be valuable to linguists and philosophers.

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Personal names are a human universal, but systems of naming vary across cultures. While a person’s name identifies them immediately with a particular cultural background, this aspect of identity is rarely researched in a systematic way. This thesis examines naming patterns as a product of the society in which they are used. Personal names have been studied within separate disciplines, but to date there has been little intersection between them. This study marries approaches from anthropology and linguistic research to provide a more comprehensive approach to name-study. Specifically, this is a cross-cultural study of the naming practices of several diverse communities in Scotland, United Kingdom. The purpose of the project is to compare and contrast the personal naming systems of a range of indigenous and immigrant communities whose social and linguistic contexts vary extensively. In doing so, it investigates links between personal names, social change, cultural contact and linguistic systems, and hopes to contribute towards examining universal features of naming systems and developing a theory of names.

Although a substantial amount of research exists on translation and on text structure, there are comparatively few works in which both subjects are combined; and to our knowledge, the effect of translation upon paragraph structure had never been thoroughly investigated. This study is an investigation of the alterations to the paragraph structure of the source text introduced by translators when translating from Russian into English and from English into Russian. In Chapter 1 we discuss linguistic and extralinguistic theories of relevance to translation, including the areas of pragmatics, norms and semiotic polysystem theory, and survey a range of theories of paragraph structure. In Chapter 2 a corpus of 8 English source texts together with the corresponding Russian translations, and 8 Russian source texts together with the corresponding English translations, is analysed for alterations to paragraph structure occurring in translation affecting either speech or narrative structure. Possible linguistic reasons for these alterations are examined in Chapter 3: the paragraph structure of the English and Russian source texts is compared for differences which could account for the alterations; and the paragraph structure of both is compared with non-translated texts in English and Russian. A high degree of similarity is found in the proportions of paragraph features across all groups, except in the area of paragraph length. It was found that a combination of factors are regularly present at alterations to paragraph structure occurring in translation, including one-sentence paragraphs, paragraphs the length of which did not conform to the source text norm, and other features of paragraph construction. This supports the hypothesis that the translator tended to alter paragraphs in conformity with the norms of the source text. In Chapter 4 we consider a higher level of factors which may promote or inhibit the the freedom of the translator to introduce alterations, such as the political and cultural climate in which the translation takes place, and the organization and production of translations.

Obtaining accurate measurements of L2 learners’ productive knowledge of collocations has proven difficult. The goal of the work reported in this thesis was to develop and test a means of eliciting from learners a reliable and representative sample of their productive knowledge of collocations. The two main methods typically used for this purpose are demonstrated to suffer from a number of drawbacks, yet one instrument is identified as having potential. This instrument, LexCombi, originally devised by Barfield (2009a), presents noun cues to learners and asks for three collocates in response to each cue, which are then evaluated as either canonical or not. In this thesis, LexCombi is taken forward and, through an iterative series of empirical studies, developed further. Specifically, after trialling LexCombi and exploring how learners interact with it, the format is adapted to more clearly guide respondents towards producing collocations; the scoring of learners’ responses is reviewed to gain a more complete picture of learners’ knowledge; and a new set of cue words is trialled and selected to resolve a number of issues identified with the original cues. After this development process, an empirical evaluation of the final form of the instrument, LexCombi 2, is conducted and its capacity to provide useful data on learners’ productive knowledge of collocations is evaluated. Following this, the empirical data is used to consider what can be learned about collocation knowledge using LexCombi 2. Explorations include the relationship between collocation knowledge and general L2 proficiency, the types of words that are used as responses to LexCombi 2, and how LexCombi 2 scores are affected by different conceptions of collocation. Finally, the thesis considers the overall significance of this work for our understanding of collocation knowledge more generally.

My PhD research investigates how Shi‘i Muslim women in Cardiff participate in religious rituals and draw on religious texts in ways that help to construct their identities as diasporic Muslims. The religious rituals involved are the majales of Muharram and Safar, the first two months of the Islamic calendar, which are dedicated to commemorate the memory of Hussein, Prophet Muhammad‘s grandson and the third Shi‘i Imam according to Twelver Shi‘a. Majales (sing. majlis) are gatherings of people for the commemoration of the memory of Hussein and the battle of Karbala. Understanding the dynamics of a particular community is essential in investigating how identities are constructed within this community and by adopting an ethnographic approach this understanding and investigation are expected to be achieved. Considering the intricate relationship between the participants‘ religious practices and the ways in which sacred texts are taken up and used, an ethnographic approach would also allow me to address these two aspects equally. This is why I carried out fieldwork for four months during two successive years, 2014 and 2015. During this period I undertook participant-observation in an Islamic Centre in Cardiff and conducted interviews with Shi‘i Muslim women who participated in the rituals. The women involved in this study are female students, mostly PhD students, or spouses of male students whose stay in the United Kingdom is bound to their study, i.e. they are (academic) sojourners. The use of interviews as a method, particularly semi-structured interviews, offered the participants the opportunity to talk about their practices through a narrative mode. Deppermann (2013a: 67) indicates that ―narratives provide particularly powerful resources for positioning‖. Through narratives people take positions towards their past selves or towards others. In his seminal article ―Positioning between Structure and Performance‖, Michael Bamberg (1997a) comes up with the idea of ̳Narrative Positioning‘, in which he argues that the process of positioning happens at three different levels. De Fina and Georgakopoulou (2012: 164) argue that Bamberg‘s model of narrative positioning has been adopted in many studies that involve interviews and conversational stories because ―it affords an analytical apparatus for linking local telling choices to larger identities‖. Bamberg‘s (1997a) model is applied to the analysis of the narratives derived from interviews with these Shi‘i Muslim women. This model consists of three different yet interrelated levels, where the first level is concerned with the story world and the relations that exist among characters. The second level is concerned with the story-telling world and the interaction that takes place between the interlocutors. The moral/ social world is what the third level focuses on and how narrators define themselves in relation to the wider context, i.e. beyond the local level of interaction. The analysis has been supplemented with observations from my ethnographic work and suggests how the women use the narratives to perform complex identity work through which they orient to the symbols and core values of their ―imagined homeland‖ and draw on these to validate the diverse roles they fulfil and the practices they have adopted in the diaspora context. In talking about majales and their practices in both homeland and diaspora, participants display and reflect on the different roles they take, including being teachers, advice-givers and critics of others‘ behaviour.

The central question addressed is whether proper names present a strain for second language (L2) readers. Answering this question helps to establish the soundness of a widely held assumption in L2 vocabulary research, that L2 readers can easily recognise and understand proper names from the form (capitalisation) and function (context) in a text. The investigation is motivated by classroom experience that contradicts this assumption, suggesting a need for reconsideration of how proper names are handled in L2 vocabulary research and language pedagogy. The assumption was approached from three angles using a series of experiments. First,interviews were conducted to investigate how L2 readers perceive proper names and what strategies they use. Another study investigated how L2 readers approach unfamiliar proper names while reading, and found some L2 readers treat proper names as vocabulary to check in a dictionary. The second direction investigated the effect of L2 proper names on higher-level comprehension processes. Two studies compared the effect of culturally familiar and unfamiliar proper names on comprehension, and found no effect for culturally familiar proper names on global comprehension. The third approach considered proper name processing in terms of lower-level reading skills (i.e. word recognition and sub-skills). A study was conducted to determine to what extent L2 readers can identify proper names in context and found that participants were not very successful at using context to identify proper names. Three main claims are based on these results. First, proper names can disrupt reading in that some L2 readers treat them as unknown vocabulary to look up. Second, proper names do not seem to impact global comprehension. Third, L2 readers are not very successful in correctly identifying proper names from context. Based on these results, L2 vocabulary researchers and teachers should consider the potential burden proper names can place on L2 readers.

This study draws on theories and methodologies from the fields of multimodality, ethnography and book history studies to explore class conflict and social mobility in Edwardian Britain (1901-1914). Using a dataset of 2,998 book inscriptions, this work investigates the types of inscriptions present in books bought and exchanged in Edwardian Britain; the ways in which inscriptive practices varied according to location, gender, age, social class and occupation; the material and semiotic features of inscriptions; and their communicative and performative purposes. The findings reveal that inscriptive choices were primarily influenced by ‘class-based affordances’ that centred on the social status and wealth of book owners, as well as Edwardian social conventions and the specific, well-established norms of each inscription genre or sub-genre. For the working classes, inscriptions represented pride at owning a book for the first time, while the lower-middle classes primarily used inscriptions as symbolic gestures of social mobility to gain social capital and respect from peers. In contrast, the upper classes, who feared the collapse of hierarchical society, saw inscriptions as a way of advertising their wealth and high social status. However, there is some indication that the upper-middle classes were slightly more willing to embrace lower-class inscriptive practices. These findings suggest that we must reframe current conceptions of hegemony as the transmission of values from a dominant social group to a subordinate one, and view it, instead, as a continuous two-way process between different groups. Overall, the study demonstrates how blending multimodal analysis with ethnohistorical methodologies can uncover the important role of the inscription as a material microcosm of the social tensions that existed between class groups in early twentieth-century Britain.

This thesis investigates the sequential organisation of offers and acceptance in Saudi Arabic talk-in-interaction. This investigation is implemented through the use of the methodology of Conversation Analysis. Through analysing Saudi Arabic naturally-occurring data, I look at offer sequences as a whole, and not just the offer and its initial response. The data suggest that, mostly, Saudi offers are not immediately accepted; the acceptance happens only after turns of vigorous rejection and negotiation between the offerer and his/her recipient. As this is the first conversation analytic study of offers in Arabic talk-in-interaction, its aim is to investigate, through the use of naturally-occurring talk, the interactional significance of the delayed acceptance and how this action is ultimately accomplished in Saudi Arabic interaction. Through the analysis, I examine these initial rejections that come as a response to Saudi offers, and how they are usually produced immediately and without delay. Furthermore, I investigate when offerers treat these initial rejections as just mere pro forma rejections that require negotiation compared to when they treat it as a definitive rejection. This ultimate outcome of the offer sequence is usually projectable due to the different use of offer formats: declarative, imperative or interrogative. Also, this outcome is related to the offerers’ and their recipients’ orientation to identity, such as membership categories and authority, and the role played by these in the recognisability of action.