This thesis presents the results of a classroom experiment designed to investigate the possible transfer-of-training effects of two types of instruction on the acquisition of the past imperfective aspect, subjunctive mood, and causative constructions in French. An input-based practice, Processing Instruction is compared to an output-based practice Traditional Instruction. More specifically, this study examines primary, secondary and cumulative effects of Processing Instruction in the acquisition of three French linguistic features. The purpose of the present thesis is to address some of the issues raised in previous Processing Instruction research, and to, not only, explore further the primary effects of Processing Instruction in the acquisition of French but also and mainly to explore for the first time the possible secondary and cumulative effects of receiving Processing Instruction. The classroom experimental study was carried out with students learning French at the University of Greenwich. They were divided into three groups. The first group received Processing Information treatment, the second group received Traditional Instruction treatment and the third group, serving as a control group, did not receive any instruction on the three target linguistic items over the duration of the investigation. The students were tested in interpretation and production tasks in a pre-test and an immediate post-test.

Dans ce manuscrit de thèse nous présentons des nouveaux résultats concernant l’existence, la non-existence, la multiplicité et la régularité des solutions positives pour deux problèmes quasilinéaires elliptiques avec conditions de Dirichlet dans un domaine borné. Dans le chapitre 1 d’introduction, nous décrivons les deux problèmes que nous allons étudier et nous donnons les principaux résultats. Le premier, d’inconnue u, comporte un terme de source de gradient à croissance critique. Le second, d’inconnue v, contient un terme source d’ordre 0. Dans le chapitre 2 nous donnons des nouveaux résultats de régularité des solutions renormalisées utiles pour notre étude. A l’aide d’un changement d’inconnue, nous établissons un lien précis entre les problèmes en u et v. Le chapitre 3 est consacré à montrer ce lien et à donner une première application. Dans les chapitres 4 et 5 nous traitons de l’existence de solutions, la solution extrémale et sa régularité, l’existence d’une deuxième solution bornée du problème en v. Dans le chapitre 6 nous démontrons un résultat d’existence pour le problème en v avec des données mesures de Radon bornées quelconques. Dans le chapitre 7 nous obtenons des nouveaux résultats pour le problème en u en utilisant la connexion entre ces deux problèmes. / In the thesis manuscript we present new results concerning existence, nonexistence, multiplicity and regularity of positive solutions for two elliptic quasilinear problems with Dirichlet data in a bounded domain. In chapter 1 we describe the two problems which we study in the sequel and we give the main results. The first one, of unknown u, involves a gradient term with natural growth. The second one, of unknown v, presents a source term of order 0. In chapter 2 we give new regularity results for renormalized solutions. Thanks to a change of unknown we establish a precise connection between problems in u and v. Chapter 3 is devoted to show this connection and to give a first application. In the chapters 4 and 5 we treat existence solutions, extremal solution and its regularity, the existence of a second bounded solution for the problem in v. In chapter 6 we prove a result of existence for the problem in v with general bounded Radon measures data. In chapter 7 we obtain new results for the problem in u by using the connection between these two problems.

The field of language motivation is almost 60 years old. Throughout these decades, one idea has been persistent: Motivation is assumed to be a conscious process on which the learner can exert direct control. That this conscious conceptualization might not give the full picture has not been seriously entertained. An important consequence ensuing from this approach is the overreliance on self-report measures, such as questionnaires and interviews. Thus, in effect, the individual’s conscious reflection on their own attitudes and motivation has been the primary source of empirical data for our field. This thesis challenges this hegemony of conscious motivation. It provides an extensive review of the various paradigms of unconscious attitudes and motivation. It traces back their origins, highlights some of their major findings, and reviews the instruments used within each paradigm to circumvent direct self-report (as well as the controversies surrounding these instruments). The review also demonstrates that the adoption of an unconscious perspective is not inconsistent with major theoretical frameworks in the field. It then selects one of these paradigms, namely implicit attitudes, to apply in the context of language learning. Two studies were conducted on two independent samples (with almost 700 participants in total), in two different contexts (the UK and Saudi Arabia), and with different instruments of implicit attitudes (the Implicit Association Test and the Single-Target Implicit Association Test). Study 1 found that openness to language speakers at the implicit level is associated with more openness at the explicit level. Study 2 successfully replicated this finding, and extended it to language achievement—showing that learners with more favorable attitudes toward language speakers at the implicit level achieved higher grades in their English class. This finding could not be explained away by either social desirability or cognitive confounds. The results from these two studies were also meta-analyzed using Bayes factors in order to give an overall picture of the findings. The Discussion chapter wraps up this thesis by highlighting the relevance of this unconscious approach to the field more broadly. This chapter reviews a number of recent studies that have yielded similar findings to those from the current thesis. Some of these findings are then critically reanalyzed and reinterpreted in the context of unconscious motivation, thus demonstrating how adopting an unconscious approach helps view existing findings in a new light. In some cases, the analysis casts doubt on established ideas that have been taken for granted for decades. The overall message of this thesis is not that conscious motivation should be disregarded. Instead, conscious motivation should be complemented with a consideration of the role of unconscious motivation. A conscious-only approach would offer a limited window into human attitudes and motivation.

This thesis undertakes an examination of H. Rider Haggard's exploration of English national identity, both in his fiction and non-fiction works.

This thesis undertakes a re-evaluation of the concept of ‘charms’ in Anglo-Saxon culture, and reconsiders three core issues that lie at the heart of this genre: the definition of galdor as ‘charm’; the manuscript contexts of rituals that have been included in this genre; and the phenomenon of ‘gibberish’ writing which is used as a defining characteristic of ‘charms’. The thesis investigates the different meanings of galdor from the entire corpus of Old English before reconsidering its meaning in ritual texts. It then explores the liturgical nature of these seemingly unorthodox rituals, and argues that ‘charms’ were understood to be part of the Anglo-Saxon liturgy. The manuscript contexts of ‘charms’ indicate that Anglo-Saxon scribes did not distinguish between these rituals and other liturgical texts, and I take a case study of one manuscript to demonstrate this. Some rituals from the Vitellius Psalter have been included in editions of ‘charms’, and this case study reinterprets these texts as components of a liturgical collection. The Vitellius Psalter also reveals intertextual relationships between ‘gibberish’ writing in some of its rituals and exercises in encryption, suggesting that several texts encode meaning in this manuscript. The findings of this case study are then developed to reconsider the phenomenon of ‘gibberish’ writing that is used as a defining characteristic of ‘charms’, and it offers an alternative way of reading abstract letter sequences in ritual texts according to Patristic philosophies of language. This study does not aim to analyse every ritual that has been included in the corpus of ‘charms’ but each chapter will take case studies from a range of manuscripts that are representative of the genre and its sub-categories. The thesis challenges the notion that there was any such thing as an Anglo-Saxon ‘charm’, and it offers alternative interpretations of these rituals as liturgical rites and coded texts.

Made available in DSpace on 2012-09-06T01:11:53Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 2 license.txt: 1748 bytes, checksum: 8a4605be74aa9ea9d79846c1fba20a33 (MD5) 256.pdf: 1172274 bytes, checksum: 68658bbceb0ae55a41e1ecc9323bf1d7 (MD5) Previous issue date: 2001 / Tem sido relatado que infecçöes e estímulos inflamatórios causam alteraçöes da atividade e dos níveis de expressäo de várias formas de citocromos P450 (CYP) hepáticos em animais de laboratório e em seres humanos. Estas alteraçöes podem ter reflexos tanto no clearance de fármacos quanto na ativaçäo meólica de pró-mutágenos, pró-carcinógenos e pró-teratógenos. Assim, infecçöes e processos inflamatórios estäo entre os fatores que modulam a atividade ou a expressäo dos CYP e podem alterar a cinética e a toxicidade de xenobióticos. Teve como objetivo avaliar os efeitos da infecçäo com S., mansoni sobre o conteúdo total de citocromos P450, as atividades de isoenzimas das subfamílias 1A, 2A e 2B, e os níveis de CYP10 e 2A5 na fraçäo microssomal hepática de camundongos das linhagens Swiss Webster e DBA/2. Avalia a evoluçäo da esquistossomose murina em Swiss Webster e DBA/2 comparando dois modelos de infecçäo experimental animais infectados com 100 cercárias aos 10 dias de vida (lactentes) ou na vida adulta (45 dias de vida). Foram determinados o peso corporal e de órgäos (fígado, baço e intestinos), o ganho ponderal, o índice de penetraçäo das cercárias, a mortalidade, a taxa de recuperaçäo de vermes após perfusäo sistêmica e o número de ovos no fígado e intestinos. Indica que na fase intermediária de evoluçäo da esquistossomose mansônica murina (55 dias pós infecçäo) há uma acentuada diminuiçäo dos níveis totais de CYP e de atividades relacionadas as subfamílias CYP1A e CYP2B. Por outro lado, contrastando com esta depressäo generalizada de CYPs, há um claro aumento de CoH, relacionada ao CYP2A5/2 infectados.

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Research in nonverbal listenership behaviour and instruction-giving has focused on interaction with people while paying inadequate attention to human-agent interaction even as recent research indicates that, increasing pervasive computing is significantly changing how humans interact with intelligent software agents and extending the boundaries of discourse to contexts including satellite navigation systems giving directions to drivers, self-checkout machines in supermarkets and intelligent personal assistants on smartphones. This thesis reports studies that use spontaneous listener facial actions and gestures to understand the nature and pattern of spontaneous nonverbal listenership behaviours, identification and communication in instruction-giving contexts. The research methodology used is as follows. Participants who are all L1 speakers of English (forty-eight in Study 1, six in Study 2) were tasked with assembling two Lego models using vague verbal instructions from a computer interface in Study 1 and a human instructor in Study 2 with a 15-minute time limit per iteration. The interface in study1uses three voices of which two are synthesised and one is non-synthesised human recording by a voice actor while Study 2 used a live human voice. A 24-hour long multimodal corpus was built and analysed from interactions between participants and the interface in Study 1 while a 3-hour multimodal corpus was developed from Study 2. The multimodal corpus was annotated for marked facial actions and gestures occurring at points when participants requested that instructors repeat instructions. Participant requests were nonverbal in HAI and a combination of nonverbal and verbal instructions in HHI contexts. The repetitions were quantified and classified into nine typologies. The results reveal key findings regarding the use of spontaneous nonverbal listenership behaviours as pragmatic markers indicating listener comprehension or incomprehension of instructions, perception of instructor-identities, projection of attitudes, meaning-development, task-execution strategies and interaction management even though, the agent could not attend to them in the same way a human can. Using these results, the thesis submits that there are potentials for applied linguistics theories and research to be used to identify and understand pathways to make agents more responsive to human behaviour, make human-agent interaction more credible and provides a theoretical foundation for future multidisciplinary research.

The aim of this thesis is to contribute to the political agency literature by analysing theoretically how media can enhance political accountability and selection. In this thesis, I identify and analyse two channels in which media can affect political accountability and selection. First, media spillovers can improve voters' imperfect information and promote politicians' discipline. Second, journalism can affect the distribution of candidates' quality across levels of government. The thesis is composed of three chapters. In Chapter 1, I present a theoretical model that analyses how voters use information from media spillovers to discipline politicians, but the spillovers depend on the geographic localization of a jurisdiction. The yardstick competition model demonstrates that within isolated jurisdictions (without media spillovers) politicians are more likely to subtract private rents. Whereas in a jurisdiction connected with two neighbouring jurisdictions, politicians have a lower probability of engaging in rent extraction. Moreover, I also show that even incumbents in isolated jurisdictions have a lower probability of engaging in obtaining private rents due to positive spillovers from neighbouring jurisdictions via voters' incumbency advantage. Chapter 2 theoretically analyses the effects of a journalist on the distribution of bad and good candidates across levels of government. Specifically, how bad (good) candidates self-select to local or national office anticipating the journalist's decision to investigate at local or national level. In the model, candidates' decisions are driven by the relative difference in the rewards for being the representative at a local or national office; and in the case of bad candidates also by the potential scandal cost of being exposed by the journalist. The theoretical model demonstrates that increasing the scandal cost of being exposed in a journalist report, does not deter bad candidates from running nationally (when the reward ratio is large enough). Indeed, it only makes that both, bad and good candidates to be distributed evenly across levels of government. Also, I found that when the reward ratio is on a specific range, increasing the scandal cost of being exposed in a journalist report creates only two opposite types of equilibria: one in which a bad candidate runs locally, whereas, in the other one, a good candidate runs locally. Moreover, I found a non-monotonic relationship between the probability of a bad candidate being elected at a local level and the reward ratio. Chapter 3 provides a brief description and an overview of the political system in Mexico. In particular, it describes the economic and political consequences that a one-party hegemony has had on the political corruption and accountability in Mexico. As the evidence suggests, the characteristics of the Mexican political system along with the hegemony, high centralized public finances, and a lack of electoral punishment have increased Mexico's political corruption, and ultimately reduced political accountability.

This thesis is the first of its kind to study the (linguistic) phenomenon of systematic polysemy and examine its pervasiveness in Arabic (both Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) and Jordanian Arabic (JA)). Systematic polysemy in this study is defined as the case where a lexeme has more than one distinct sense and the relationship between the senses is predictable by rules in language. In the narrow sense, however, this phenomenon refers only to the productive type of regular polysemy, which is defined vis-à-vis Apresjan’s (1974) notion of totality of scope (e.g. the content/container type). The integral function of this research is to (i) identify the major (as well as the minor) patterns of regular polysemy in Arabic in the major lexical categories of nouns, verbs, and adjectives; (ii) determine the extent to which these patterns converge with or diverge from the already explored patterns, mainly in English; and (iii) test the applicability of Pustejovsky’s (1995) Generative Lexicon (the GL) in accounting for the various Arabic data on polysemy. The study found that nearly every regular polysemous pattern observed in English was also present in Arabic, albeit with a few attested differences. For example, the regular pattern of the mass-to-count alternation (e.g. coffee—a coffee) is very rarely encountered in Arabic. In addition, the animal/meat alternation in English behaves rather differently in Arabic in the way the language elicits a non-countable (mass) meaning from a countable counterpart. With respect to lexicography, this study adds to the already studied patterns in Atkins and Rundell (2008). The dissertation also raises additional questions for the GL framework with respect to property nominalizations, nominalized adjectives, and generic collective nouns.