Earlier studies on interpretation such as Garcés (1996) and Hale (2004) show that interpreters often make the mistake of conveying only the semantic meaning; ignoring, misunderstanding or simply not conveying the pragmatic meaning of utterances. Other studies have also touched on issues of the classification of the types of errors made during interpretation Mead (1985), Karton (2008) and Kiguru (2008); they do not, however, provide a good understanding of errors that lead to stylistic and pragmatic modifications in interpretation from and to indigenous African languages. Research on interpretation in Kenyan courts is limited and there is none that examines Dholuo-English interpretations. Consequently, there is a need to have a broad and deep understanding of the stylistic and pragmatic meaning of modifications involving Dholuo-English data. The literature reviewed includes literature on courtroom interpreting and literature on meaning shifts in the courtroom. This study investigates courtroom interpretation using critical stylistic tools to determine the stylistic and pragmatic changes and their impact on ideation and interpersonal communication in the Target Text. The critical stylistic tools used from Jeffries (2010) are: presenting other people’s speech and thoughts, presenting actions and state, as well as naming and describing. In the data analysis, for presenting the speech of others, I use the reported speech categories by Short (2012) to examine fidelity to the text, for the description of actions and states I ground my work in the transitivity model by Halliday as explained by Simpson (1993) and for naming and description I use Halliday’s Functional Grammar to describe the Noun group. For analysis of pragmatic modifications during interpretation, the research is grounded in Austin’s (1962) Speech Act Theory and Grice’s (1975) Cooperative Principle. The data analysed consists of 12 court cases. The data collected is analysed using qualitative methods of analysis in order to determine inferences, give explanations and make conclusions. The results show changes in the Target Text which include: modifications to adhere to felicity conditions, passivisation to conform to how Dholuo reports speech from senior people, misreporting while using direct speech, distortion of facts, expansion of meaning, vagueness, changes to the verb processes, use of explanations, use of euphemisms that obscure meaning, changes in the tone of the source text and changes in the pre and post modifications of nouns that cause meaning loss. Reasons for these changes are: culturally bound words and phrases, legal jargon which has no Dholuo equivalents, specialised Kenyan English vocabulary, the nature of courtroom interpretation, the additional duties courtroom interpreters in Kenya carry out, as well as lack of training. This research uncovered a new role for interpreters in the courtroom of striving to maintain the dignity of the court as well as a new feature of adherence to felicity conditions in judgements.

This thesis investigates the place-names of four parishes in Berwickshire and compares coastal and inland naming patterns. Berwickshire is a large county that borders on northern England and historically formed part of Anglo-Saxon Northumbria. Partly due to the survival of extensive archives from the medieval priory of Coldingham, preserved in Durham Cathedral Archives, this county holds some of Scotland’s earliest recorded place- names. The parishes that form the research area are grouped together in the north-east of the county. Two of these parishes, Abbey St Bathans and Bunkle & Preston, are inland, and two, Cockburnspath and Coldingham, have extensive coastlines. The diversity of this group of parishes allows a comparative study of the place-names of coastal and inland areas to be undertaken. The topography of Berwickshire’s thirty-two parishes is very varied, and the four parishes have been chosen to reflect this range of landscapes. The place-names within the four parishes examined in this thesis derive almost exclusively from Old English, Older Scots, Modern Scots including Standard Scottish English, with a small minority derived from Old Norse, Gaelic, and Brittonic. The chronology of Old English, Older Scots, and Modern Scots is defined as given in the Concise Scots Dictionary: Old English is the period up to 1100, Older Scots is the period 1100-1700, and Modern Scots is the period 1700 onwards (CSD, 1985: xiii). Often with place-names it is not possible to give a precise dating for the coining of a toponym. For the purposes of this study, the language label given for a toponym is that of the date of the earliest record of the place-name with earlier linguistic evidence supplementing discussion. This thesis focuses on the names of topographic features, for example hills, rocks and woodland, and the role of perception in their naming. In order to compare the role of perception in inland and coastal naming, this thesis includes a diachronic study of the toponymy of the research area, along with two case studies. The first of these is a study of the toponymy of relief features, which focuses on generic elements in order to compare the perception of one type of referent in the two environments. The second is a study of the ‘colour’ category, which focuses on qualifying elements in order to compare the use of colour terms in the two environments. This thesis is the first comparative study of inland and coastal place-names, and it is one of the first to investigate new ways of using fieldwork as a central part of its methodology. In doing so it proposes innovative and nuanced ways to understand the toponymy of diverse landscapes within a community.

The theoretical and experimental work presented in this thesis investigates the spray/load and dative alternations. The purpose is to provide a comprehensive analysis of the alternations in terms of their syntactic structures and to account for how contextual information drives differences in the linear order of their VP arguments. This analysis shows that the syntactic structures of the spray/load and dative alternations are identical; each variant in an alternation is characterised by one of two available structures proposed in Janke and Neeleman (2012). Each structure is shown to respect a novel thematic hierarchy that is based on the value of binary feature clusters (Reinhart, 2000) rather than by direct reference to semantic labels. The choice of a particular structure is demonstrated to be affected by the non-semantic context in which the spray/load or dative sentence is generated. This is a consequence of the limited processing capacity of Working Memory and the allocation of attentional resources to a stimulus. Experimental data from an as yet untested variable of the visual context – the egocentric perception of distance – is found to interact with word order preferences of the alternations. I conclude that non-semantic contextual information interacts with the encoding of an event which ultimately has consequences for syntactic choices.

Despite the diversity of research on the Libyan Revolution across a spectrum of academic fields, very little work has focused on the representation of this event in media discourse. More specifically, no studies have approached this topic from a critical linguistic perspective using a large corpus, focusing on the qualitative analysis of the corpus findings. The overall aim of this thesis is therefore to investigate linguistically how the Libyan Revolution of 2011 is constructed within a corpus of British broadsheet newspapers. The focus of this study was to explore linguistic evidence to substantiate the claim that British newspapers are biased in their coverage in favour of anti-Gaddafi forces. The investigation of textual bias was guided and assisted by tools and methods from corpus linguistics. In particular, the keyword linguistic tool in WordSmith (Scott, 2004) was utilised as an entry point to the data to provide potential foci for further analysis. The findings of the corpus analysis revealed that keywords referring to the participants involved in the conflict during the Libyan Revolution and action-related words are the dominant lexical items in the coverage of this event in British newspapers. These corpus findings are further studied in context using the concord function in WordSmith, and then interpreted using the tools offered by Critical Stylistics (Jeffries, 2010). The occurrence of different nominal choices referring to the key participants in the Libyan conflict in the keyword list also led me to focus on investigating how those participants have been named and referred to linguistically. The analysis reveals linguistic evidence and discursive strategies showing a biased representation of the Libyan Revolution in the British newspapers in favour of anti-Gaddafi forces. This study has shown that the UK broadsheet newspapers represented a negative stereotypical image of Gaddafi’s side, while simultaneously presenting a neutral and at times even a positive portrayal of the opposition side. Specifically, the choices of linguistic structures result in the legitimation of Gaddafi’s opponents and, conversely, the delegitimisation and suppression of Gaddafi and his government. Finally, it was also observed that the language of British newspapers was highly ideological in representing this event despite British news outlets endorsing the values of democracy, freedom and universal rights. It is important to also recognize that the wider social context influences the processes of production and interpretation of news discourse and helps to explain the reasons behind giving Gaddafi and his government the worst negative image. Considering the socio-political contexts and the close examination of the relation between Libya and Britain reveals that Gaddafi’s negative representation could be seen as a reflection of the excesses of his dictatorship over his own people during his years in power as well as a reflection of his accumulated stock of past wrongdoings and tense relations between him and Britain. Therefore, this representation could be taken as a fact, given Gaddafi’s historical background. However, the analysis reveals that there was unequal treatment of the two sides in the conflict. There was a complete lack of any mitigation on the description of Gaddafi’s side, whereas the rebel side are treated in an apologetic manner. The British newspapers are biased in covering up the violent actions that were committed by the opposition and their violation of human rights. It was obvious that British newspapers act as a dominant source of hegemony by deciding what and how to report. The analysis reveals that the British newspapers tried to support their government in their leading role in the military intervention in Libya. This confirms that news reporting is not free from the subjective interpretation of events, rather it constructs them in a way that reflects their ideological and political viewpoints. Overall, the positive representation of the opposition could be seen as a problematic, as the political consequence of overthrowing Gaddafi results in plaguing Libya in chaos and violence with internal wars run by rebels who were described as good during the revolution.

Vocabulary knowledge is key to the successful use of any language skill (Nation & Webb, 2011) and learning to map a particular meaning to an L2 form for a great number of words is therefore crucial for learners of a foreign language. Vocabulary assessments can play a facilitating role in this learning process, which is why there is now an abundance of assessment tools to measure lexical knowledge. However, few of these tests have undergone sophisticated validation, even after their release into the public domain. Although vocabulary tests are used in numerous pedagogical and research settings, there has been “relatively little progress in the development of new vocabulary tests” (Webb & Sasao, 2013, p. 263). Instead, conventionalized traditions are being reiterated without questioning them. This PhD project has set out to address this gap of an innovative measure of vocabulary knowledge by developing a new diagnostic computer-adaptive measure of form-meaning link knowledge: The Vocabulary Knowledge Profiler. The present test development project started from scratch by questioning the underlying assumptions and trying to make design decisions based not only on theoretical considerations but empirical evidence. In a series of studies, three major weaknesses of existing vocabulary tests were problematized: (1) selection of item formats, (2) sampling in terms of unit of counting, frequency bands and representativeness, and (3) the general lack of validation evidence and validation models. These issues were explored across four studies in this thesis to design a novel instrument and gather initial validation evidence for it along the way. The first set of studies presented in this thesis investigated the usefulness and informativeness of different item formats for vocabulary tests and found in a comparison of four different formats that all formats show considerable error in measurement but the MC format may be the most useful because of its systematicity in overestimating scores. The second set of studies found support for the adoption of the lemma as an appropriate counting unit and for a new approach to frequency banding that takes into account the relative importance of frequency bands in terms of the coverage they provide. Based on these foundation studies, test specifications were drawn up and an item bank was created, which was subjected to a large scale trial to admit functioning items to an item pool for creating a computer-adaptive test. A study was conducted to compare two different computer-adaptive algorithms for implementation in the test design, suggesting that a “floor first” design would generate more consistent and representative score profiles. For initial validation evidence, a final study was then conducted to relate scores from the finished test to that of a reading comprehension measure. The findings of the studies presented throughout the thesis are then synthesized to produce an initial version of a validation argument in the structure of Bachman and Palmer’s (2010) Assessment Use Argument to outline both the necessary areas for further research before the launch of the test as well as the collected validation evidence to date that builds a tentative argument that the Vocabulary Knowledge Profiler and of the diagnostic decisions that are made based on its results and use are beneficial to English as a foreign language (EFL) learners and EFL teachers for classroom learning and teaching.

This study explores a shift situation among Libyan Tuareg in the southwestern region of Libya. They are shifting from Targia (Tamaheq), an indigenous minority language, to Arabic, the predominant language in the country. The two communities under investigation are Ghat, ethnically and linguistically heterogeneous and Barkat, ethnically and linguistically homogeneous. The investigation focuses on Targia’s use and transmission across generations as well as domains of language use.

The purpose of the thesis is to find patterns of gender and (im)politeness within the Javanese language. To attain its goals, the research discussion focused on the patterns of gender and (im)politeness in its formal aspects, power relations, and criticism. To accomplish the goals, the research applied a participation order and quantified data related to recurring actions (frame-based analysis). The research participants were Javanese families living in Surakarta and its surrounding areas, which are in Central Java, Indonesia. The data recorded natural conversations, involving voluntarily recorded daily conversations within familial settings. The formal aspects analysis indicated (1) husbands use a low style (ngoko) to address their wives; (2) Javanese women of the middle social class use different linguistic styles. Additionally, to express their respect, a higher number of women spoke in ngoko, while others addressed their husbands in higher level (basa). Those who used ngoko speech level displayed a minimal sign of deference by using honorific pronouns (e.g. panjenengan) and titles. The analysis on power relations reflected higher agreement in relation to the Javanese norm of indirection. However, the discussion on criticism demonstrated overtness and mock impoliteness, which disagrees with the norm of indirection. The last two analyses indicated that the evaluation of (im)politeness is different across social actions (e.g. asking, criticising, etc.). Among the three areas of analysis (formal aspects, power relations and criticism), there were persistent aspects involved in the evaluation of (im)politeness) such as intention, identity, moral orders, and utterances or actions.

This thesis examines the discourse of intra-national charitable giving in the UK. I combine a rhetorical discourse analysis of Children in Need (CiN), a popular charity telethon for ‘disadvantaged’ British children, with that of six focus groups carried out with people who have different relationships with charities (student volunteers, a local Amnesty International group, bereavement counselling volunteers, non-charity related office workers, employees of different charities, and academics). Although the focus group discussions all included some consideration of CiN and its methods, they were primarily concerned with broader issues to do with disadvantage, fairness and, where relevant, charitable giving more generally. Boltanski’s (1999) seminal idea of ‘the politics of pity’ holds that relationships between those who suffer and those who observe their suffering are radically altered by distance. Seeing suffering people face-to-face is not the same as seeing them via the mass media because of the actions that are or are not possible in relation to them. This idea has been utilised in numerous studies of international charity, but so far no one has applied it to situations in which the viewed are in the same country as the viewers. I argue that the sort of (social, perceived) distance that may exist between citizens who live in the same country has similar consequences for their relationship as actual physical distance has. Indeed, representing others as if they were distant means that charity comes to be seen as the only way to relieve suffering, even though in this instance there are, in fact, many other available options. The central tension I highlight in the CiN data is that, on the one hand, British beneficiaries of charitable aid are represented as socially distant from the rest of the population, which makes the mediation that CiN offers seem necessary, while on the other hand their experiential closeness is constantly being highlighted by appealing to a particular (nostalgic) ideal of Britishness. This tension is also reflected in the focus group data: although the recipients of intra-national charitable giving are typically talked about as members of the speakers’ own in-group, there is also a lot of scepticism regarding the truthfulness and reliability of the spectacle of suffering that is presented on television screens and that does not always match up with people’s own experiences.

In this thesis, the digital writing practices of two 2nd year undergraduates are examined in terms of the functions and structures of their revision activity. Using systemic functional linguistics as an underlying framework, the project takes a first step toward to a dynamic description of written text in functional terms. To date, research into dynamic descriptions of language (i.e. the logogenesis, or unfolding of meaning in a text) has been almost entirely based upon data related to the spoken mode. Furthermore, research into revision activity has tended to ignore the functionality or meaning inherent in such revisions. The existing research has, instead, primarily focused on cognitive processes (for e.g., pause times) or which language structures, such as parts of speech, are more frequently involved in revisions that others. Ultimately, this thesis works toward providing a dynamic description of the language functions and revisions involved in revision activity in two student writers. To do this, it makes use of software called keystroke logging to record how two writers compose four academic essays on their computers. Such technology allows us to model the unfolding of a written text in much the same way as a tape recording allows researchers to model the unfolding of a speech. By examining how these writers revise text in light of academic expectations (a 'valued' configuration of field, tenor, and mode register variables present in language choices) and digital mediation (computer afforded composing practices), the thesis shows how certain language functions and structures may play a key role when it comes to shaping an academic essay. In this light, this thesis takes a first step to providing a dynamic description of what is usually analysed solely in synoptic terms, by showing how we can analyse written text as process (an evolving entity) rather than just a product (a static entity). Because of this, a new model of analysis – a combination of keystroke data and functional systemics – is proposed, which can provide an additional perspective to the already existing methods of examining writer behaviour by looking at meaning making practices in revision activity.

Polysemy is a challenge for L2 learners because it confounds the mapping of form to meaning. We can therefore consider learners' capacity to manage polysemous words as an indication of their L2 lexical and conceptual knowledge. To investigate what factors affect L2 learners' knowledge of polysemous meanings, a test was created in which Arabic learners of English judged whether various meanings of polysemous words were used acceptably in sentence-length contexts. Analysis of the results revealed that two key factors determined learner responses. First, learners were more likely to respond that a polysemous sense was acceptable if it was more frequently used in English. Second, learners were more likely to judge a polysemous sense as acceptable if was semantically closer to the core sense, such as when head is used in the test item, “I went to sleep early to have a clear head for the exam,” in contrast to this less closely related use, “The president sat at the head of the table.” Semantic similarity was further addressed through distractor items that were unacceptable to native English speakers but logically related to the core sense, such as this use of head, “I thought she was upset because she had a sad head,” in contrast to the illogical use, “Come through into the dining head.” Again, L2 learners generally judged the distractor items as more acceptable if the usage of the polysemous word was semantically related to the core sense. Further analysis revealed that learners with high scores on a receptive vocabulary size test were more likely to correctly reject distractor items; however, there was little indication that L1 form-meaning mappings affected perceptions of L2 polysemy. The implications of these findings for theories of lexical processing, and for the teaching of polysemous words in the classroom, are considered.