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.

This dissertation examines the development of Cantonese in young heritage speakers (age of testing 3;10–12;3) in New York City. These heritage speakers were raised speaking predominantly Cantonese at home, but were exposed to English (the majority language) from a young age. The research investigates whether they were acquiring Cantonese in the same way as Cantonese-English peers in Hong Kong, where Cantonese is the majority language, and which factors contributed to stronger abilities in the heritage language. The two groups of participants were compared in terms of tone discrimination, phono- logical production, and classifier production. The results showed that the heritage speakers discriminated between Cantonese tones less accurately, and that they spoke with lower native-likeness and lower comprehensibility. They were comparable to the participants in Hong Kong in producing the classifier structure, but were less able to use the appropriate classifier form. In the heritage speakers, age of testing predicted tone discrimination, and age of arrival and the amount of Cantonese input and output predicted classifier selection, but no other tested factors showed significant effects on the measures of Cantonese ability. These findings indicate that young heritage speakers do not acquire Cantonese in the same way as majority language speakers, although they can still be undergoing development. The data presented in this dissertation provides a comparison of two groups of bilingual Cantonese speakers, and illustrates the individual differences among heritage speakers.

Italian L1 speakers of English L2 make specific and predictable errors when expressing particular temporal concepts in English. This was study principally designed to ask to what extent these errors are caused by L1 conceptual transfer: the influence of conceptual knowledge and patterns of conceptualisation from one language on production of another; A cognitive linguistics framework was adopted to: i) delineate the cognitive processes that may underlie conceptual transfer in general; and ii) reveal areas of potential conceptual difference for investigation within the tense and aspect systems of English and Italian. Taking a mixed methods approach, a twenty item cloze test was developed to target areas of potential conceptual difference between Italian and English. This was also used to generate qualitative think aloud reports. Allowing the investigator access to the thought processes underlying tense choice for target concepts, think aloud reports were able to reveal and explain more specifically examples of conceptual transfer in the first instance, and also as analysis progressed to distinguish between concept and conceptualisation transfer. Concept transfer refers to the influence of L1 stored conceptual knowledge and conceptualisation transfer to the influence of L1 conceptualisation patterns - both developed through exposure to one language - on the production of another. This thesis provides evidence for these two types of transfer as two distinct stages in interlanguage development. All participants - 54 Italian L1 speakers of English L2 (experimental group), 30 native English speakers (control), 50 native Italian speakers (control) and 40 Maltese speakers (control) - completed the cloze test, and 6 of the experimental group did this while thinking aloud. All the participants also performed a non-verbal task. Results of the statistical analysis show the experimental group had an increased error rate for target concepts. The concurrent think aloud protocols were analysed and cross referenced with the cloze test results. Think aloud reports indicated that participants thinking for the target concepts is constrained by L1 mediated cognitive processes giving rise to potential evidence for conceptual transfer distinguishing it from formal transfer and revealing L1 conceptual influence even in ‘correct’ responses. Moreover, the think aloud reports also provided evidence with which to differentiate between concept and conceptualisation This novel methodological approach represents an important and original contribution to the state of the art of conceptual transfer research to date as it serves to unmask conceptual transfer despite its numerous guises.

This study examines the nature of different types of English noun phrases with the relator of in their structural middle such as the father of the bride, a map of the world, or that plonker of a plumber (of-NPs). In response to a strong focus in previous literature on the internal structure of these expressions and the notion of headedness, this study investigates of-NPs from a different angle, taking a multi-method approach. In a theoretical framework embedded in Construction Grammar and Conceptual Blending Theory, of-NPs are viewed as constructions consisting of ‘conceptual entities’, one to either side of the relator of. These two conceptual entities are put into a meaning relationship with one another, which creates the meaning of the overall expression. This theoretical approach facilitates the inclusion of all types of of-NPs (including idiosyncratic ones) within the same framework. In a corpus approach, this study examines the diversity of English of-NPs in written language. It analyses a representative sample of expressions from the British National Corpus and identifies 31 different types of of-NP constructions and their frequency within the corpus. In a cotextual approach, the expressions are studied within their immediate textual environment. Based on a cohesion analysis, this study introduces the concepts of ‘cohesive footprint’ and ‘cohesive landscape’ by the means of which it identifies five textual functions of English of-NPs: elaboration, linking, transition, introduction, and mention. In a cognitive sorting experiment, the of-NP constructions found in the corpus dataset are tested against the intuition of other experts and non-experts. This approach discusses the influence of previous knowledge in linguistics on the interpretation of grammatical phenomena, and confirms the relevance of constructional meaning within English of-NPs. This study concludes that grammatical phenomena, such as English of-NPs, need to be examined from multiple angles, which inform one another. From such a multi-method approach arises a more profound understanding of the multifaceted nature of a grammatical phenomenon.

Building on the success of previous investigations, the doctoral thesis offers a contribution to the study of communication between health professionals and their clients. Since the overall aim of the investigation was to analyse both the verbal and non-verbal communication strategies used by both midwives and mothers in antenatal clinics in Great Britain and Germany, data was collected in the form of videotaped recordings of consultations during pregnancy. Socio-demographic data was retrieved through the use of questionnaires designed to investigate the participants' perceptions of the consultation. Working within a framework of speech act theory and conversation analysis, data was analysed in order to assess the varying degrees of asymmetry apparent in the communicative patterns of interactants. Typically occurring features such as use of the first person plural pronoun, references to the expected baby, interruptions, requests for information and confirmation, and unrelated responses were examined under the linguistic areas of lexis and pragmatics. The significance of non-verbal behaviour and its relation to verbal requests was investigated through the analysis of listener-oriented and other-oriented head movements. Statistical analysis of the phenomena chosen for observation revealed that the appearance and frequency of certain linguistic features (e.g. the first person plural pronoun) was significantly associated with socio-demographic variables such as age and occupational status. Analysis of request sequences also revealed significant correlation when compared with social variables such as age of participants and occupational status of mothers. Qualitative analysis of detailed transcriptual data appeared to indicate that the functions of particular utterances were positively associated with socio-demographic and cross-cultural features such as age and country of study, respectively. Confirming the hypothesis that both linguistic and sub-linguistic features are subject to influences from social and external factors, the results offer a thorough description of the communicative behaviour of both midwives and mothers in antenatal consultations in Great Britain and Germany. Furthermore, it is suggested that the findings arising from the study will enable professional midwives and members of the public alike to develop greater awareness of the importance of good communication skills in order that consultations may operate effectively and to the benefit of both parties. Linguistically, it is argued that the study contributes to our understanding of the distribution and functions of language according to its particular context.

This thesis involves a comparative lexico-grammatical analysis of third-year student writing belonging to the Essay genre family (Nesi and Gardner, 2012) in two disciplines, History and PIR (Politics and International Relations), from two UK higher educational institutions. The project adopts a corpus-driven approach which was developed by Groom (2007) in his analysis of professional academic writing in Literature and History: statistically significant grammatical words are identified using a keyness analysis, and the phraseological patterning around these grammatical keywords is then qualitatively analysed and phraseologies are categorised according to their semantic purposes. In the project five grammatical keywords - of, and, that, as and this - were analysed across four sub-corpora each consisting of student writing from one of the two disciplines at one of the two institutions. It was found that there were more similarities than there were variations in the semantic patterning of grammatical keywords across the four disciplinary/institutional sub-corpora, and that these similarities could to a large extent be explained in terms of the shared features of student Humanities and Social Sciences writing (Durrant, 2015). The variations that occurred fell along disciplinary rather than institutional lines and it is argued that, with regards to both similarities and differences, in the case of these two disciplines at the two target institutions, discipline seems to override institution as an influence at lexico-grammatical level on the nature of student academic writing. It is also argued that Groom’s (2007) approach is an extremely useful one to take in analysis of student writing as it uncovers lexico-grammatical features which occur extremely regularly within student texts and thus, from a pedagogical perspective, are of high value in terms of how much of the text they ‘operationalize’ (Bruce, 2011, p. 6).

Communication impairments are common following acquired brain injury (ABI) and have a significant impact on a person’s quality of life (QOL) post-injury. While some treatments have improved communication skills, few have measured QOL, and even fewer have shown improved QOL for people with ABI following communication-based treatments. Project-based treatment is an alternative treatment approach that could have an impact on communication skills and QOL for people with ABI who are long-term post-injury. The treatment is embedded in a context of meaningful activities chosen by people with brain injury, whereby, as a group, they work collaboratively to plan and achieve a concrete goal or outcome that contributes others and/or the wider community. Project-based treatment has not been empirically evaluated for people with ABI. More specifically, no research has evaluated whether projects can improve both communication skills and QOL in people with ABI. Therefore, this research aims to evaluate the effectiveness of project-based treatment on the communication skills and QOL for people with ABI. An exploratory study was designed as a prospective quasi-randomised controlled trial with pre, post and follow-up assessments, using mixed methods, and feasibility testing to investigate the effect of project-based treatment. Twenty-one people with ABI were recruited from community settings, allocated to either a TREATMENT (n=11) or WAITLIST group (n=10). Treatment was completed over 6 weeks and comprised an individual session (to set specific communication goals with the person with ABI and their communication partner), followed by nine sessions conducted in groups of 2-3 people. These sessions involved a range of meaningful activities chosen by people with ABI that contributed to a tangible end product designed to help others (e.g. video, pamphlet, radio podcast, piece of art). Mixed methods were used to determine the effect of the treatment on people with ABI. The primary communication outcomes were: (1) Blind ratings of the person with ABI’s conversations on the Interaction and Transaction scales of the Adapted Measure of Participation in Conversation (MPC). The secondary communication outcomes were: (1) Blind ratings of the communication partner’s involvement in conversations on the Acknowledging and Revealing Competence scales of the Adapted Measure of Support in Conversation (MSC); (2) Blind ratings for the Impression scales that described how appropriate, rewarding, effortful, and interesting a conversation was; (3) La Trobe Communication Questionnaire (LCQ) as rated by the person with ABI, and their communication partner; and (4) Goal Attainment Scaling (GAS). The primary QOL outcome was the Satisfaction With Life Scale (SWLS), and the secondary QOL outcome was the Quality of Life in Brain Injury (QOLIBRI) measure. The qualitative data was drawn from semi-structured interviews conducted post-treatment. The first set of analyses for the primary and secondary outcome measures, compared the TREATMENT group with the WAITLIST group over two time points, between which only the TREATMENT group had received the treatment. This showed that people with ABI in the TREATMENT group had improved Interaction scores on the MPC, their communication partners had improved Revealing Competence scores on the MSC, and the conversation was perceived as less effortful, compared to the WAITLIST group. No changes were found for the remaining communication outcomes, or the QOL outcomes. The second analyses compared pre-treatment, post-treatment, and follow-up scores across all people with ABI (i.e. scores for both the TREATMENT and WAITLIST group were combined). This showed significant changes for communication partners on the MSC and LCQ, and significant achievement of communication goals on GAS, as rated by both the person with ABI, and their communication partners. Significant improvement on the QOLIBRI was found, with a trend towards significance on the SWLS. No other significant changes were found. Qualitative data was analysed using content analysis where the content and context of the interview transcripts were analysed and themes identified. People with ABI described overwhelmingly positive experiences of the treatment, the group, the project, and working on goals. They also described a range of positive benefits including improved awareness and skill, and positive feelings. Project-based treatment made modest improvements to both communication skills, and QOL. Moreover, people with ABI perceived positive experiences, and benefited from inclusion in the treatment. While this study was an exploratory trial, with feasibility testing, the results highlight that this treatment could be a potential alternative to other treatments available to people with ABI.

This study investigates sociolinguistic variation in the traditional dialect of Sūf, a Hōrāni town in northern Jordan. Two variables are examined: (k): depalatalization of /k/; and (l): develarization of /l/, according to internal linguistic constrains and two external social factors: namely age and sex. Conditioned palatlalization of /k/ and the presence of a dark allophone of /l/ are two of the most salient phonological features of the dialects of Hōrān in general. The present study provides a quantitative analysis within the framework of Variationist Theory, using the multiple logistic regression program Rbrul. Palatalization of /k/ is treated at two levels and thus involves two variables: 1. Phonological variable (k); the pool of data for this variable includes tokens of /k/ in the stem of the word. 2. Morphophonemic variable (–ik); the pool of data includes tokens of /k/ in the feminine suffix -ik. Analysis of the data shows that the rate of palatalization in the stem is relatively low (11%), and the palatalized variant [ʧ] may be disappearing, constrained by preceding and following linguistic environments, age and gender. By contrast, the palatalized variant in the suffix shows a relatively high rate of maintenance (70%), and variation in its use in the suffix is constrained by the social variables only. With respect to (l), the study found that dark /l/ is used only in (12%), and Rbrul analysis returned preceding and following linguistic environments, and gender as constraining factors. Overall, the results show that women are more conservative with respect to the usage of both of these traditional features, thus indicating that women preserve the local way of speech more consistently. The thesis adopts a method of interpretation of the results that focuses on local issues, including the social structure of the community, space, the local mode of production and gender roles.

This study presents the role of literary texts in a sample of Pakistani EFL classrooms. The study primarily aimed to explore the perceptions of undergraduate students about the role of literary texts in their learning of English language. It also investigated some socio - contextual and textual factors related to English language literary texts taught in the context of this study. The study applied a mixed method approach. A structured questionnaire was designed and administered to over 268 undergraduates in five government colleges of Kohat District, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, Pakistan. In addition, 32 semi - structured interviews (28 students and 4 language teachers) were also conducted. The descriptive analysis was run for the quantitative data to get the mean score of all items included in the scale. The inferential analysis was carried out to analyse the significance difference on gender basis among the samples of this study. For qualitative data analysis, all interviews were transcribed and coded, which led to the development of categories and themes. The results of quantitative and the qualitative were interpreted and discussed in detail. The study provided a detailed view of various aspects of literary texts which seemed to influence Pakistani learners of English participated in this study. Literary texts seemed to motivate these young learners for learning English as they intend to know more about English language and its speakers after reading literary texts. They enjoy reading some literary texts and analyse the socio - cultural details mentioned in these texts, which my possibly contribute to their personality development. However, the study revealed that participants’ lack of prior linguistic competence and intercultural awareness may challenge their ability to understand and comprehend some references of foreign cultures and vocabulary items used in the classical literary texts taught in the context of this study. The study also revealed that the role of teachers may be important in utilising literary texts according to the interests and learning needs of their students. The study highlighted the difference between the perceptions of the teachers and the students.