This thesis presents an account of the properties of Relative Clauses in Modern Greek, with particular focus on the distribution of the resumption and gap relativization strategies. For the most part relative clauses have been regarded in the literature as a type of Long Distance dependencies with unique properties. This thesis looks at the properties of three types of relative clauses in Modern Greek (restrictive, non-restrictive and free relative clauses). Working in the framework of Lexical Functional Grammar, we present an overview of the most important properties of Modern Greek Relative Clauses focusing on the distribution of the gap and resumption strategies in these constructions. We propose an analysis of Relative Clauses that brings forward the similarities of the three types of Relatives while at the same time manages to account for their dissimilarities, and it is shown that such constructions can be accommodated in LFG quite straightforwardly. The thesis also presents a computational implementation of the analysis using XLE (Xerox Linguistics Environment) a platform for testing and writing LFG grammars.

The objectives of this thesis are fourfold: First, I will offer a detailed analysis of rhetorically functional text component moves of the genres of Jordanian written wedding invitation cards and newspaper obituary announcements at the macro-structural level. Second, I will provide a comprehensive analysis of salient linguistic features that characterize the genres at the microlinguistic level. Third, I will find out how socio-cultural and religious beliefs and practices are reflected in the generic formulaic structure of these genres. Fourth, I will show how sociolinguistic variability and dynamics are evident in the genres. In order to explore the discourse of these genres, a move analysis was carried out upon a corpus of 500 wedding invitation cards, and another 500 newspaper obituary announcements. The analysis of macrostructural and micro-linguistic features is influenced by the work of Bhatia (1993) as it profitably illuminates the relationship between social practice and written discourse. The findings of the study are fivefold. First, the study demonstrates that eight and eleven communicative moves exist in wedding invitation cards and obituary announcements respectively. Each move performs a specific communicative function and contributes to the general communicative purpose of the entire genre. Second, the genre analysis indicates that the generic organisational structure of the genres is highly conventionalized and structured in terms of form, content, positioning and functional values, with some variations in frequency and order of moves. Third, the writers of Jordanian wedding invitations and obituary announcements use a number of linguistic resources the way they like to generate some special effects and express private and organisational intentions within the framework of culturally recognised purposes. Fourth, the generic structure of the genres uncovers many socio-cultural and religious messages about Jordanian society. Finally, the findings showed that, besides religion, other sociocultural factors such as family, gender, and socioeconomic status have massively impacted the way these genres are structured and interpreted. It is hoped that the results of this study will be of great help in further understanding the socio-cultural perceptions, attitudes and values that shape these two communicative events as well as aiding in efforts towards intercultural communication.

This thesis explores the textual and ideological effects of linguistic negation in written texts. It argues that when language users process negation, understanding its use in context is as much about the possibility of presence as it is about the actuality of absence. This gives rise to a variety of effects in texts from contributing to the construction of fictional characters to potentially influencing readers’/hearers’ view of the world they inhabit. This thesis brings together research on the theoretical aspects of how negation works to present a new approach to linguistic negation in written discourse. It also demonstrates how this approach can be applied in the analysis of the conceptual practice of negating. The approach presented is made up of three main elements; negation is presuppositional, is realised through a wide variety of linguistic forms beyond the morphosyntactic core forms (not, no, never, none, un-, in-, and so on) and includes semantic and pragmatically implied forms. These two elements combine to give rise to implied meaning in context. Having outlined this approach to negation, it is then applied in the analysis of literary and non-literary texts to explain the textual and ideological effects that arise from its use.

In this thesis I analyse and compare the linguistic construction of offenders, victims and crimes in the British and German press. I have collected a corpus of British and German newspaper articles reporting on crime and criminal trials and carried out a corpus linguistic analysis of this data using the software package Wordsmith Tools (Scott, 2004). Reports on crime do not construct a neutral representation of offenders. By employing the tools offered by Critical Stylistics (Jeffries, 2010a) and combining them with Corpus Linguistics I identify the linguistic features used to pre convict offenders and to invoke a feeling of insecurity and fear in the public. The negative associations assigned to crime are transferred to the offenders and thus construct them as being evil and label them as deviant (Becker, 1966: 31). The linguistic construction of the victim ultimately impacts on the construction of offenders because the two are placed at opposite ends of a morality scale. It is through language that such ideologically motivated representations of offenders are constructed and reinforced. The image of the evil-perpetrating monster constructed in the media as part of societal discourse on crime is based on ideologies which my research aims to reveal. I argue that the underlying ideologies for the construction of offenders, victims and crimes in the British and German press are comparable and that the linguistic triggers for these in the texts are similar. I found no distinction between the persona of the offender and his or her crime because offenders only gain a celebrity-like status following the crime they have committed. This fascination with crime in the media has roots in the ‘backstage nature of crime’ (Surette, 2009: 240) which satisfies the voyeuristic desire of the audience.

The aim of this thesis is to explore the psychological qualities that set apart L2 teachers who are motivated and committed to the profession, innovative and productive in their practice, and emotionally well-adjusted from those who struggle to survive. To do this I carried out a sequence of four research phases, each building on the design and findings of previous phases. The first of these was a data-driven case study designed to investigate whether teachers who are engaged and motivated, well-adjusted and productive might provide insight into surviving as a teacher. Taking the language teacher as the complex system in which self-organized change occurs, the qualitative interview data suggested that these teachers (N = 4) had developed an emergent outcome in response to the accrued disturbances they encountered in their classroom experience. This emergent outcome—which I termed language teacher immunity—appeared to function as a defense mechanism against the material and emotional demands placed on L2 practitioners. To validate these findings, I adopted a retrodictive qualitative modeling research template for the remaining phases. The second phase used focus-group interview data from L2 professionals (N = 44) to investigate prototypes of language teacher immunity and the salient characteristics (i.e., system components) of each. These initial prototypes fit one of four global categories (i.e., productively immunized, maladaptively immunized, partially immunized, and immunocompromised). Additionally, seven components were found to be essential to the make-up of these outcomes: teaching self-efficacy; attitudes to teaching; coping; classroom affectivity; burnout; resilience; and, openness to change. Phase three triangulated the focus group phase with questionnaire data from a larger sample of L2 practitioners (N = 293). Cluster analysis of this data illustrated a core of six language teacher immunity archetypes distributed across the spectrum of global outcomes. Particular combinations of the seven components at varying levels were exhibited as specific profiles of language teacher immunity. The final phase used in-depth interview data collected from three teachers in each archetype to explore trajectories of development for each outcome, and investigate the manner in which the various archetypes manifested themselves in L2 teachers‘ sense of professional identity and motivated behavior. The data provided substantiating evidence for mapping these dynamic trajectories using a developmental blueprint (i.e., with triggering, linking, realignment, and stabilization stages) which captured the emerging pattern in these teachers‘ individual experiences and their pathways of growth. The combined evidence from this research indicates that language teacher immunity plays a significant role in L2 teachers‘ professional identity and affects how L2 practitioners position themselves in the profession through their accompanying mindsets. Furthermore, language teacher immunity outcomes are displayed in the real-time classroom choices of L2 practitioners, suggesting that language teachers‘ emotions, teaching motivation, and instructional effectiveness may hinge on the outcome of language teacher immunity that is developed.

Children with early language delay form a heterogeneous group. Although a significant number will catch up and develop language in the normal range, some will continue to have difficulties with language. Predicting the outcome for these children represents a challenging task for clinicians. It has been suggested that the assessment of sociocognitive skills contributes distinctively to the prediction of persistence of language and communication difficulties and the nature of these difficulties. In the absence of standardized assessments in Saudi Arabia for children with early language delay, this study aimed to take a first step to filling this gap by developing a battery of early sociocognitive and language measures. The battery consisted of six measures assessing sociocognitive and language skills using direct and indirect methods, some existing and some newly developed or adapted for this project. Sociocognitive measures were the Early Sociocognitive Battery (ESB; Chiat & Roy, 2006b), together with a new Motor Imitation test (MI) and Sociocognitive Questionnaire (SCogQ); language measures included the Sentence Repetition test (Wallan, Chiat, & Roy, 2011), a new Arabic research adaptation of the Language Use Inventory (O’Neill, 2009), and a preschool adapted version of the Arabic Picture Vocabulary Test (Shaalan, 2010). Since this project was performed in a very different language culture and included a wider range of sociocognitive and language measures than most previous studies, a second aim was to investigate relations between the different sociocognitive and language skills. The battery was administered to 161 Saudi children between the ages of 2;0-3;5 years, divided into three six-months age groups and almost equally divided into boys and girls. Addressing the first aim of this study, results showed that all the measures with the exception of the SCogQ were reliable, valid, and age sensitive. These findings suggest that the measures are fit for purpose and have the potential to identify children with early language delay. Parental concern matched children’s performance on direct and indirect measures of language for the majority of children. Turning to the second aim of the study, regressional analyses using the three language assessments as outcome measures showed that the ESB and MI were important predictors of pragmatic language and receptive vocabulary when other measures had been taken into account. It is concluded that the substantial set of data that this study has produced on the wide-ranging battery of assessments can serve as a reference for clinical comparison and as a foundation for standardization with a fully representative sample of young Saudi children. These measures not only enable the formal identification of a delay in Saudi preschoolers but are also informative about strengths and difficulties and can guide intervention. The results add to current understanding of the role sociocognitive skills play in language development, and provide the foundation for longitudinal research investigating relations to longer term outcomes.

This thesis examines the use of supra-textual devices in the Trotula, a set of Middle English gynecological and obstetrical medical treatises. Through close examination of the thirteen manuscript versions dating between the early or mid-fifteenth century and the late sixteenth century, this thesis studies the way in which punctuation, layout, colour, marginalia and other visual devices are used to structure and present the texts. Combining quantitative and qualitative methods, this thesis examines the ways in which supra-textual devices are used to organise the texts into units of various type and length (major and minor sections, paragraphs,recipes, sense-units, sentences, clauses, phrases), and how the presentation of these units contributes to the reading of the text, showing that,despite the lack of standardised punctuation practices, each manuscript text uses a consistent system of supra-textual devices. Their use is not haphazard, as has previously been asserted; supra-textual devices are used purposefully to structure the texts and to communicate with the reader. The definitions of ‘sentence’ and ‘sense-unit’ in the Middle English context are also discussed, as well as the terminology used to describe medieval punctuation practices. In particular, the often-made binary division between ‘grammatical’ and ‘rhetorical’ punctuation is examined, showing that this division is neither very informative nor useful in practice for describing the systems of supra-textual devices present in medieval English writing. While the majority of the units can be described in terms of ‘sense-units’, the development towards the modern ‘sentence’ can be evinced in the data. This thesis also examines the role that scribes played in adapting and modifying the textual presentation in their exemplars, arguing that scribes played a key role in modifying the appearance of the manuscript texts to suit the needs of their audiences. Emphasising the importance of contextualisation, the final chapter focuses on the pragmatics of supra-textual devices, and how they can contribute to our understanding of the ways in which these texts were read and used by private individuals, professional medical practitioners or textual communities. This thesis argues that the Trotula had a number of different audiences, with varied literacy skills, and the supra-textual devices in the manuscripts suggest a range of reading practices, from private to communal, silent to oral, intensive to extensive. This thesis demonstrates that a close examination of supra-textual devices can bring new insights into Middle English grammar as well as scribal and reading practices.

The aim of this study is to access the experiences of teachers of English (i.e. English as a foreign language teachers) when teaching cultural elements through coursebooks which are assigned by their schools/universities, and the materials which they use to deliver these lessons plus the activities that they normally select for their classes. Moreover, teachers’ opinions concerning the learning and teaching of cultural elements are studied in this research. Teachers, both native and non-native speakers of English, participated in this research and have EFL teaching experience from 2 years to 30 years. An open-ended questionnaire (85) followed by semi-structured interviews (28) were conducted to learn more of teachers’ experiences and to obtain further details of their opinions on teaching and learning cultures through coursebooks. All data from questionnaires were coded manually and Nvivo 9 and 10 were also utilised while processing and analysing the findings (i.e. to store interview transcripts and extracting participants’ words and coding them appropriately. The details can be found in the Data Analysis section). The study has clearly shown that EFL teachers use the internet, youtube and other kinds of websites through electrical devices such as computers and smart boards and other sorts of authentic materials (e.g. current newspapers or magazines). Youtube is used for authentic material, and the BBC and some other news channels are also accessed for listening tasks. Written materials are less applied in classrooms since teachers think that electronic media materials are more visual for students, thus helping them to understand more easily , encouraging motivation and gaining more attention in lessons. Teachers recommend that learning cultures through coursebooks would benefit students, as language and culture are interlinked, and it would make students not only become fluent speakers of English but also help them to become interculturally competent persons.

Should we analyse Arabic morphology in terms of a morpheme-based approach or in terms of a stem-based approach? This is the question which has figured prominently in morphological debate in recent years, especially in Semitic linguistics with ablaut-rich inflectional systems. This study provides a novel synchronic account to Transitional Libyan Arabic morphology, using a stem-based approach that assesses the morphomicity (Maiden, 2009, p.45) of stem alternations in the verb inflectional paradigm. This work focuses on the role of stem alternations in defining inflectional paradigmatic complexity in relation to implicative relations and inflection classes within the stem-space and principal parts morphological approaches. Following Bonami and Boyé’s (2002) approach to stem alternations in French, we define an inheritance hierarchy for TLA morphomic verb stems and show how this effectively identifies a set of inflection classes in the absence of affixal allomorphy. Within Stump and Finkel (2013) principal parts model, TLA inflection class membership can be determined by principal parts as indexed stems and/or as substems. The scale of the complexity of TLA inflectional system is also measured using the Principal-Parts Analyzer (PPA) computational tool. TLA conjugations reveal a synchronic morphomic patterning which shows sensitivity to extramorphological factors. The TLA semi-autonomous morphology is reflected by stem referencing features that provide the base for stem indexing possibilities which in turn can define TLA inflectional classes in the absence of the affix allomorphy. The results of principal parts analysis reveal that verb inflectional complexity of TLA as a Semitic language is as morphologically complex as concatenative stem based systems, posing serious empirical problems for any justifications for a unique distinctive non-concatenative morpheme-based account.

This thesis explores PhD-researcher oral presentations (OPs) in five studies on engagement and clarification strategies in a parallel corpus of 88 OP transcription-essay pairs (n=128228 tokens). Corpus and statistical significance procedures identify features that discriminate among researchers' levels of oral achievement and disciplines: gestural-verbal deixis, audience and impersonal identity projection, code glosses, and transformations of written into oral content. Features analyses include distribution across the levels and disciplines subcorpora, recurrent patterns, discourse functions, and pragmatic appropriacy and grammatical variety. The studies reveal that levels differ in the way that presenters mark stance authorship, anticipate the audience need for help, and vary their strategies grammatically. Disciplinary differences re-present the ways in which disciplines (re)produce knowledge. Hard-fields focus on research methods and outcomes is observed in interaction with images, academic identity projection, and technical terms explanation. Soft-field OPs focus on interpretations is observed in opinions towards existing knowledge and use of folk examples. Language choices also reflect the non-expert character of the audience. This thesis contributes to the study of oral academic genres by demonstrating the importance of multimodal, across modes, non-deficiency analyses; confirming disciplinary differences; and proposing ways of understanding levels of achievement based on pragmatic success rather than grammatical accuracy.