The present investigation analyzes critically the discursive and generic make-up, the conceptual base and educational goals of a new interdisciplinary academic field of enquiry called Intercultural Business Communication as it is pursued in the context of the Germany higher education system. Its purpose is twofold: Firstly, it attempts to bring to light and debate the actual validity claims made by these authors in respect to socio-economic changes and the educational promise of intercultural understanding through intercultural training. Secondly, it shows how aspects of context (e.g. interdisciplinary relations, disciplinary intricacies, hegemonic discourses, changes in the higher educational system and its relation to other social spheres) can impact upon the discourse and genre of social science in general and this particular field in particular. By drawing upon Critical Discourse Analysis as a theoretical stance and a methodological path, a corpus of 24 academic articles published in this area is analyzed in relation to the recontextualization of socio-economic changes (presences and absences of social actors, processes and evaluation), the legitimation of educational goals through reference to these changes, the conceptualization of key terms (like culture, the other etc.), the implications of these theoretical decisions for the possibility of increased, mutual understanding and the form of academic writing (argumentation, debate, genre change). While the thesis aims to identify specific discursive and generic patterns, open them to contestation, and to explain their presence in these texts, it is also strongly normative and discusses questions related to the changing understanding of the nature, form and function of academic knowledge production in society.

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Two widely used reference points in Translation Studies are the notions of source and target, indicating a point of departure and a point of arrival in the translating process. This thesis takes the notion of source as a starting point and observes what happens when one introduces a variation in the early stages of the process. Specifically, it argues that by modifying the perception of the source, i.e. the way one sees and consider the source, the resulting translation changes as well. By "perception" one wants to stress that the source in question is a constant and does not actually change; what varies is the way one conceives of it. The framework chosen to verify this hypothesis is the translation of orality into different media, i. e. paper, magnetic, electronic or digital media. Translation is here not merely intended as the act of transferring material from one language into another, but has been expanded to include the intralingual passage from oral to a different form. The source is examined from two different perspectives. One, located in 19th century England and Italy, identifies the source of orality in a collective entity, called "folk" in England and "popolo" in Italy. The other perspective, taking place in current times and drawing inspiration from performance-oriented approaches to orality, focuses on individuals and their personal performances. Taking into account linguistic, historical, political, social and economic factors, the thesis argues that these two perspectives have affected the translations of oral material, giving space alternatively to the voice of a collectivity or that of an individual. Translating orality thus emerges as a process influenced by the attitude of translators, whose "perceptions" underscore their decision-making role.

Around the age of fourteen months, infants start to use and understand others' uses of words in communicative interaction. What cognitive abilities must one attribute to them in order to explain this? In this thesis, I set out a variety of features – including knowledge of reference, of (Gricelike) communicative intentions, and of (Lewis-like) linguistic conventions - of which one would need some grasp in order to be able to use and understand words in communicative interaction. I develop an account of the cognitive abilities that grasping such features would require, and defend the plausibility of attributing such abilities to infants around the beginning of their second year of life. I argue that prior to their first uses of words, infants already have some grasp of others' minds – in particular, of when others are trying to communicate with them, and of what it is that they are trying to communicate. On the account that I sketch, infants learn how to use and understand words because they grasp the ends to which those words can be used as means, and because they are able to imitate the purposive communicative actions of their caregivers, and thereby produce utterances of their own.

The aim of this thesis is to further our understanding of the processes which control the sequencing of phonemes as we speak: this is an example of what is commonly known as the serial order problem. Such a process is apparent in normal speech and also from the existence of a class of speech errors known as sound movement errors, where sounds are anticipated (spoken too soon), perseverated (repeated again later), or exchanged (the sounds are transposed). I argue that this process is temporally governed, that is, the serial ordering mechanism is restricted to processing sounds that are close together in time. This is in conflict with frame-based accounts (e.g. Dell, 1986; Lapointe & Dell, 1979), serial buffer accounts (Shattuck-Hufnagel, 1979) and associative chaining theories (Wickelgren, 1969). An analysis of sound movement errors from Harley and MacAndrew's (1995) corpus shows how temporal processing bears on the production of speech sounds by the temporal constraint observed in the pattern of errors, and I suggest an appropriate computational model of this process. Specifically, I show how parallel temporal processing in an oscillator-based model can account for the movement of sounds in speech. Similar predictions were made by the model to the pattern of movement errors actually observed in speech error corpora. This has been demonstrated without recourse to an assumption of frame and slot structures. The OSCillator-based Associative REcall (OSCAR) model, on the other hand, is able to account for these effects and other positional effects, providing support for a temporal based theory of serial control.

While learner autonomy is often lauded as an important goal in language education, applied linguists have debated if it is a construct that has been given proper attention in terms of definition and assessment. In order to address this debate the researcher implemented a two-phase study within the context of higher education. Theories of learner autonomy, sustainable assessment and transformative learning guided the study design. In the research design, the nexus between language learner autonomy and assessment as learning was first explored in phase one of the study. Here survey methodology was used on a global scale: Findings from 45 respondents in 13 countries indicate that indeed language learner autonomy is being widely assessed, and, further that a variety of tools, evidence and people are implemented in this task. In phase two of the study, the most important stakeholders of learner autonomy - language learners - participated in Q-methodological study of their perceptions of the non-linguistic outcomes of learning in an autonomous environment: A total of 30 participants from Hong Kong, Japan and the UK completed a Q sort and interview. The findings of the Q study showed that there were six different ways of being autonomous, and these were interpreted as 'modes of autonomy'. These modes of autonomy were lastly used to devise a tool for the formative self-assessment of learner autonomy.

This thesis examines the interconnection between the linguistic forms of reactive tokens and their associated conversational actions in Mandarin conversation. It aims to show how reactive tokens are produced and interpreted by participants themselves as the display of an awareness of being a recipient in longer sequences. The central argument of the thesis is that participants display overt recipiency through variation and selection of reactive tokens in longer sequences in Mandarin conversation. This thesis shows that a consideration of the sequential organization of reactive tokens is as important as a consideration of their forms and functions in order to understand their prominent role in longer conversational sequences. Through sequential analysis, the investigation of reactive tokens shows that participants orient to and design a diversity of reactive tokens to construct and maintain mutual understanding and to create and secure recipient engagement. Through quantitative analysis, the frequency and distribution of six types of reactive tokens demonstrate their significant roles in first and second language interaction. Through deviant case analysis, the examination of miscues of reactive tokens reveals that reactive tokens might be a potential “barrier” in second language interaction, in contrast to being a “facilitator” in first language interaction. I propose a framework for displaying levels of recipiency through the selection of reactive tokens in longer conversational sequences in Mandarin. The framework proposed here implies that the selection of one particular reactive token over another is more a question of varying degrees of recipient engagement, than of different linguistic forms. The use of reactive tokens in interaction is shown to be systematic, conversationally strategic, sequentially and socially organized. It can be concluded that seemingly trivial and random reactive tokens are more significant and orderly in Mandarin conversation than one may assume.

A view that has been gaining popularity is that humans are sensitive to frequency information at different levels, and that this information affects the processing of linguistic material, subsequently shaping our mental representations. Frequency effects have been reported extensively in word processing literature, but only a small number of studies have investigated frequency effects in units larger than a word. The question that the present thesis strives to answer is: Do units above the word level, both fully compositional and less so, exhibit frequency effects? In Study 1, using an eye-tracking paradigm, I investigate the comprehension of idioms used figuratively (at the end of the day – 'eventually'), literally (at the end of the day - 'in the evening'), as well as novel phrases (at the end of the war) in a first and second language. In Study 2, which also uses eye-tracking, native and non-native processing of frequent binomial expressions, such as bride and groom, is compared to their infrequent reversed forms, such as groom and bride. Finally, three ERP experiments, which form Study 3, further investigate on-line processing of frequent binomial expressions versus novel phrases in a first language. The results of the studies point to the following. Frequent phrases are processed faster than novel ones by native speakers. Non-native speakers, on the other hand, appear to have a "lexicon in transition", that is, their processing starts to approximate that of natives only with respect to very high frequency items. Overall, the processing of frequent multi-word sequences in a second language is more sequential than that in a first language (this is particularly the case with idioms). The processing advantage for binomials observed in the ERP study with native speakers also suggests that different neural correlates underlie the processing of familiar phrases when compared to novel ones. On the whole, the findings reported in the thesis suggest that the units that language users attend to are not limited to single words, but extend to multi-word sequences as well.

In this dissertation I defend a non-indexicalist contextualist account of metaphorical interpretation. This theory, which works within Kaplan’s double-index semantic framework, claims that context does not have the only role of determining the content expressed by an utterance, but also the function of fixing the appropriate circumstance of evaluation relative to which that content is evaluated. My claim is that the metaphorical dimension of an utterance can be found in the circumstance of evaluation, and not in the content which is expressed by the utterance. To that effect, I introduce a parameter in the circumstance of evaluation of an utterance, which I call ‘thematic dimension’. I show how the introduction of this parameter is in harmony with a class of theories that have proposed a relativistic semantic treatment of other phenomena such as predicates of taste and knowledge ascriptions. At the same time, I question a number of other proposals, both semantic and pragmatic, which, I believe, do not reach the same level of empirical adequacy and formal correctness as my proposal.

There are many advantages to learning a foreign language, such as a better understanding of another culture, a better chance of employment, as well as metalinguistic and cognitive benefits. Unfortunately, language learning can be a long and difficult process, partly because of the amount of words necessary to achieve fluency in a language. However, informal exposure to languages can help language learning. The aim of this thesis was to explore the impact of informal exposure on the incidental acquisition of foreign language vocabulary with complete beginners in a foreign language. This was investigated in the context of multi-modal situations including verbal (auditory and written) and pictorial information. The first study investigated the acquisition of foreign language vocabulary through watching a film with subtitles, as well as the processing of subtitles using eye-tracking. In the second study, a simpler multi-modal situation (one spoken and written foreign language word form along with a line drawing depicting the meaning of the word) was used to investigate incidental vocabulary acquisition. In addition, this study investigated the use of a potentially more sensitive measure of early vocabulary learning based on the savings paradigm. The third study reported in this thesis explored the number of exposures to multi-modal stimuli necessary for incidental learning to occur. The fourth study, explored the type of connections resulting from the multi-modal incidental learning situation in the context of the current models of FL word learning. Finally, in the fifth study, the allocation of attention to the verbal and pictorial elements of the multi-modal situation were investigated using eye-tracking, as well as the impact of attention on vocabulary acquisition. The results of the studies presented in this thesis showed that incidental acquisition of foreign language vocabulary happens rapidly during a simple multi-modal situation, and that the pictorial information plays an important role. Furthermore, this type of situation was shown to be effective even with complete beginners in a foreign language and therefore could be exploited to promote informal language learning.