The aim of this research is to illuminate the experience of vocational trainees, specifically trainee cooks, on work placement. Previous ethnographic research in vocational education has tended to converge on sociologically oriented concerns and link the provision of vocational education to the reproduction of social classes. This provided a rich but nonetheless limited understanding of the student experience in this education sector. Professional socialisation studies typically focused on students in higher education and newcomers working in white-collar settings; few studies were carried out with individuals joining vocational trades. Moreover non-sociological studies rarely involved participant observation in data collection and non-linguistic studies rarely emphasised local interactions and verbal exchanges between participants. Studies in blue-collar settings are equally rare. Through a linguistic ethnographic approach, this research offers a detailed picture of the everyday experience of trainee cooks on work placement in professional kitchens. Data was collected through participant observation, fieldnotes, interviews and audio-recordings over a 16-week period involving more than 550 hours in nine professional kitchens. Constituted by physical action, kitchen work involved extensive engagement in doing and for trainees in particular, watching. Doing involved engagement in assigned tasks and working in the capacity of specific workers at their stations, here described as ‘doing Nellie’s work’. Watching was mandated by workers, treated as a mode of learning and gave trainees a legitimate presence in the kitchens. A third action termed as origination was also uncovered in this context. Origination is a self-directed voluntary action of bringing about work, carrying it out and contributing purposefully to work situations. Constituted by physical actions and the general physicality of work, task performance involved verbal interactions that were often minimal. Occasions of extended talk however showed the construction of particular relationships. These extended interactions provided important learning opportunities. The study supports, reinforces and extends findings in workplace research. It also makes a theoretical contribution through the concepts of origination and legitimate presence, and illustrates the use of a linguistic-ethnographic approach in a minimal talk context. Its outcomes are useful for understanding the nature of work/learning at work placement and offer practical insights of value to professionals involved in work preparation programmes.

This is a study of the letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575-1611. It achieves in bringing together archival research, close reading and socio-historical context with the methods and concepts from historical pragmatics. This cross-disciplinary and multi-dimensional approach is demonstrated to be a valuable way of providing more nuanced readings of the letters and of extracting their communicative forms and functions. These documents reward close scrutiny, and the findings of this study offer significant and important contributions to the fields of historical linguistics, early modern rhetoric, paleography, women’s history and letter-writing, as well as for the Thynne family more specifically. Following the theoretical introduction and a short biography of the Thynne family, there are five analytical chapters. The first, Chapter 3, asks how the letters’ prose was organized into meaningful units of information – describing a variety of pre-standard uses for punctuation as well as the organizational and elocutionary functions of other pragmatic markers. Chapter 4 examines the sociopragmatic significance of performative speech act verbs such as beseech and confess and shows how individual manifestations of these forms actually reflect and reiterate larger aspects of early modern English culture and sociability. Chapter 5 compares Joan’s holograph letters and those prepared for her by scribes, exhibiting the social, graphic and linguistic implications of using a scribe. The only direct correspondence from the letters – consisting of two letters sent between Joan and Lucy Audley (Maria’s mother) in 1602 – is the topic of Chapter 6, which discusses rhetoric, language and text as ways of negotiating an awkward relationship, concluding that these features must be considered in respect to one another and in relation to the other letter in order to fully describe their significance. Chapter 7 extends a discussion on ‘sincerity’ begun in Chapter 6 by considering it alongside other ‘voices’ in Maria’s letters – namely sarcasm and seriousness – which are described as interrelated communicative styles dependent upon an anxious awareness of the gap between expression and meaning. The sum of these analyses not only proves historical pragmatics to be a productive method of investigating and systematically describing meaning in individual letter-collections from early modern England, but also suggests a range of new questions, which are presented in the conclusion. Newly prepared diplomatic transcriptions of all the letters are provided in Appendix 1.

This thesis examines phonetic symbolism, the meaningful use of individual speech sounds to convey and infer size, shape, and motion. Chapter 1 presents a summary of the literature. Though there is evidence suggesting that phonetic symbolism exists and is pervasive, the literature presents several research opportunities. In nine experiments and one pre-test (total N = 357 participants), we use graded stimuli throughout, which is uncommon in the previous research. This use of non-dichotomous stimuli allows for the hypotheses that have arisen from a gestural model of language evolution and the Frequency Code to be more fully investigated. In the first set of experiments (Chapter 2), we demonstrate that phonetic marking for size is graded, i.e., it does not mark just very large and very small objects. In Chapter 3, the focus is on marking for size and shape, and their possible interactions. We show that marking for size and for shape are not as in line with each other as previous works might suggest. Marking for movement is the topic of Chapter 4, which includes moving stimuli, not just implied motion. We find that trait permanence is at play with the naming for motion tasks, with marking only occurring when naming the motion itself. Finally, a concluding chapter summarizes and further expounds on the results of the thesis, and how those results relate to the hypotheses suggested by gestural models and frequency code. The conclusion also includes a section of current and future research directions.

This thesis reports the first empirical study to specifically measure and attempt to improve the comprehensibility of jury instructions in England and Wales. While a wealth of research has established that the majority of American jurors substantially misunderstand the crucial legal instructions they are given by the judge at the end of a trial, to date there has not been any comparable rigorous testing of jury instructions in England and Wales and we do not have a clear picture of how well they are understood. It is unwise to extrapolate the findings from American jury trials because the instruction methods are very different: in the English summing-up, English judges not only instruct the jury on the law but also review the evidence, and judges may, if they wish, both integrate their legal instructions with the specific evidence in the case and 'narrativise' the language of their instructions. 102 mock jurors drawn from the community were tested for their ability to recognise, recall and apply eleven legal instructions given in a summing up at the end of a rape trial simulation. They were randomly assigned to receive one of three summings up, which systematically differed in their degree of narrativisation: one based on model instructions published by the Judicial Studies Board; a second that integrated evidence from the case into the instructions; and a third that further narrativised the integrated instructions by applyign discourse features previously hypothesised as having a narrativising function. The thesis, then examines both the comprehensibility of legal instructions within the English summing up and the effect on comprehension of narrativising those intructions. A highly persuasive pattern of results occurred: increasing levels of narrativisation increased juorors' understanding of the instructions, and specifically aided jurors' ability to apply the law to the evidence in the case. Discussing the results in terms of Accommodation Theory and the Cognitive Story Model, the thesis concludes that a judge may better guide jurors through the categories of the law by accommodating the narrative approach that jurors bring to their role.

Cults are negatively regarded. The way in which they persuade people to join their movements is particularly criticised by, for example, the anti-cult movement. Cults do use language in specific ways to recruit new members. There are, however, other groups who use language similarly, for recruitment purposes, but without stigmatisation. A new framework for rhetorical analysis, incorporating both classical tradition and contemporary work in text analysis, is particularly useful at demonstrating this. This thesis develops such a framework and uses it to analyse the rhetoric of three cults, Scientology, The Jehovah's Witnesses and the Children of God, showing that cults' distinctive negative profile in society is not matched by a linguistic typology. Indeed, this negative profile seems to rest on the semantics and application of the term 'cult' itself. Not only does this analysis increase our understanding of rhetoric, it paves the way for new questions to be asked about the pejoration of cults.

The purpose of this dissertation is to investigate Language Attitudes in three representative areas of Morocco. The impact of these attitudes on the individual's socio-psychological make up, especially within the system of education, is examined and emphasis is put upon the relationship between students' and parents' attitudes on the one hand and achievement in second-language learning on the other hand. The working hypothesis is that it helps learners of a second language, who wish to hve a good command of the language, to hold a positive attitude towards the other speech community. By adopting a socio-psychological approach, I seek to examine my subjects' affective as well as behavioural dispositions and the impact of the latter on any language planning programme. By so doing I intend to contribute to the search for a most suitable approach to language-rleated problems in Morocco. To achieve this purpose, a group of workers, students and teachers volunteered to fill out questionnaires on their evaluations of languages and language planning efforts in Morocco. Others volunteered to take part in the matched-guise experiments and interviews concerning their use of language and their desire to learn a second language. The attitude-behaviour relationship was also examined through observation, including participant observation. The subjects were stratified according to age, sex, mother tongue, social status and provenance. The first three substantive sections of the dissertation aim at familiarising the reader with the sociolinguistic situation in Morocco, social psychology as applied to language studies, and the data-eliciting techniques used in the thesis. The subsequent three chapters are concerned with the analysis and discussion of the corpus of data. The results showed significant differences between the attitudes of the groups towards French, SA and the vernacular languages (i.e. MA and MB). The correlation analysis showed a negative relationship between grades and the attitude variables. Only a weak relationship was found between socio-psychological variables and second-language proficiency. Attitudinal and motivational characteristics obtained from the students' parents were included in the study, and a positive correlation between student language proficiency and parental language attitudes and motivation was obtained.

The city of Glasgow, Scotland, is typically associated with violence, criminality, and aggression, and these negative associations impact on the social meaning of Glaswegian Vernacular as used by working-class adolescent males. There have been, however, no studies which have made a systematic attempt to uncover the role fine-grained phonetic variation plays in indexing these associations. Moreover, there have been no studies of Glaswegian which have examined locally constituted groups of adolescent male speakers, and how such speakers use a range of linguistic and social practices in their construction of particular social identities. This study is an ethnographically informed sociolinguistic account of Glaswegian Vernacular which examines the nexus of language, identity, and violence using data collected from a group of working-class adolescent males from a high school in the south side of the city between 2005 – 2008, and aims to uncover whether adolescent males who identified as ‘neds’ or who engaged in social practices considered ‘neddy’ have quantitative linguistic differences from those adolescent males who do not. Through the fine-grained phonetic analysis of the linguistic variables BIT, CAT and (TH), coupled with ethnographic observations, this thesis shows how an apparently homogenous group of speakers use linguistic and social resources to differentiate themselves from one another.

This thesis is the first attempt at analysing the Bórama with a detailed analysis of the poetry read alongside the prose, as well as a detailed discussion on the hagiographical material found at the core of the text. Chapter 1 examines the text, with particular attention on issues of composition, chronological order or disorder and other temporal anomalies, as well as the connection with other texts, especially those situated within the Book of Leinster (LL) manuscript. This is to address the issue of what the purpose of the text is, to support the argument that this is a compiled text, possibly by a single author or compiler, drawing on an extensive knowledge of literary works. It examines what the central focus of the text is and also illustrates Moling as the central character of the text, and crucial to the text in whole. In addition it will discuss the issue of classification, something that scholars have contended with for many years. The poetry of the Bórama serves as the focal point of Chapter 2. There I demonstrate the various metres represented in the poetry, and cover a broad discussion on the issues the poems raise in the debate on the Bórama. It illustrates that the poems are an integral part of the text, and that without them the understanding of the text has been severely affected. The following chapter, Chapter 3, is devoted to the numerous saints who occur in the poetry of the Bórama. In the poems, interspersed throughout the text of the Bórama, there is a great number of saints mentioned at various instances with varying purposes. The purpose of their inclusion as well as in which situation they are represented in the text is discussed extensively. Their locality and affiliations will, as far as possible, be explored in terms of their connection to Leinster or Moling. Chapter 4 will be dedicated to the discussion of Moling, the central character of the text. It will explore how he is represented in the text of the Bórama, as compared to other texts where he is also a key figure. It will be shown that the Bórama, in LL, is a central text to his hagiographical corpus. Material concerned with Moling will also be looked at in terms of what they contribute to his legend. It will draw together the traits Moling exhibits in the extant sources and how his literary persona develops. The chapter will then conclude with the suggestion that LL was invaluable to the development of the legend of Moling. In the final final section of the thesis I will draw together the main issues of each chapter in order to provide a conclusion and iron out any remaining issues. I will also highlight the numerous issues this thesis has raised during the course of the research undertaken and which would serve as future projects centred on the text.

The thesis aims to propose a framework for poetry translation and its criticism. It is demonstrated how criticism on poetry translation can discuss the source text and target text in a way that they may well be two pieces of prose and miss a very important point: their aesthetic value as poetry. The thesis goes on to investigate an important issue of poetry translation: what makes �·poetry poetry. For if poetry is to be translated into poetry and criticized as poetry, this will be a highly relevant issue. An investigation into both Chinese and Western traditions shows that the common ground shared is that poetry in a poem is something holistic and coming from those aesthetically effective contextual relations from the poem. Gestalt Theory is introduced as the backbone of the framework to embody how those contextual relations function and a new term for the poetry one reads in a poem is coined, poestalt-combining poem and gestalt. The framework then is applied to investigate three issues and its significance to the criticism of poetry translation: Firstly, how poestalt may emerge mid the condition for this to happen, i.e. aesthetic coherence. Secondly, the significance of the creative involvement of the reader/translators, which is an important element of poetry reading/translation. Thirdly, the nature of the contextual relation and poestalt, which is highly related to the former two.issues. With this framework, the thesis shows that the poestalt emerging from the source text is the relevant object of poetry translation and its comparison with the poestalt emerging from the target text is the object for the criticism of poetry translation.

The thesis is based on the learning of word-orders in a cross-lingUistic and historic perspective. In linguistics, a certain hannony is expected in word order. X-bars of a language are supposed to be right-branched or left-branched. So, a language, which is right-branched has its head usually first, and a language, which is left-branched has its head usually last. In the generative framework, linguists argue that when a child encounters a structure where the head is to the right, she will assume that the whole language is constructed this way. Cognitive scientists like Christiansen argue that inconsistencies, that means a mixture of right- and left- branching are more difficult to learn because of recursive embeddings, and thus inconsistencies should simply die out or never come into existence in the first place. Greenberg established language universals after having considered forty languages. These universals would show consistencies in an X-bar branching, but Greenberg also cited exceptions and spoke of statistical universals. We are interested in these inconsistencies. If they are really more difficult to learn, why do they evolve in the first place and why are they often quite consistent in language evolution, i.e. they do not die out. Historical linguistics often argue that languages tend to develop from one consistent language via a transitional one and then develop again towards a consistent language. Inconsistent structures exist in most languages although there is a statistical trend towards consistencies. So, how do languages change and what makes persons learn at one stage a language differently and what are the mechanisms involved in learning that we can see as an end-result in language change. We will examine some of these phenomena, when we discuss�· language change in Romance, the introduction of postpositions in Gennan, and the role of the infinite verb in Gennan and in Old English. Experimental work has been done for the frontability of Gennan particles, which is closely linked to the introduction of postpositions. We did an experiment in English language for the role of the infinite verb in verb-final languages such as Gennan and replicated this experiment in French because of its richer verb morphology because this gives us a greater distinction between finite and infinite verbs. An SRN-simulation on the role of the infinite verb supports the experiments.