This thesis reports a study of a corpus of 286 suicide notes collected from the Birmingham Coroner’s Office, with additional findings from 33 real and 33 fabricated notes from Los Angeles. Following some background regarding how suicide notes are treated by Coroners’ Courts and other courts in the U.K, the thesis compares topics used in real and fabricated suicide notes. Although there is considerable overlap between the two categories, they can be partially distinguished by some features that are more likely to occur in one category than the other. For example, dates, indications of author identity and trivia are more likely to occur in real notes than fabricated ones. The thesis then concentrates on fake notes and scrutinises instances of atypical language or phraseology and contextually inappropriate content. It is found that these oddities are far more frequent in the fake notes than in the genuine ones. Finally the thesis focuses on the corpus of genuine notes from the Birmingham Coroner’s Office, using an automatic semantic tagger. The findings are that suicide notes contain significant proportions of items indicating affection, the future and their authors’ kin. In addition, the notes include significant proportions of pronouns, names, negatives, intensifiers, maximum quantity terms, and discourse markers.

The aim of the study was to investigate linguistic interaction in a vocational classroom based in a Further Education college in the UK. The course was designed for adults wishing to become qualified primary teaching assistants. The study was ethnographically grounded and, in keeping with a Linguistic Ethnography approach, it also incorporated close linguistic and narrative-in-interaction analysis. This enabled me to show how educational discourses shape local interactions and how, in particular types of classroom interaction, participants appropriate wider discourses creatively for their own goals. Through detailed analysis of whole class discursive interactions, I show how the tutor appropriated and mediated the curriculum content and discourses for and with her class. She did this by constantly shifting identities and relationships along clines of power, social solidarity and social distance, by drawing on funds of knowledge from her own lived experience and those of her class, and by creating spaces to talk about the different domains of social life: further education, primary school and local life worlds. In their turn, the learners drew on their previous experiences of education, their work experience and their own local life worlds, to make sense of the content with the tutor and their classmates.

This thesis explores the phraseologies of the two first person pronouns, ‘I’ and ‘We’, and their verb collocates in Chinese novice writers’ academic discourse. Quantitatively, the study compares the use and the function of the FPPs in Chinese EFL learners’ academic texts across two disciplines, Business and Management and English Literature, and at two academic levels, undergraduate and postgraduate. It is found that the phrases serving these functions are highly formulaic. There is correspondence between the identified frequent phraseologies and the proposed textual functions in the novice writers’ academic texts. Specifically, a textual function is often realised by one or two phrasal frames including the two FPPs. When the two disciplines are compared, more similarities than differences in relation to the phrases and the textual functions of ‘I’ and ‘We’ are observed. When the undergraduates and the postgraduates are compared, the postgraduates use more impersonal expressions and more retrospective textual organisation expressions to organise and develop their academic texts. The qualitative case study illustrates the importance of quality of using ‘I’ and ‘We’ to interact with readership and claim authority. This study concludes by discussing the insights offered into the teaching and learning of academic writing in EFL contexts.

My thesis argues that Gabriele d’Annunzio and Thomas Mann both conceive of artistic creation as a process which is influenced by their interpretations of Nietzsche’s notion of the Dionysian, and that striking affinities characterise their respective literary portrayals of the relationship between the artist and (a version of) the Dionysian. D’Annunzio and Mann, who were contemporaries, are rarely considered together, and it is widely assumed that there is little common ground between them. This thesis will demonstrate that their creative and critical engagement with Nietzsche, especially his idea of the Dionysian, offers a productive way of comparing the two writers and illuminating hitherto overlooked parallels between their understandings of creativity. The relationship between the artist and the Dionysian will constitute the main point of comparison. For both d’Annunzio and Mann, the Dionysian appears as a drive that can promote creativity, through encouraging liberation from repression and the rediscovery of primordial energies, but also destruction, by threatening self-dissolution, chaos and annihilation. The Dionysian will be seen to offer a highly precarious form of creativity. The artist’s success, and even survival, will depend upon his ability to master this potentially lethal drive, and channel the impulses it triggers into artistic production.

Perlmutter (1971)'s seminal work on clitics has set much of the research model for ensuing studies. Despite enormous changes in linguistic theory over the intervening period, models in which clitic order is determined on the basis of grammatical person remains a key ingredient of most analyses. A key tenet of the current proposal is that clitic-forms may perform more than one syntactic function, reflected in their position within an elaborated series of feature projections including heads, not only for VP argument referents but also non-argumental datives and nominative actors. Surface clitic patterns are merely sequential spell-outs of this structure. There is no need for clitic re-ordering at a morphological or syntactic level. The proposed model requires no complex exclusion or conversion mechanisms nor sophisticated syntactic processes, whilst being iconic and, therefore, learnable without the need for prior knowledge e.g. Universal Grammar constraints. The model has no need of lexicalized units, treating all clusters as purely compositional sequences directly interpretable from context. Giving each 'case' its own position leads to a simple and coherent model readily applicable across Romance. The work addresses 1-/2-/3-/4-clitic clusters in French, Italian, Spanish, Occitan, Catalan, and Romanian in their various dialect forms, whilst briefly illustrating many other Romance dialects.

Developing an ability to understand and use metaphor is essential for successful language learning. While teachers/researchers have examined the effects of metaphor training in language classrooms, they have rarely embedded the instruction into a four skills language curriculum. To fill this gap, this study explores the effectiveness of metaphor instruction in developing reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills for both EFL and ESL learners. During this two-part study, the pre-test and post-test scores of an experimental group of 11 EFL students who received metaphor and metonymy instruction in the four skills were compared with a control group of 10 EFL students. Next, the test scores of two experimental groups of 11-12 ESL students who received metaphor and metonymy instruction in either reading and writing or listening and speaking were compared with two control groups of 12 ESL students. The thesis finds that explicit metaphor instruction can lead to modest improvements for some aspects of metaphor use. However, as different task types, genres, and topics were found to require different types and amounts of metaphor and metonymy use, the thesis also finds that it is essential to consider the nature of the communicative task when developing metaphor instruction.

This thesis provides an original contribution to ongoing research on so-called Islamic State (‘IS’) by using a multiple case-study approach to offer an in-depth analysis of Arabic and English language narratives related to four atrocities committed by the group: (1) the mass killing of hundreds of Iraqi soldiers, known as the Speicher massacre, (2) the captivity and sexual enslavement of Ezidi girls, known in Arabic as sabi, (3) the executions of a number of western, Arab, and Kurd victims, and (4) the destruction of cultural artefacts in Nineveh province. The analysis engages with the discourses of ‘IS’, western, Arabic, Iranian, and Kurdish media, survivors, ‘IS’s’ religious opponents, and other actors. The dissertation uses a social narrative theory as its conceptual framework that I seek to develop by focusing on the fragmentation in narratives, on one hand, and on the multimodal resources through which narratives circulate, on the other. To this end, I combine the theory with Boje’s (2001) notion of antenarrative and Kress’(2009) understanding of the three resources of discourse, genre, and mode, to investigate ways in which narratives first unfold and how they later change as they are translated. Translation is understood in the thesis as a multi-directional movement that simultaneously takes place across multiple resources without necessarily crossing language boundaries. The findings of this study reveal that the aforementioned resources contribute to transforming narratives. In translation, ‘IS’s’ narratives can be delegitimized and confronted, or the opposite. Examining the changes in these narratives as they are translated in multiple directions is a novel contribution to the field of translation studies in relation to the digital media environment.

The following study of history through literature uses a French text composed by and for the court of Burgundy in the mid fifteenth century: the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. It demonstrates that philological interpretation of the text has floundered when it has ignored the historical context in which the work was composed. Alongside this critique, the thesis comes to the positive conclusion that it is valuable to restore an appreciation of the benefits of historical scholarship to the discipline of philology. In the first chapter, the case is made for reclaiming the text as a historical document on the basis of its context. Recent studies, which have insisted that the historical context of the work is unimportant, are examined critically, to establish the need for a historical reappraisal of the text, beginning where the pioneer archiviste-palaeographe Pierre Champion left off. In the second chapter, we see that both the traditional and more recent assumptions about the text, its authorship, date, and place in the canon of western European literature have to be reassessed. Through close study of manuscript and printed text, the textual tradition is asserted, and the Cent nouvelles nouvelles is restored to its historical milieu. Antecedents and analogue texts are examined in the context of the moral vision of the work as one which is similar to the Decameron's, though it involves an unrecorded deliberative process, which allows it to be considered as more of an aesthetic unity than philologists have recognised. The question of the Nouvelles' relationship to the contemporary literary context is examined in detail, particularly through an analysis of the issues of fashions in literary style, and the interplay of courtly with popular culture. This section is partly based on archival work. The third chapter, which is heavily based on chronicles and unpublished archival material, moves from the world to the text, to consider the men who made the text, and for whom the text was made. The immediate political context in which the work was conceived is shown to have a bearing on its form, and the raconteurs are replaced in their courtly milieu. We see that they were the closest to the duke, serving him in his household, his political network, his armies, his ideological aspirations, and his diplomacy. The network of sociability which underpinned the text made the Cent nouvelles nouvelles what it is: a Burgundian work from a particular time and place. Lastly, this chapter considers the raconteurs' contributions to the collection as extensions of their personalities, and as extensions of their careers of service, giving two particular examples in detail. The fourth chapter moves from the text to the world using the literature to throw light on the circumstances under which it was created. A sequence of individual stories (Nouvelles 2, 19, 53, 60, 63, 78, 83) are examined in their historical context, and explained in terms of the meaning they had when they were first recounted. The raconteurs' historical backgrounds, established in the previous chapter, prove invaluable in unlocking the particular significance of motifs, plots and jokes in the stories. We also see that philological appraisals which lack historical awareness are unable to appreciate the texts on their own terms. Nouvelles which have a basis in historical fact are considered alongside those which form part of a longstanding textual tradition. Both sorts of texts are shown to have a Burgundian specificity - a historical accent. The fifth chapter argues, on the basis of what has preceded it, that the method of restoring literary texts to a historical milieu is universal, even though not all texts may be as susceptible to such detailed analysis which was brought to bear on the Cent nouvelles nouvelles. It is contended that the evidential value of literature as historical document is more specific than it is general. Moreover, it is vital to ascertain what the literary text is most informative about, as well as what its limitations are as historical evidence. We see how postmodern ideas have taken root in philological theory. Cutting against postmodern theories about textuality and evidence, which have insisted that the historical context of the work is not merely unimportani but that it is irrelevant and unascertainahle, the conclusion argues for a return to the practice of setting texts in context. Appendix 1 deals with the codicology of MS Hunter 252, and compares the Verard text. Appendix 2 presents transcriptions of Nouvelle 63 from the manuscript, and two early printed versions. Appendix 3 demonstrates Verard's reuse of the woodcuts with which he decorated the Cent nouvelles nouvelles and emphasises that the commercial nature of his business impacted on aesthetic concerns. Appendix 4 deals with the question of the raconteurs that are difficult to identify, particularly the lords of Beauvoir and Villiers, and Caron.

This is a study of the letters of Anne, countess of Northumberland (1536–91) throughout her exile in the Low Countries from August 1570 until her death on 9 September 1591. The thesis draws on archival research and analysis of several hundred letters and associated documents, in English, Latin, Scots, French and cipher, spread across six British and European archives, to, from and about Anne and her contemporaries. The thesis includes an edition of the twenty-four extant letters written to and from Anne, in English and Latin, and images of these, as well as a newly published ODNB entry. Anne's letters offer evidence of an early modern woman directing and commanding the production and rhetorical construction of her correspondence and the gendered nature of her epistolary world. The thesis argues that she successfully represented herself and developed her agency despite (or in the context of) epistolary practices shaped heavily by men: male secretaries penned her letters, male addressees and male intelligencers intercepted and assessed the value of her correspondence. This thesis illuminates the physical ways that Anne authorised her letters as well as the rhetorical and linguistic strategies that she employed to assert her own power and negotiate her position in epistolary exchanges. After the introduction, which includes a biography of Anne, an overview of her letters and an outline of the theoretical framework of the thesis, there are three analytical chapters. Chapter One situates the letters in their socio-historical contexts to highlight how Anne negotiated the extreme circumstances of her exile to her own advantage: to access traditional reward-based patronage; to deploy informal shared experiences to sustain service and client bonds; and to establish a central position within the English exile community and the political network surrounding Mary, Queen of Scots. Chapter Two draws on techniques from manuscript studies and examines Anne's letters and the evidence they offer for their own composition, sending, reception and afterlife. This chapter reveals the benefits of close scrutiny of the physical and linguistic features of letters, adding detail to our understanding of women's use of letter-writing practices in the period. Chapter Three applies techniques from the field of historical pragmatics to analyse the rhetorical and linguistic strategies used in Anne's letters to bolster her own position by appropriating gender expectations to her own advantage while navigating social and interpersonal relationships embedded in epistolary exchanges. The thesis therefore, by drawing on different disciplinary techniques, offers us layers of insights into the letters. The picture that emerges is one that depicts not only Anne's agency but the processes through which her agency was constructed and enacted, according to the opportunities and limitations of her own culture and the extreme and exceptional circumstances of her own life.

The thesis explores the experiences of a group of university students with African diasporic connections, an under-researched group in UK HE. Building on the traditions of ideological and ethnographic approaches to academic literacies research, the thesis highlights power relations involved in a range of life experiences, social practices and institutional power relations. The study offers a complex reading of the student experience focusing on the negotiation of literacy practices. It presents non-traditional undergraduates as complex individuals with a range of abilities and resources to draw on for knowledge making which are constantly being reshaped by their diasporic identities, power relations within the academy and wider context beyond the university setting. Research findings evoke a reciprocal exchange between disciplinary understandings, knowledge making and poststructural conceptions of identity. More specifically, while the students I worked with were assessed in unfavourable ways, they displayed a range of resources for knowledge making stemming from a complex interchange between cultural and social identification, an applied social science curriculum and the negotiation of high stakes written assignments. The thesis offers an enhanced understanding of undergraduates as knowledge makers, the resources they bring to the academy and how, at times, they are positioned by others as they negotiate what is required of them. In doing so, an alternative image of the multilingual, non-traditional undergraduate and the potential resources they have is provided. The thesis is also concerned with the broader and less distinct phenomena of globalisation, migration and social exclusion and their impact on current understandings of the student experience within contemporary UK HE. As a result, the main contribution to knowledge can be said to centre on understandings of the scope of academic literacies research, what it means to be a nontraditional learner in HE and critical perspectives on the nature of higher education in the contemporary world.