This thesis is the first; part: of a comprehensive grammar of the language of Shakespeare. It deals with the noun, the adjective, the articles, numerals, the verb, and congruence between subject and predicate. The method employed is basically traditional and historical, and normally only Shakespeare is considered, but occasionally comparisons are made with earlier and with later usage. A division has not been made between accidence and syntax, though both are examined. All examples from Shakespeare are quoted from the Polio or Quarto texts. Usually more examples are given of a rare construction than of a common one, and sometimes all known instances are cited. A very few examples are given from Shakespeare s contemporaries where it is felt that these are helpful. The work takes as its basis Wilhelm Franz's Die Sprache Shakespeares in Vers und Prosa (Halle, 1939), which is in fact a fourth edition of his Shakespeare-Grammatik (1898-1900, 1909, 1924); but frequent references are made to other grammatical works that confirm, amplify, or- correct the statements made there.

Recent studies of metaphor have stressed both its importance to thinking and its pervasiveness in language. A number of researchers now claim that metaphorical transfer often connects semantic domains at the level of thought. This has implications for formal features of individual linguistic metaphors and for the lexical relations holding between them. The linguistic data used by metaphor researchers has largely been either intuitively derived or taken from small hand-sorted collections of texts. As yet, there have been few attempts to systematically examine metaphorical linguistic expressions in non-literary corpus data. In this thesis I use corpus data to examine a number of polysemous lexemes and I attempt to establish whether their metaphorical meanings, the lexical relations holding between these meanings, and aspects of their collocational and syntactic behaviour can be accounted for by a theory of metaphor as conceptual mapping. The investigation comprises a number of studies of non-innovative metaphorical expressions and their literal counterparts. I conclude that the contemporary theory of conceptual metaphorical mapping accounts for some features of linguistic metaphor but that it does not completely explain the data.

Bilingualism means more than speaking two languages, it also has cognitive consequences. Recently, the question whether bilingualism affects cognitive control abilities or not has raised a fierce debate. In this thesis, the effect of bilingualism on executive control was tested in different domains. First, bilingual speakers showed enhanced attentional control abilities while performing non-verbal executive control tasks. This was evident in terms of their response distribution profiles, which showed less extreme distribution tails than those of monolinguals, suggesting less frequent lapses of attention. Second, bilingual speakers resolved intra-language lexical competition differently from monolingual speakers. Their response distribution profiles as well as their brain activities were differentially affected in a picture naming task that manipulated the level of lexical competition. These results were best explained by bilingual speakers having enhanced engagement of executive control while resolving lexical competition within a single language, even though this might not be reflected at behavioural level. Third, bilingual speakers demonstrated enhanced task shifting abilities at a latent factor level, while they did not differ from monolinguals with regard to inhibition and updating abilities. Results also suggested a more correlated network of executive control for bilingual speakers than for monolingual speakers. Therefore, this thesis has obtained converging evidence that bilingualism benefits executive control. Reasons for inconsistencies in the literature and absence of the bilingualism effects are discussed.

This study is a classroom linguistic ethnography with a Year 4 class of 18 students, aged 9 years, in a village primary school in bidialectal South Eastern Cyprus. The research methods include a year of participant observation, in-depth interviews and fieldnotes. The study applies Hornberger’s (1989) theoretical framework of the biliteracy continuum for a critical perspective on the way this Greek Cypriot community reflects hierarchical views of Cypriot Dialect, (CD) and Standard Modern Greek, (SMG) in academic contexts which involve both linguistic varieties. The study analyses translanguaging and literacy practices in classroom talk to focus on students’ collective efforts when negotiating meanings of texts, helping them to jointly construct knowledge (Garcia, 2009; Creese & Blackledge, 2010). The analysis shows that, regardless of negative views of CD, children and teacher use CD as a learning resource. The students draw on all their available linguistic resources to understand and construct knowledge through types of talk, such as exploratory talk (Mercer, 2000; 2004) enacted through translanguaging practices. Evidence showed that learning through translanguaging can be both cognitive, such as understanding the pedagogic task, as well as social and cultural, based on and embedded in, the way students shared their ideas and reasoned together.

The study of speech sounds has established itself as a distinct area of research, namely Phonetics. This is because speech production is a complex phenomenon mediated by the interaction of multiple components of a linguistic and non-linguistic nature. To investigate such phenomena, this thesis employs a Functional Data Analysis framework where speech segments are viewed as functions. FDA treats functions as its fundamental unit of analysis; the thesis takes advantage of this, both in conceptual as well as practical terms, achieving theoretical coherence as well as statistical robustness in its insights. The main techniques employed in this work are: Functional principal components analysis, Functional mixed-effects regression models and phylogenetic Gaussian process regression for functional data. As it will be shown, these techniques allow for complementary analyses of linguistic data. The thesis presents a series of novel applications of functional data analysis in Phonetics. Firstly, it investigates the influence linguistic information carries on the speech intonation patterns. It provides these insights through an analysis combining FPCA with a series of mixed effect models, through which meaningful categorical prototypes are built. Secondly, the interplay of phase and amplitude variation in functional phonetic data is investigated. A multivariate mixed effects framework is developed for jointly analysing phase and amplitude information contained in phonetic data. Lastly, the phylogenetic associations between languages within a multi-language phonetic corpus are analysed. Utilizing a small subset of related Romance languages, a phylogenetic investigation of the words' spectrograms (functional objects defined over two continua simultaneously) is conducted to showcase a proof-of-concept experiment allowing the interconnection between FDA and Evolutionary Linguistics.

This thesis is an exploration of ambiguity in rhetoric, dialectic, religio-political writing and literature in Early Modern England. It examines the ways in which the attitudes to ambiguity were formed in Early Modern England, with a focus on the development of ideas about the so-called ‘Jesuitical equivocation’ or ‘mental reservation’, a special case of ambiguity. In late sixteenth century England, hiding Catholic priests sought a way of defending Catholics from what they perceived as unjust persecution. They believed to have found a solution in the doctrine of equivocation, according to which it is justifiable to deceive one’s questioner by giving replies that the examiner is likely to misunderstand because they are phrased ambiguously, or because the speaker qualifies his/her words by a restriction only spoken within themselves, specifying what he means only to his own conscience and God. The thesis first explores the ways in which ambiguity occurred in sixteenth century education (by looking at Aristotle, Cicero, the Rhetorica ad Herennium, Quintilian, Servius, Melanchthon and John Case) to argue that the doctrine of mental reservation is grounded in the Classical and Renaissance rhetorical and dialectical tradition. In my second chapter I examine how the doctrine evolved from its first statement in 1584 by Doctor Navarrus, through the Casuistical tradition to Henry Garnet’s infamous A treatise of equivocation. The third chapter is devoted to the controversy between the Protestant Thomas Morton and the Catholic Robert Persons, who debate whether equivocation is a justifiable evasion, or a simple lie. The second part attempts to demonstrate that the obvious mistrust in ambiguity, usually seen as the effect of the trial of the Gunpowder Plotters and the ensuing anti- Jesuit propaganda, is in fact rooted more deeply in Renaissance culture. The fourth chapter explores Sidney’s Arcadia, and the ways in which prophecies, the princes’ disguises, and misunderstood speeches become indicators of the limitations of human understanding. The fifth chapter on Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night concentrates on how conveying or concealing a message and understanding or misunderstanding the speaker’s intention can be seen as acts of exercising power. Finally, a reading of Macbeth explores the ethics of deception, by looking at the instances of deceit that result from ambiguous language, employed by and against Macbeth. To demonstrate the parallels between religio-political discourse and literature, the thesis looks at common assumptions about how meaning is produced, conveyed, understood, misunderstood, or allowed to be misunderstood.

This study examines four aspects of teaching Chinese in English primary schools – participants’ motivations, teachers’ backgrounds and subject knowledge, the teaching of Chinese and participants’ experience – and potential relationships between them. Building on a previous survey of Chinese teaching in English primary schools (CILT 2007), it provides a more detailed picture of teaching and learning Chinese and has important implications for practitioners and policy makers. Five case studies were conducted in four English primary schools to investigate the teaching and learning of Chinese. Mixed methods were used to collect data, including a structured questionnaire, semi-structured interviews, lesson observations and field notes. The findings suggest strong relationships between teachers’ backgrounds and their subject knowledge. These impact upon their teaching as a result of their priorities and preferences in teaching Chinese pinyin, characters, culture and language. This study identifies gaps in different aspects of teachers’ subject knowledge, informing government that the training of future teachers of Chinese should involve either training English primary class teachers in Chinese or equipping Chinese heritage teachers with primary pedagogical skills. Pupils’ motivations and experience suggest that the former may be more successful, as teachers’ pedagogy seems to outweigh their knowledge of Chinese in motivating and maintaining pupils’ interest. The content of Chinese teaching is unregulated and hotly debated. Pupils’ opinions and experiences of very different teaching styles suggest that Chinese culture and written characters should be included in teaching Chinese. However, this finding has implications for teacher training and pupil study practices. In addition, this study suggests that pupil expectations constrain teachers’ teaching, and that head teachers play a very important role in the development of Chinese teaching in schools. This study informs government that there is an urgent demand for appropriate guidance for primary teachers of Chinese, as current governmental guidelines are unsuitable for and unused by teachers.

This thesis investigates the advertising strategies used in marketing cars in Italy and the UK, with particular reference to the employment of translation. Fieldwork has been undertaken within advertising agencies, with a view to establishing how translation is used, whether translators in the industry are professionally trained and how significant translation is generally maintained to be. The role of advertising agencies in both contexts has been considered in terms of their development over time and their cultural prominence. A qualitative analysis of a corpus of Italian and British car advertisements from the 1980s to the present has been undertaken, with the aim of determining how car advertisements have changed across two decades, during which advertising techniques have tended to become more complex and both societies have undergone significant changes. This is particularly apparent with regard to issues of gender representation and the balance between verbal and visual text. The analysis of the corpus focuses on the use of translation. It is suggested that car advertisements, as cultural products, are reconstituted and rewritten when translated, so that advertisements of the same product tend to be very different across cultures, both in terms of textual content and visuals. Investigating the cultural value of advertisements demonstrates the continuing tension between perceptions of what is termed ‘mechanical translation’ and ‘creative rewriting’ as well as the social and economic value ascribed to each in marketing discourses. The general aim of the thesis is to establish the involvement of translation in economic and cultural exchanges within which advertising plays a part. It is argued that despite what advertising professionals appear to believe, the cultural and economic impact of advertising is assisted by translation, which plays a significant role in the transmission of information and values.

Professional intercultural communication is of growing importance in today’s globalising world. This study analyses the dynamics of relating that occurred between Chinese officials and American officials and other professionals during a three-week delegation visit to the USA. Drawing on concepts and frameworks in pragmatics, sociolinguistics, cross-cultural psychology, communication studies and translation studies, it takes a data-driven approach to explore Chinese officials’ professional interaction with American/British professionals. This kind of interaction, which involved government officials, has rarely been studied before. During the delegation visit, over twenty authentic professional intercultural events including formal meetings and banquets were recorded in six major cities in the USA. Relational issues and the interactants’ interpretations of these issues from both sides were extracted and examined from twenty-hour-long video recordings and two-hour-long audio recordings of official interaction, fifteen-thousand-word notes of the delegation’s evening meetings where they reflected on the day’s events, forty-one individual post-event and post-trip interviews with the Chinese and fourteen open-ended questionnaire responses from the Americans. Taking a first order approach, I place the interactants’ perspectives at the core and significantly reduce my interference by starting from the natural and spontaneous reflections made by the participants in the evening meetings. I then check the generality of the findings by comparing them with a second dataset which comprises eighty-six narrative accounts of Chinese-non-Chinese professional communication reported by thirty-seven Chinese officials and three businesspeople. My analysis takes a developmental perspective, and reveals the complexities of relational management as it unfolds over time. A number of different norms and interactional principles emerge, and my investigation of relational management combines motivational (e.g., Rapport Management theory) and descriptive aspects (e.g., dialectical theory). The study contributes to our understanding of the conceptualization and operationalization of the key concepts face, politeness and relations as well as the major practical concerns of gifts, hosting and interactional styles, including language and interpreting. For example, the findings suggest that while the concepts face, politeness, guanxi and the “relational”, i.e., relations/relationships/relating, tend to be conflated and remain largely entangled in the literature, all of them are distinguishable. First, face and politeness are conceptually distinct, and their connection is not as strong as we have assumed. Second, while both face and guanxi can be viewed as enduring yet not static entities, they are two separate concepts. Guanxi work is much broader than facework and face is only one of the major motivations behind it. Yet guanxi dynamics frequently have face implications. Face can be gained when guanxi goes well and is very likely to be lost when it goes wrong. Additionally, face and the “relational” are not synonymous. In spite of the emerging call for a relational study of face, it is not a property of a relationship and merely analysing it in talk-in-interaction is inadequate.

To describe a transitive event, the English language allows a choice of two Voices. The canonical form is the active-voice, and the alternative is the passive-voice, which offers its own semantic and syntactic functions. The passive-voice can also be divided into two further variants: be-passives and get-passives. Though theories are numerous, literature from both Linguistics and Psychology falls short in describing the functions and uses of these two forms. In this thesis, I present a rethink of passive syntactic representation, simplifying its description under a single structural unit. The proposed pvP theory allows for the variation between the two passive-types, while accounting for the features that are shared by all passive forms. I also present several experiments that explore the differing semantics and syntax of be-passives and get-passives. The results of these studies show a clear preference for the be-passive over the get-passive, especially in self-reporting and tasks that allow self-correction. However, it is also clear that, though there is overlap between them, each form serves its own purposes and exhibits preference for use in specific contexts.