This thesis investigates Deleuze-Guattari's notion of stratification through a series of investigations into their material on language. Stratification is their term for the process by which matter-energy comes to assume the relatively stable historical formations of our social world, and in particular the relationship between subjects, objects and words. The complex notion of the order-word/password is proposed as key to this process, with its role in the articulations of the strata (as order-word) and in movements of creation and escape (as password). I explore this apparatus from a variety of angles, in order to present an account of Deleuze-Guattari's pragmatics that demonstrates both its basis in philosophy and its connections with the world. I begin by introducing the notion of 'difference in itself', through Deleuze/Deleuze-Guattari's critique of representation and their account of subjectification, the creation of the subject in space and time (in relation to Bergson and Kant) - and then feed this material through an encounter with Judge Schreber, in the process filling out our account of the subject. The resulting diagram of stratification is further explored through a dialogue with two other key thinkers of language - Wittgenstein, in relation to his social conception of meaning as use, and Derrida, in relation to his critique of Austin and Searle's Speech Act theory - in either case, demonstrating important connections and contrasts with Deleuze-Guattari. I then examine the specifics of stratoanalysis through an examination of the related zones of the formal, the abstract and the incorporeal, bringing this to bear on Deleuze- Guattari's appropriation of the linguist Hjelmslev, and to the criticisms of Ruthrof. The final step is to relate this apparatus both to linguistic and everyday understandings of language, connecting this pragmatics of the order-word with the notion of an 'art of living' through a consideration of standardised language and 'verbal hygiene'.

Every political system has a shared language of symbols, narratives and priorities through which legitimation is sought. This language is basic and schematic, yet it generates 'legitimate' priorities and objectives. My interest is two-fold: firstly, how is this language reproduced, disseminated and upheld? Secondly, how is it used, interpreted and adapted to legitimise a wide array of actions, policies or ideas? I seek to answer these questions in light of Turkey's EU ambitions. I sketch the prescriptions of what I call the normative core of Turkish politics, as expressed through national socialisation, the Constitution and the raison d'etre of key institutions. I show how institutions such as the military, judiciary and Presidency legitimise their actions through appeals to this normative core, thus reproducing it with little variation, while simultaneously reproducing a shared language of politics. I also highlight the wide dissemination this language enjoys through education and early learning as well as its symbolic reproduction through spatial narratives such as national sites, museums and monuments. Having demonstrated how this language is institutionally entrenched, widely disseminated and extensively used for the legitimation of public activities, I turn to the question of whether its constraints also create opportunities. I argue that Turkey's EU ambitions have actually led to the proliferation of such opportunities by introducing an alternative value benchmark in the pursuit of political legitimacy. Although the language is not abandoned, it is being actively enriched. After decades of tension and reform, the notions of 'secularism' and 'westernisation', cornerstones of the normative core of Turkish politics, are now open to debate. This could lead to a process of radical re-negotiation of political values. Alternatively, the constraints that the language imposes might actually outweigh the opportunities. For now, a delicate but fascinating process of negotiation is unfolding in the heart of the Turkish political system. My PhD seeks to explain and analyse it.

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This thesis investigates the interaction of emotion and motivation in language learning. By means of three independent research studies, I analyse the interaction of affective, motivational, and cognitive factors as they appear in relation to the context of a classroom. Rather than studying motivation, affect, or cognition in relative isolation in terms of their impact on language development, I argue that it is worthwhile to study the amalgams formed by these three forces by means of a dynamic systems–based research methodology. The research methodology employed for the first research study is primarily based on the concept of attractor states: salient and relatively stable states of a dynamic system. I demonstrate the existence of four main classroom states: interest, boredom, neutral attention, and anxiety. The factors forming the attractor basin for these states are cognitive, affective, motivational, and contextual in nature. This indicates that affect and motivation have an impact on language learners via the state they produce through their interaction with cognitive and contextual factors. In the second research study of this thesis, I analyse the self-regulation and perseverance of ten language learners from various backgrounds. I argue that a learner’s attractor basin produces a stronger and more positive attractor when there are strong motivational elements present, such as a well thought-out goal orientation. Although other factors may diminish in strength due, for example, to a new teacher with whom the learner does not get along, or a new topic that is no longer enjoyable, a well-defined and sufficiently internalised goal orientation can be the key to successful self-regulation and, ultimately, greater success in learning the target language. In the final research study, I demonstrate that the factors that contribute to the construction of the aforementioned state in the classroom are different for younger and older learners. For older learners, the motivational element plays a significantly more prominent part, while for younger learners the affective, cognitive, and contextual elements are more important. Furthermore, the older learners have the ability to analyse and deconstruct their classroom state, while this is not the case for younger learners. Instead, the experience of the classroom for younger learners is made up of an indistinguishable combination of affective, cognitive, and contextual elements, which combine into an overall feeling of “I like it” or “It is difficult”. Although this can result in the impression that a young learner’s state is determined entirely by affective elements, this is not, in fact, the case; rather, these states are most likely a combination of affective, cognitive, and contextual elements.

In this thesis a new concept called ‘Lexism’ (the Othering and discrimination of dyslexics) is proposed, outlined and defended. The dyslexia debate is currently in a state of deadlock. The origin of this stalemate is not an empirical problem but a conceptual one. The conceptual problems with dyslexia, and the existence of dyslexics, are both recognised, but the contradictions between them remain unresolved. For this reason a philosophical approach (influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein and Gilbert Ryle) has been adopted. First, the conceptual foundations are set out to enable the recognition of Lexism as a concept, and to reject the concept of dyslexia whilst recognising the existence of dyslexics. Second, Lexism as a concept, is evaluated, compared and contrasted with what some might consider to be the strongest existing account of dyslexics’ social experiences, that of Riddick’s (2001) social model of dyslexia. Third, the key aspects and features of Lexism as a new concept are set out. The original contribution to knowledge is that Lexism enables us to see that dyslexics are defined by Lexism not dyslexia. Lexism, it is argued, in a certain sense, is comparable to, though not the same as, racism, sexism and homophobia. This enables us break the current deadlock and move away from sterile debates over dyslexia’s existence, to how dyslexics are Othered by a literate society. Lexism raises new and significant implications for the dyslexia debate, but also government policy, educational practice, assessments and reasonable adjustments for dyslexics.

Over the past few decades, our understanding of the cognitive processes underpinning our navigational abilities has expanded considerably. Models have been constructed that attempt to explain various key aspects of our wayfinding abilities, from the selection of salient features in environments to the processes involved in updating our position with respect to those features during movement. However, there remain several key open questions. Much of the research in spatial cognition has investigated visuospatial performance on the basis of sensory input (predominantly vision, but also sound, hapsis, and kinaesthesia), and while language production has been the subject of extensive research in psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, many aspects of language encoding remain unexplored. The research presented in this thesis aimed to explore outstanding issues in spatial language processing, tying together conceptual ends from different fields that have the potential to greatly inform each other, but focused specifically on how landmark information and spatial reference frames are encoded in mental representations characterised by different spatial reference frames. The first five experiments introduce a paradigm in which subjects encode skeletal route descriptions containing egocentric (“left/right”) or allocentric (cardinal) relational terms, while they also intentionally maintain an imagined egocentric or allocentric viewpoint. By testing participants’ spatial knowledge either in an allocentric (Experiments 1-3) or in an egocentric task (Experiments 4 and 5) this research exploits the facilitation produced by encoding-test congruence to clarify the contribution of mental imagery during spatial language processing and spatial tasks. Additionally, Experiments 1-3 adopted an eye-tracking methodology to study the allocation of attention to landmarks in descriptions and sketch maps as a function of linguistic reference frame and imagined perspective, while also recording subjective self-reports of participants’ phenomenal experiences. Key findings include evidence that egocentric and allocentric relational terms may not map directly onto egocentric and allocentric imagined perspectives, calling into question a common assumptions of psycholinguistic studies of spatial language. A novel way to establish experimental control over mental representations is presented, together with evidence that specific eye gaze patterns on landmark words or landmark regions of maps can be diagnostic of different imagined spatial perspectives. Experiments 4 and 5 adopted the same key manipulations to the study of spatial updating and bearing estimation following encoding of short, aurally-presented route descriptions. By employing two different response modes in this triangle completion task, Experiments 4 and 5 attempted to address key issues of experimental control that may have caused the conflicting results found in the literature on spatial updating during mental navigation and visuospatial imagery. The impact of encoding manipulations and of differences in response modality on embodiment and task performance were explored. Experiments 6-8 subsequently attempted to determine the developmental trajectory for the ability to discriminate between navigationally salient and non-salient landmarks, and to translate spatial relations between different reference frames. In these developmental studies, children and young adolescents were presented with videos portraying journeys through virtual environments from an egocentric perspective, and tested their ability to translate the resulting representations in order to perform allocentric spatial tasks. No clear facilitation effect of decision-point landmarks was observed or any strong indication that salient navigational features are more strongly represented in memory within the age range we tested (four to 11 years of age). Possible reasons for this are discussed in light of the relevant literature and methodological differences. Globally, the results presented indicate a functional role of imagery during language processing, pointing to the importance of introspection and accurate task analyses when interpreting behavioural results. Additionally, the study of implicit measures of attention such as eye tracking measures has the potential to improve our understanding mental representations, and of how they mediate between perception, action, and language. Lastly, these results also suggest that synergy between seemingly distinct research areas may be key in better characterising the nature of mental imagery in its different forms, and that the phenomenology of imagery content will be an essential part of this and future research.

This study provides description and analysis of some verbal complementation patterns in Egyptian Colloquial Arabic (ECA), namely the Auxiliary /kaan/, Causative /xalla/, phasal verbs and modals. Each verb is represented by a set of sentences extracted from a 5 million word corpus of ECA online texts that was built for the purpose of the current study using the Sketch Engine tool. These verbal complements are described and analysed within the principles of LFG syntactic theory, and represented in a grammar fragment implemented using the XLE tool. The analysis shows that both tense and aspect can be expressed verbs in ECA, where in simple tense forms the verb carries tense only, while in compound tense, the main predicate marks tense and occupies I while the following lexical verb marks grammatical aspect and occupies V. The bi- prefix marks present tense on verbs in I and imperfect aspect on verbs in V, as well as a HAB/PROG feature. The bare Imperfective verb form is treated as a non-finite verb in ECA, where it can not occupy I and is marked by VFORM=BARE. All of the verbal constructions analysed are bi-clausal structures, however, they show differences regarding the kind of control relation. Functional control was attested in constructions where the main predicate is the auxiliary /kaan/, the causative verb /xalla/, phasal verbs, as well as non-inflecting modals. Anaphoric control was attested only with inflecting modals, with the modal /yi2dar/ ‘able’ showing a case of obligatory anaphoric control. This is, to my knowledge, the first study which attempts to develop a grammar for ECA using the XLE platform. It provides an insight over the issues correlated with developing this grammar, which could be a step towards including ECA into the ParGram project in order to develop broad coverage grammars for a bigger number of languages.

This thesis is a critical stylistic analysis of the meanings of the lexemes 'feminism', 'feminist(s)' and 'feminist' in UK national newspapers, 2000-2009. It uses the textual-conceptual functions set out in Jeffries (2010a) to investigate the linguistic contexts in which these lexemes occur within the data in order to assess to what extent the movement, the people who represent it, and things that are described as feminist are imbued with different textually constructed meanings. The analysis tests previous studies' findings concerning portrayals of feminism and feminists in the media. Expanding on and responding to this research, this study reports on five main findings: • 'Feminism', 'feminist(s)' and 'feminist' have positive, as well as negative, meanings. • 'Feminism' and 'feminists' are a western phenomenon, with different types in the past and present. • 'Feminism' has a complex meaning, with no single, universal definition and a variety of types. • 'Feminism' is presented as having undergone changes in meaning, as antonymous to other ideas and containing opposed meanings. • Portrayals of 'feminism' are complex, with articles recognising and contesting different meanings of the lexemes. These findings both confirm and question previous studies, which have argued that feminism and feminists are portrayed negatively in newspaper texts. It provides linguistic evidence to support claims made by other non-linguistic studies of the same genre and time period: that portrayals of feminism are 'fragmented' (Mendes, 2011a, p. 49) and that they present feminism as consisting of approved and disapproved types (Dean, 2010). I also discuss the lexemes 'feminism', 'feminist(s)' and 'feminist' in with regard to contested meaning, using critical stylistic tools to analyse how newspaper articles textually construct different meanings of the lexemes, and explicitly discuss and compare different definitions. The thesis argues that the analysis of textual meaning can be used to explore how the meanings of a lexeme or set of lexemes that 'involve ideas and values' (Williams, 1983, p. 17) are constructed in a variety of ways through the linguistic context in which they occur. I also reflect on the usefulness of the textualconceptual functions in the manual analysis of a large dataset, identifying ways in which an analysis that seeks to provide as full as possible an account of the textual construction of meaning can produce findings not possible through other means of analysis.

Grounded in Halliday’s systemic functional approach to the study of language and his three metafunctions of language, a new model called an Eclectic Model of Mind Style (EMMS) is presented in this thesis. Its building involved the examination of existing research on mind style and further systematic incorporation of some of the existing concepts, approaches and methodologies into one overarching model that could assist scholars in a more comprehensive understanding of the character’s mind style. The goal of the model is to provide an analytical tool for stylistic analysis of the fictional characters’ mind styles by demonstrating various stylistic effects used by authors in depiction of fictional characters in their novels. The building of the model involved two stages: the first stage comprised the detailed review of the scholarly research on the notion of mind style with the focus on the workings of the deviant minds. During this process, the outlines of the new model including its major categories have gradually emerged and finally, the EMMS has been built to be used as an inclusive analytical tool for stylistic analysis. Testing the proposed model by applying it to the analysis of the two selected fictional characters has become the next logical step bringing forth the second stage of the thesis writing process. During this stage, the two novels and their main characters have been chosen, namely: Christopher Boone in Mark Haddon’s (2003) The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and Don Tillman in Graeme Simsion’s (2013) The Rosie Project. The primary focus of the analysis has been on exemplifying application of the EMMS categories to identifying the foregrounded use of stylistic features by the two characters and testing the EMMS analytical potential. The findings show the EMMS analytical potential for stylistic research and possible use in other areas of language studies, as well as the necessity for its further testing.