This thesis investigates how the strong verb system inherited from Old English evolved in the regional dialects of Middle English (ca. 1100-1500). Old English texts preserve a relatively complex system of strong verbs, in which traditionally seven different ablaut classes are distinguished. This system becomes seriously disrupted from the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods onwards. As a result, many strong verbs die out, or have their ablaut patterns affected by sound change and morphological analogy, or transfer to the weak conjugation. In my thesis, I study the beginnings of two of these developments in two strong verb classes to find out what the evidence from Middle English regional dialects can tell us about their origins and diffusion. Chapter 2 concentrates on the strong-to-weak shift in Class III verbs, and investigates to what extent strong, mixed and weak past tense and participle forms vary in Middle English dialects, and whether the variation is more pronounced in the paradigms of specific verbs or sub-classes. Chapter 3 analyses the regional distribution of ablaut levelling in strong Class IV verbs throughout the Middle English period. The Class III and IV data for the Early Middle English period are drawn from A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, and the data for the Late Middle English period from a sub-corpus of files from The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English and The Middle English Grammar Corpus. Furthermore, The English Dialect Dictionary and Grammar are consulted as an additional reference point to find out to what extent the Middle English developments are reflected in Late Modern English dialects. Finally, referring to modern insights into language variation and change and linguistic interference, Chapter 4 discusses to what extent intra- and extra-linguistc factors, such as token and type frequency, stem structure and language contact, might correlate with the strong-to-weak shift and ablaut levelling in Class III and IV verbs in the Middle English period. The thesis is accompanied by six appendices that contain further information about my distinction of Middle English dialect areas (Appendix A), historical Class III and IV verbs (B and C) and the text samples and linguistic data from the Middle English text corpora (D, E and F).

This variationist sociolinguistic study investigates language change in the Francoprovençal speaking communities of les monts du Lyonnais in France, and the Canton of Valais in Switzerland. In Chapter 1 we give a brief overview of Francoprovençal, and outline the parameters of the study. Chapter 2 presents an overview of where Francoprovençal has come from and why it is so controversial. Beginning with its origins, we give a brief history of dialectalisation for our fieldwork areas, before discussing Francoprovençal as an exceptional case in the Romance linguistic literature. Case studies on language maintenance and shift are presented in Chapter 3, where we contextualise our study on Francoprovençal and the emergence of the 'Arpitan' revitalisation movement. We argue that Francoprovencal does not quite fit the mould of other multidialectal contexts such as Breton or Corsican. Chapter 4 outlines the methods employed in undertaking the empirical and ethnographic fieldwork for the study. In Chapters 5, 6, and 7 we examine each of the linguistic variables in the study in relation to a number of extra-linguistic factors. Our findings indicate that, while older traditional speakers produce localised dialectal variants in a more monitored speech style, there is variation. Conversely, the new speakers not only show substantial linguistic divergence from other speakers in the sample, but also from each other. We present evidence to suggest that the pan-regional norm is having some impact on language use. In Chapter 8 we focus specifically on the Arpitan movement and its effects, asking in what ways a commitment to the revitalisation cause is driving change for some participants in the study. A novel Arpitan Engagement Index is employed to assess the extent to which speakers are connected with the movement and how this correlates with language use: we focus on the social significance of a series of 'new' Arpitan forms. We terminate with our conclusions in Chapter 9, where we advance a number of hypotheses in relation to language change in the communities under investigation. In particular, we suggest that convergence is taking place in the direction of both national and regional norms. Lastly, we suggest avenues for future research trajectories.

The present study was carried out to investigate the possible effects of two types of form-focused instruction (henceforth FFI) on the acquisition of a specific feature of the Italian verbal morphology system: namely the future tense, which has hitherto never been researched within this framework. Processing instruction was compared to a more traditional type of grammar instruction output-based. The impact of these two types of FFI was investigated on a well documented strategy (Musumeci 1989) used by second language (henceforth L2) learners when interpreting tenses. This strategy consists in giving precedence to lexical items (in this case temporal adverbs, i.e. oggi, domani) over morphological markers during learner's interpretation of tenses. In order to carry out this investigation, first year students (39 subjects) in their second semester, learning Italian at the University of Greenwich were randomly assigned to three groups. One group received processing instruction, which involved grammar explanation and comprehension practice directed at altering the way second language learners process input and make correct meaning-form connections; the other group received output-based type of instruction which consisted in an explanation of grammar rules followed by written and oral practice which was directed at altering the way L2 learners produce the target language; the third group was used as a control group and received no instruction. The groups were exposed to two consecutive days of instructional treatment and pre-tests and post-tests were carried out. The tests consisted of an aural interpretation task, a written completion text and an oral limited response production task. A delayed post-test was also administered to assess the possible effects of instruction after three weeks. Based on previous research carried out in a feature of Spanish (Cadierno 1993) verbal morphology, it was hypothesised that processing instruction would have positive effects on the accuracy with which subjects interpreted sentences in Italian (future tense vs present tense) in which temporal reference is only expressed by verb morphology. It was also hypothesized that the effects of processing instruction would be visible on the production of both the written and the oral task. A further hypothesis was that the effects of instruction would/hold over a post-test session three weeks later. Overall the statistical analyses carried out on the data supported the three hypotheses of this study. The results obtained in this research provide some evidence that processing instruction has positive effects on the acquisition of Italian verbal morphology, these effects being greater on the developing system of beginners, L2 learners, than output-based instruction. However the output-based group performed better than the control group in the interpretation task. This is an interesting finding as it was not hypothesised, but is likely to have significant implications for further research within this framework. The present study also showed that processing instruction was successful in altering the way in which learners processed the input and its effects had also an impact on the way learners produced future tense at sentence level in both a written and an oral production task. Finally, these effects were proved durable over a three week period. The results obtained in the present study have implications at two levels. At the theoretical level this study provides further support for the role that input processing plays in SLA. At the pedagogical level it demonstrates the effectiveness of processing instruction not only on an interpretation task but also on a written and oral production task. This is further evidence of the suitability of this pedagogical approach to encourage linguistic competence among L2 learners.

This thesis is concerned with reading practices and the late medieval vernacular text. More specifically, it is concerned with the ways in which the medieval text was read and received in early modern England. The analysis focuses on two texts in their early modern instantiations: the late fourteenth century allegorical dream vision Piers Plowman by William Langland, and the early fifteenth century Fall of Princes, a translation of Boccaccio’s De Casibus Virorum Illustrium by Benedictine monk John Lydgate. The thesis considers the reception of these poems as they are reworked and reread by successive editors and readers during the shift from script to print, and from a culture of orality to a culture of silent reading. The reception of and editorial policy applied to these texts are considered in relation to the political and religious upheavals of the sixteenth century, and to developments in literacy and literary culture. The editions selected for analysis range from an early manuscript of a B-text version of Piers Plowman, Trinity College Cambridge, MS B.15.17, through to an early seventeenth century print of the Mirror for Magistrates, an early modern reworking of Lydgate’s Fall, published in 1619. The thesis engages with Zumthor’s theory of textual mouvance in that each edition is granted the authority of its own circumstances of production and reception. The synchronic analysis highlights the economic and political pressures which influenced and/or constrained editorial decisions. In charting the various editions through the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the thesis provides a complementary diachronic perspective which places each edition within the wider history of textual transmission and in relation to developments in literary culture. The combined synchronic and diachronic analysis of the printed late medieval text provides an insight into developments in reading habits and changing attitudes towards authorship and the functions of literature more generally. The evidence for the development of reading practices can be found in the interaction between the text and its systems of punctuation and paratext. Systems of punctuation and features of paratext act as guide and mediator between the text and the reader; it is these forms and levels of mediation, and the relationship between them, which can indicate patterns of literacy and reader engagement. Thus, developments in the systems of punctuation and paratext interact with changing models of the reader and the various types of ‘literate activities’ available to them (Salter 2012: 67). The late medieval period has been described as a culture of ‘literate orality’ (Sponsler 2010: 1) and its readers exhibited a diverse range of reading practices. The oral and aural characteristics of literary culture gradually declined in the late medieval and early modern periods but a ‘critical mass’ of silent readers did not emerge until the end of the seventeenth century (Jajdelska 2007). Adopting and adapting Jajdelska’s theory of the changing reader model, this thesis focuses on the chosen texts as they appear before the emergence of this ‘critical mass’. The analysis of reading practices, therefore, pertains to the period of transition during which readers negotiated existing oral/aural reading environments while moving towards a predominantly silent reading culture. The thesis demonstrates that the transition was gradual and that sixteenth-century literary culture was diverse in both its reading habits and reading practices. The emerging discipline of historical sociopragmatics provides the theoretical and methodological bridge between the diachronic description of punctuation and paratext, and the examination of reading practices. Historical sociopragmatics allows established insights from sociolinguistics and pragmatics to be applied to the written historical text, creating new opportunities for the recovery and analysis of textual production, editorial treatment and reader engagement. This thesis brings the sociopragmatic concept of ‘situational contexts’ (Culpepper 2011: 4) to the analysis of the physical page and, more specifically, to the interactions between punctuation and paratextual systems. By applying a sociopragmatic approach to the concept of the reader model, this thesis demonstrates that systems of punctuation and paratext provide important evidence for the history textual transmission, reader engagement and the development of reading practices.

This is an analytic and descriptive classroom-centred research, the purpose of which is to investigate a Thai postgraduate teacher’s verbal feedback in relation to the course objectives and his personal teaching goals in an English for Specific Purposes (ESP) classroom. The participant of the present study was a Thai teacher teaching at university level. The current study draws on both classroom observation and interview data in a classroom-centred research. The teacher was observed eight times and interviewed after the end of the course. The audio-taped data were transcribed and analysed both quantitatively and qualitatively. The quantitative approach addressed the frequencies and percentages of aspects of the teacher’s verbal feedback. Based on the quantitative data, a qualitative analysis of the transcripts was made to describe the occurrences of several aspects of verbal feedback provided by the teacher. Moreover, the qualitative analysis included the interpretation of the teacher’s verbal feedback to consider the degree to which he provided opportunities for the students to reach the course objectives and his personal teaching goals. Drawing from the findings, two areas of implications are offered: (1) for teachers in Thailand, and (2) for teacher education in Thailand. For teachers in Thailand, the study suggests that teachers should: (1) increase interactional feedback with different areas of content, (2) increase evaluative feedback strategies prompting students to self-repair, and (3) organise patterns of classroom communication meeting course objectives and teaching goals, and being appropriate for students’ abilities, interests and motivation. For teacher education in Thailand, the research suggests that teacher educators should: (1) provide knowledge about the use of teacher verbal feedback, and (2) reconceptualise the organisation of patterns of classroom communication.

Although English for Specific Purposes (ESP) approach is widely applied in science to many non-native speakers around the world, higher education institutions in Libya are striving to remain competitive in on-going changes in the science field. There is an ever increasing demand for communication in English in study and in work places, and some institutions have taken steps to develop newer academic programs as a means to meet students’ needs. However, few studies have been carried out to customise ESP courses to suit the Libyan scientific environment. The primary focus of this study is to explore the language needs of undergraduate science students in Libya. The Needs Analysis Framework was used to investigate the extent of English use among computer science, chemistry and physics undergraduates. For this purpose, multiple-instruments were used including questionnaires, semi-structured interviews, classroom observations and teaching materials. The questionnaires were completed by 127 science students while the semi-structured interviews were conducted with 7 faculty members. The classroom observations were conducted with three classes namely Computer Science, Chemistry and ESP, and teaching materials were collected from each of these subjects. The study reveals that English language is generally needed in the science settings. Moreover, it plays a significant role in computer science in particular, as most of its discourses are conducted in English. However, it plays only a limited role in the teaching of Chemistry and Physics. The study suggests that collaboration between science disciplines and English teachers are needed in terms of the ESP programme if such programmes are to be successful.

This thesis is concerned with Spanish weak dative pronominals. Similar elements-generally labelled as clitics- in many languages have been focus of much research in Linguistics. The present study, however, abstracts away from classic approaches that had the external form of clitics as their main focus and provides description and analysis of very specific uses of dative pronominal items, namely when they appear on ditransitive constructions, with psychological predicates or in a configuration where they are not lexically specified in the valency of the verb, the so-called non-selected datives. The analysis of the dative in ditransitive constructions is twofold. We claim that the distribution of the dative in such configurations has semantic and syntactic implications. The presence of the dative pronoun is becoming grammaticalised and provides an entailment of affectedness. In instances of clitic doubling where we have both the pronoun and a noun phrase, we are treating the pronoun as the element that the predicate subcategorises for and the noun phrase is linked to it through information structure. This analysis is quite innovative as it ensures both elements are linked but they retain syntactic independence, in contrast with their treatment in previous approaches. With psychological predicates, we are concerned with what the status of the dative marked argument is; as previous approaches have contradictory views of it as subject or object. We analyse this dative with the tools provided by Lexical Mapping Theory and disagree with previous accounts by proposing an analysis of this dative as OBJɵ. With regards to non-selected datives in Spanish, they have not been widely discussed in the literature. We describe the different types and propose a finer grouping based on their ability to be treated as derived arguments. We sketch an analysis that adds a dative argument to the valency of a predicate through a lexical operation.

A vocalisation may be described as a historical linguistic change where a sound which is formerly consonantal within a language becomes pronounced as a vowel. Although vocalisations have occurred sporadically in many languages they are particularly prevalent in the history of Germanic languages and have affected sounds from all places of articulation. This study will address two main questions. The first is why vocalisations happen so regularly in Germanic languages in comparison with other language families. The second is what exactly happens in the vocalisation process. For the first question there will be a discussion of the concept of ‘drift’ where related languages undergo similar changes independently and this will therefore describe the features of the earliest Germanic languages which have been the basis for later changes. The second question will include a comprehensive presentation of vocalisations which have occurred in Germanic languages with a description of underlying features in each of the sounds which have vocalised. When considering phonological changes a degree of phonetic information must necessarily be included which may be irrelevant synchronically, but forms the basis of the change diachronically. A phonological representation of vocalisations must therefore address how best to display the phonological information whilst allowing for the inclusion of relevant diachronic phonetic information. Vocalisations involve a small articulatory change, but using a model which describes vowels and consonants with separate terminology would conceal the subtleness of change in a vocalisation. The model presented here has therefore been designed to unite the descriptions of consonants and vowels to better demonstrate this change whilst allowing for relevant phonetic information to be included.

The published work submitted herewith involves the application of Relevance theory (as a theory of verbal communication) to the description of Galician and Spanish, and to translation. The phenomena studied within these areas are examined from the point of view of language use. This allows us to see them together as instantiations of language and thus as being theoretically and fundamentally of a kind. As a result, they are also subject to the same principles of communication. The theoretical approach used and applied throughout is that of Relevance theory. This approach allows for an explanatory theory of verbal communication, which encompasses the two areas under study and thus provides a unitary theoretical framework to account for the phenomena examined. The various aspects of language description and translation explored here are therefore seen as instances of verbal communication to be studied precisely under a single general theory (and not as instances of different fields that should be examined by different theories). This submission is structured in three parts. The first part involves an introduction to the publications submitted, which includes a brief literature review. This review provides an overview of the most important approaches to communication, including the code mode, the Gricean approach and the approach adopted here, namely, Relevance theory. This introductory part also includes a discussion of the overall coherence of the publications submitted, together with their impact and contributions in the wider context of the field of study. The second part of this submission deals with applications of Relevance theory to the description of Galician and Spanish in a range of areas, including prepositional direct objects, presuppositional effects, interpretive use of language, and non-declarative sentences. In all these cases, current approaches are reviewed and critiqued, and alternative accounts are provided as applications of the theoretical framework provided by Relevance theory. The third and final part of this submission deals with applications of Relevance theory to translation in a number of areas, including interlingual interpretive use of language, interlingual enrichment, interlingual impoverishment, and degrees of acceptability in translation. One of the main themes in common between all these areas is the notion of discrepancy between original and target texts in translation. It is shown that many of these translation discrepancies arise from the gap found in verbal communication between what is encoded and what is communicated. Some of the most important types of gap that exist in verbal communication are examined in detail and their impact on translation explored throughout.

The purpose of this study is to examine the birth of a translation industry in Italy during the fascist regime, and describe how, despite the fact that translations became the focal point for questions of cultural and political prestige, the regime took very little action to hinder their influx until the last few years before its collapse. Chapter One sets the historical background of this study with a brief examination of how the regime was put in place, the system of censorship that was applied, the regime's attempts to cultivate a fascist culture, and the developments that took place within the publishing industry. Chapter Two presents a detailed statistical view of the translation industry in Italy and compares it to other countries, particularly France and Germany. It is important when considering the debate surrounding translation and the political value that translations were to acquire to be able to have a sense of the empirical reality that the rhetoric and bluster often disguised. Chapter Three describes the birth of translation as industry and the campaign against translations that this sudden flourish in translation provoked. This chapter also looks at the relatively flexible censorship policies that were adopted towards translations. Chapter Four describes the second campaign against translations which took place after the Ethiopian war and in a political climate that was increasingly xenophobic. It also looks at how the regime made its first moves to hinder the publication of translation and the ways in which publishers attempted to resist these measures. Chapter Five looks at the final years of the regime, when anti-Semitic legislation was put in force and as a consequence books underwent a thorough "revision". It looks at how the translation question became a matter of national prestige and how the publishers were obliged to collaborate in applying a quota that would limit their number.