This thesis collects, transcribes, and, with reference to household documents and contemporary literature, annotates and interprets the surviving correspondence of a constellation of seven upper servants who at various points in the second half of the sixteenth century were stationed at or moved between several country houses and estates of which Bess of Hardwick was mistress. The thesis finds that the extant correspondence of Bess’s servants falls into two categories: (1) letters of management exchanged between Bess and five of her household and estate officers (Francis Whitfield, James Crompe, William Marchington, and Edward Foxe at Chatsworth House, Derbyshire and nearby estates in the 1550s-1560s, and Nicholas Kynnersley at Wingfield Manor, Derbyshire in the late 1580s) and (2) letters seeking practical and political patronage, written in the early 1580s by two of Bess’s gentle-born personal attendants, William Marmyon and Frances Battell, to contacts outside Bess’s itinerant (and at that time politically vulnerable) household. Close literary, linguistic (historical pragmatic), and material readings reveal that all these letters adapt and surpass conventional expressions as they engage in practical problem-solving, complex interpersonal exchanges, and domestic politics. The thesis argues that the manuscript letters materialise dynamic verbal performances of their writers’ specific social roles and relationships — the mistress-servant relationship foremost among them. Each writer simultaneously registers and renegotiates his or her own experience of the mistress-servant relationship through the combination of diverse epistolary features, which include verbal etiquette and page layout, degrees of directness or circumlocution, complexity of syntax, tone, use of emotive language, discourses of pleasure and displeasure, personalised content (which ranges from in-jokes to empathy to distinctive pen flourishes), and explicit expressions of authority or loyalty, as well as job-specific terminology and subject matter. Frequency of correspondence, modes of delivery, and the afterlives of letters are shown to carry further social significance. The correspondence of Bess of Hardwick’s servants acts as a touchstone for the complex role of letter-writing in the formation of social selves and the performance of domestic duties in sixteenth-century England. By accurately transcribing these letters, interpreting them using a unique combination of literary, linguistic, and visual analysis, and reconstructing from these letters and additional archival sources the careers of several servants of one mistress, this thesis opens up new material, perspectives, questions, and methods for early modern cultural studies.

This study is concerned with the linguistic analysis of a cognitive training programme for offenders which was run at Prison X in 1996. Several Cognitive Skills classes run by prison officers and attended by groups of five to eight prisoners were videotaped and analysed to investigate the discourse practices used in these sessions. I also explored the written discourse of the Cognitive Skills Handbook used by the offenders as a reference-text for running the classes. In my research, I have borrowed insights from Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA), particularly Fairclough's three-dimensional model of discourse, as it forms a framework for studying language in its relation to power and ideology. I have attempted to show through this case study that the discursive practices investigated are ideological in that they produce and reproduce unequal power relations in the way they represent and classify offenders. Following the Hallidayan tradition, I have taken a systemic functional approach as my point of departure for the analysis and interpretation of texts.

The three aims of my interdisciplinary thesis are: - To develop a conceptual framework for re-thinking the gestures of neuro-atypical young people, that is non-traditional and non-representational - To develop qualitative analytical tools for the annotation and interpretation of gesture that can be applied inclusively to both neuro-atypical and neuro typical young people - To consider the conceptual framework in terms of its theoretical implications and practical applications Learning to communicate and work with neuro-atypical young people provides the rationale and continued impetus for my work. My approach is influenced by the limited social, physical and communicative experiences of young people with severe speech and motor impairment, due to cerebral palsy (CP). CP is described as: a range of non-progressive syndromes of posture and motor impairment. The aetiology is thought to result from damage to the developing central nervous system during gestation or in the neonate. Brain lesions involve the basal ganglia and the cerebellum; both these sites are known to support motor control and integration. However, a paucity of theoretical research and empirical data for this target group of young people necessitated the development of both an alternative theoretical framework and two new tools. Biological Dynamic Systems Theory is proposed as the best candidate structure for the re-consideration of gesture. It encompasses the global, synthetic and embodied nature of gesture. Gesture is re-defined and considered part of an emergent dynamic, complex, non-linear and self-organizing system. My construct of Cognition-in-Action (C-i-A) is derived from the notion of knowing-as-doing influenced by socio-biological paradigms; it places the Action-Ready-Body centre stage. It is informed by a theoretical synthesis of knowledge from the domains of Philosophy, Science and Technology, including practices in the clinical, technology design and performance arts arenas. The C-i-A is a descriptive, non-computational feature-based framework. Its development centred around two key questions that served as operational starting points: What can gestures reveal about children’s cognition-in-action? and Is there the potential to influence gestural capacity in children?. These are supported by my research objectives. In my empirical study I present three case studies that focus on the annotation and interpretative analyses of corporeal exemplars from a gesture corpus. These exemplars were contributed by neuro-atypical young people: two adolescent males aged 16.9 and 17.9 years, and one female girl aged 10.7 years. The Gesture-Action-Entity (GAE) is proposed as a unit of interest for the analysis of procedural, semantic and episodic aspects of our corporeal knowledge. A body-based-action-annotation-system (G-ABAS) and Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis methodology is applied for the first time to gesture (G-IPA). These tools facilitate fine-grained corporeal dynamic and narrative gesture feature analyses. These phenomenal data reveal that these young people have latent resources and capacities that they can express corporeally. Iteration of these interpretative findings with the Cognition-in-Action framework allows for the inference of processes that may underlie the strategies they use to achieve such social-motor-cognitive functions. In summary, their Cognition-in-Action is brought-forth, carried forward and has the potential to be culturally embodied. The utility of C-i-A framework lies in its explanatory power to contribute to a deeper understanding of child gesture. Furthermore, I discuss and illustrate its potential to influence practice in the domains of pedagogy, rehabilitation and the design of future intimate, assistive and perceptually sensitive technologies. Such technologies are increasingly mediating our social interactions. My thesis makes an original and significant contribution to the field of cognitive science, by offering an ecologically valid alternative to tradition conceptualization of perception, cognition and action.

The present study was conducted to investigate possible interpretation discourse level effects of processing instruction and re-exposure to processing instruction on the acquisition of a specific feature of the Japanese linguistics system: namely Japanese passive forms. Processing instruction is a type of focus on form which is framed around the input processing theoretical framework. In order to carry out this investigation two separate experimental studies were conducted. All participants were native English speakers and were randomly assigned to two groups. In both experimental studies, one group received processing instruction which involved an explicit instruction component and structured input practice directed at altering the way L2 learners process input; the other group was used as a control group and received no instruction. Interpretation and production sentence level tasks, and discourse level tasks were used to measure performance after a one day instruction. A pre-test/post-test design was adopted to collect data in both studies. In the second experimental study, the processing instruction group received a re-exposure treatment between the post-test and the delayed post-test. Based on previous research carried out on the effectiveness of processing instruction, it was hypothesised that processing instruction would have positive effects on the accuracy with which subjects interpreted and produced sentences containing Japanese passive forms. A further hypothesis was that the effects of re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment (after the first post-test) would further improve subjects ability to interpret and produce sentences containing Japanese passive forms. A set of two hypotheses were formulated on possible interpretation discourse effects for processing instruction. It was hypothesised that the group receiving processing instruction would improve in its ability to interpret discourse (guided recall: dialogue and story version) containing Japanese passive forms, and that learners in this group, receiving re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment would further improve in their ability to interpret discourse containing Japanese passive forms. Overall the statistical analyses carried out on the raw scores of all the measures used supported the four hypotheses of this study. The results obtained in this research provide clear evidence that processing instruction has positive effects on the acquisition of Japanese passive construction. The present study 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 Japanese passive construction forms. The main findings of the present study also provided new evidence on the effectiveness of processing instruction in improving learners’ performance on interpretation discourse level tasks. In addition to this, it also provides new evidence that learners receiving re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment between a post-test and a delayed post-test can further improve in their ability to interpret and produce the target feature at sentence level and interpret the target feature at discourse level. The results obtained in the two studies have implications at two levels. At the theoretical level this research provides further support for the role that input processing plays in SLA. At the pedagogical level it demonstrates the effectiveness of processing instruction on the acquisition of a different linguistic feature of the Japanese grammar system (passive forms), not only on an interpretation and production sentence level task but also on an interpretation discourse level task. It also demonstrated the important role of a re-exposure instructional treatment.

The English language was in a state of transition during the Early Modern period, which is defined here as extending from 1500 to 1700. In particular, it is suspected that changes were taking place on the borderline between speech and writing. However, these changes have rarely been researched in a systematic way. This study investigates these changes with reference to the writing contained within a corpus of original manuscript letters from Elizabeth Talbot, Countess of Shrewsbury (known as Bess of Hardwick), c.1527 to 1608. Manuscript letters are an excellent data source to use in order to investigate the changes taking place on the borderline between speech and writing during the Early Modern period because the writing contained within them has a different, possibly closer, relationship to speech than the writing contained within other kinds of text dating from the period. However, the use of manuscript letters as data sources is not straightforward because the notion of authorship is complex. In particular, letters can be holograph or scribal. In order to address this authorship issue, this study marries techniques from the fields of palaeography and historical pragmatics. Following an introduction, it is divided into two analytical parts. Part 1 outlines how a specially-designed scribal profiling technique was used to identify Bess’s holograph handwriting, and the handwriting of five of her scribes in a corpus of her manuscript letters. Part 2 outlines how four lexical features, namely AND, SO, FOR and BUT, were identified as salient discourse-organizational devices within the prose of Bess’s holograph letters, before presenting four case studies that compare the discourse function of these four lexical features in the six hands identified in Part 1. Having identified how these features pattern in the letters, Part 2 compares the results of the case studies with previous studies, and draws conclusions about linguistic change in the period. The study’s original contribution to knowledge is therefore threefold. Firstly, it showcases a reliable, replicable scribal-profiling methodology that can be assessed and critiqued on its own terms. Secondly, it shows how it is possible to successfully combine a sensitivity to the complex nature of Early Modern English manuscript letters with effective qualitative analyses of the language contained within them. Thirdly, with the findings produced by the four case studies, the thesis offers significant and important contributions to the fields of historical linguistics, manuscript studies and literary scholarship. The study also has implications for the editing of Early Modern English letters, the study of women’s history and letter- writing, and for biographical studies of Bess of Hardwick more specifically.

This is a thesis in variationist sociolinguistics. It attempts to make a contribution to the study of a dialect of Arabic—Palestinian Arabic—spoken in a region where the population is gradually becoming engulfed in a language, which was once quite similar to Arabic, namely Hebrew, but has undergone drastic changes, particularly in its phonological structure, as a result of contact with European languages. Now, Modern Hebrew is acting as a colonizing language vis-à-vis Palestinian Arabic, and in this study we are exploring the effects the contact between the two languages on the phonology of Arabic in the town of Jaffa, where Arabic-speaking Palestinians and Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jews reside, perhaps not in harmony, but nonetheless in the same urban space. Employing quantitative methods for one linguistic variable and a sociohistorical analysis for another, we make the case that the two variables observed in this study are but a fragment of the entire complex. Examples from the data collected are provided and briefly analyzed, some of which are from other domains of the language, and these will be further explored at a later date.

The fundamental similarity between translation and acting can be summarized by the words of translator Ralph Manheim: ‘translators are like actors: we speak lines by someone else’ (cited in Stavans 1998: 176). This common metaphor is a useful tool for translation practitioners and researchers. Although it cannot be fully exhausted, it can be further clarified, analysed and developed by looking into modern and pre-modern theories of theatrical performance, examining their compatibility and incompatibility with the world of translation practice and theory. The first chapter of this thesis deals with mimetic representation in translation and in performance. The issue of disguising oneself as someone else while performing or translating raises practical problems. They are discussed here in relation to the opposite approaches to acting suggested by Denis Diderot and Constantin Stanislavski. The following chapter deals with radical goals of theatrical and textual representations, and discusses ethical and political strategies in relation to Bertolt Brecht and Lawrence Venuti. The next chapter deals with spiritual and metaphysical goals of theatrical and textual representations, and discusses them in relation to Jerzi Grotowski and Walter Benjamin. The final chapter explores the common ground between theatrical space and norms of translation, and shows that in many ways, the use of theatrical space, confining performers yet channelling their communication with their spectators, functions in similar fashion to translation norms.

This doctoral thesis is an investigation into the process of translation performed by “natural” translators in comparison to MA Translation Studies students, hereon after will be termed trainee translators. “natural” translators were defined following Harris and Sherwood understanding of “natural” translation as: “the translation done in everyday circumstances by people who have had no special training for it” (1978: 155). The research examines bilinguality and diglossia in the context of Kuwait and how these two factors influence the translation process. The research examines the participants’ working units as well as the most commonly used strategies in the translation of culture-specific items and in the translation of English passive voice into Arabic. The study also explores the cohorts’ perceptions of translation and of the role of the translator drawing from Tymoczko’s call to look beyond Western conceptualisations of translation. The study uses think-aloud protocols (TAPs) to monitor and understand the process of translation. Different levels of working translation units were identified among the cohorts which further highlights the importance of translator training. Trainee translators worked on larger segments, mixing different levels of translation units. On the other hand, natural translators worked primarily on smaller units, although some worked on larger units. In terms of strategies, the research explores how time restrictions and the observational method might influence the strategies applied in a translation task. In terms of strategies there were general similarities in the types used, trainee participants and “natural” participants used global and local strategies to complete the task within the time frame. The participants were observed to advocate for an active role of the translator in some instances, however, the authority of the text was also an important aspect that was taken into consideration during the task. This project aims to contribute to existing literature in process-oriented research by comparing the process of translation with that of “natural” translators to academically instructed translators. This research also sets out to make an empirical contribution to the research in translation from English to Arabic.

This thesis combines corpus stylistic, literary and historical linguistic approaches to test critical observations about the language of Shakespeare’s late plays. It finds substantial evidence of increased syntactic complexity, and identifies significant linguistic differences between members of the wider group of later plays. Chapter One outlines the critical history of the late works, including consideration of stylometric approaches to Shakespeare’s language. Chapter Two describes the stylistic methodology and corpus techniques employed. Chapter Three reports the finding of salient which frequency in the late plays, and details the analytical categories to be used in the examination of which usage, the results of which are discussed in Chapter Four. Chapter Five describes two further analyses, where a broader group of ten late plays is considered on the basis of their high which frequency. The relativisation syntax of the five post-1608 plays (Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen) is found to distinguish them unequivocally as a group, while Pericles stands out as an anomaly. Finally, in Chapter Six it is argued that Shakespeare’s syntax reflects a stylistic phenomenon unrelated to individual dramatic characterisation, motivated by his re-association with the Elizabethan romance writers of the sixteenth century.

This study is about discourses of bilingualism in Bolzano-Bozen, Italy, and what they reveal about language, identity, hegemony and the production of social space. The theoretical and methodological framework I use is Nexus Analysis and Geosemiotics: approaches developed by Scollon and Wong Scollon (2004 and 2003, respectively). These approaches have revealed how and why place names, their public placement, Fascist-era monuments and bilingual education maintained a constant presence, under broader discourses on bilingualism, during the research period. Nexus Analysis focuses on social action and Geosemiotics pays meticulous attention to fundamental aspects of signs, including where they are in the material world, and how social actors interact with them. This has led to an investigation of the historical past, and how this is represented, understood and indexed in the present by those who align (or not) to ideologies of language and nation. In the complex multilingual context of this study, this approach has revealed how such ideologies are mobilized to contest ownership of geographic place and to make social space. I have traced discourses across disparate discursive genres, to reveal the complex interrelationships between language and other social semiotic data in discourses on bilingualism in Bolzano-Bozen through time, and across space.