This is a study exploring the feasibility of a fully automated analysis of linguistic data. It identifies a requirement for large-scale investigations, which cannot be done manually by a human researcher. Instead, methods from natural language processing are suggested as a way to analyse large amounts of corpus data without any human intervention. Human involvement hinders scalability and introduces a bias which prevents studies from being completely replicable. The fundamental assumption underlying this work is that linguistic analysis must be empirical, and that reliance on existing theories or even descriptive categories should be avoided as far as possible. In this thesis we report the results of a number of case studies investigating various areas of language description, lexis, grammar, and meaning. The aim of these case studies is to see how far we can automate the analysis of different aspects of language, both with data gathering and subsequent processing of the data. The outcomes of the feasibility studies demonstrate the practicability of such automated analyses.

An linguistic analysis of the langauge used in the Lindisfarne gospels, focussing upon the accusative/dative, the s/ð problem, problems in the strong and weak adjective, and the indicative and subjunctive moods.

This thesis investigates communication (verbal and nonverbal) in a bilingual (Farsi-English) complementary school mathematics’ classroom. The study examines gestures were used as a resource for teaching mathematics in a bilingual setting, enabling intercolutors to construct meaning and mediate understanding. That is, the ways in which language and gesture can be seen as resources in supporting and conveying mathematical ideas is described. I investigated a number of verbal and nonverbal resources and show how these are culturally and socially shaped. I also explored how modes of communication are employed in creating mathematical meaning in a bilingual classroom context. A multimodality framework was adopted to analyse data which included audio and video recordings, observations and interviews with teachers and pupils. I found that gestures were employed to convey aspects of the mathematical register and how these were used to amplify what interlocutors were expressing verbally. Furthermore, I identified that different languages activated a different conceptual understanding of the same mathematical concept which was reflected through the students’ and teachers’ gestures.

This thesis addresses the quality of ‘difference’ in L2 English argumentative essays written by Japanese students by focusing on the use of metadiscursive nouns. It does this by comparing the similarities and differences in the use of 33 shell nouns (Schmid, 2000) as discourse construction devices in two corpora: the Japanese subcorpus of ICLE – Japanese writing in English as a foreign language – and the US subcorpus of LOCNESS – Americans writing in English as a first language. Based on Schmid’s (2000) theory, discourse roles of shell nouns are analysed according to three aspects: noun frequencies, syntactic patterns where shell nouns occur, and lexicalisation of nouns. This thesis demonstrates that one source of different impressions in non-native speaker writing stems from their use of shell nouns. The findings show that each group of students uses shell nouns differently, most notably for anaphoric referring functions. Employing different lexicalisation patterns, Japanese students use nouns for these functions more frequently than American students. Different lexicalisations are correlated with preferred discourse construction and argumentation patterns in each of the corpora. This thesis describes the findings and discusses causes of difference that suggest a transfer of L1 cultural values and essay conventions. Aspects of shell noun usage that the Japanese students tend not to handle well are identified and implications for pedagogical practice are discussed.

With the aim of establishing a guideline for how to teach successful job interview communication in a multi-cultural Business as a Lingua Franca (BELF) setting, this thesis examines authentic job interview communications in the world maritime industry, compares overall features of successful and unsuccessful communications, and discusses pedagogical implications for ESP language teaching. For this purpose, authentic job interview communications conducted in four different countries between non-native speakers of English (both English as a Second Language and English as a Foreign Language speaker) including India, the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and Vietnam were collected. The data from 40 job interviews in total was transcribed for corpus analysis, and finally a Corpus of ELF Job Interviews in a Multicultural Business World (hereinafter CELF-JOIN) has been compiled for this research. Based on the analysis, a wide range of BELF job interview features were investigated in terms of contextual and schematic structures, interactional pragmatic features and lexico-grammatical characteristics. From the findings, pedagogical implications were drawn as ways to enhance learners’ schematic structural awareness, utilise diversified narrative strategies, increase interactional and presentational competency and finally to raise their multi-cultural awareness for successful business communicative outcomes in the future cross-cultural BELF job interview communicative setting.

In the UK school exclusion is conceived as a disciplinary measure in response to breaches of a school’s behaviour policy, it is also noted that unwanted behaviour can result from unmet need (DfE, 2012). The link between previously unidentified verbal language difficulties and unwanted behaviour has been well-evidenced; a smaller body of research has evidenced a link with pragmatic language abilities. Much research has been conducted in a clinical paradigm, with results interpreted within a deficit model. The aim of this thesis was to investigate if there was evidence of less well-developed pragmatic language competence in children at-risk of school exclusion, and if so, interpret the results through an interactionist perspective. Data was gathered using the Children’s Communication Checklist: 2nd Edition (Bishop, 2003) on a sample of children at-risk of school exclusion (n=29). Results indicated that 77% of the sample had significantly less well-developed pragmatic language abilities than a matched sample. A probabilistic causal relationship is proposed, incorporating environmental factors as intervening variables that potentially determine risk of exclusion. Future directions involve research to test this proposed relationship. Findings suggest that professionals should consider the interaction between demands of the communicative environment and a child’s communicative profile when considering interventions to address unwanted behaviour.

This study explores discourses in teachers’ talk about their teaching practice in multilingual schools, with a focus on discourses relating to language. The study adopts a Foucauldian approach to discourse and views social structures and institutions as formed in discourse specific to a social and historical context. Semi-structured interviews were carried out with teachers in schools where a high proportion of pupils spoke a first language other than English. Eight teachers were interviewed, and the data were analysed using Foucauldian Discourse Analysis. The findings indicate that in the teachers’ talk there are discourses of a monolingual education system where other languages are used to support pupils to transition to using English and for recognising culture in non-curricular activities. The discourse is contradictory, as the structures of teaching are described as suitable for all, yet as inaccessible and disadvantageous to pupils learning EAL. The discourse also excludes a number of alternative discourses including the regular use of first languages during curricular activities. Disciplinary powers are identified in the standard curriculum structures, and they are discussed in relation to how they constrain practice in multilingual schools. Lastly, there is a discussion of implications for educational psychology practice and ideas for future research.

This thesis investigates discourses of age and gender as realised in language used by and about ageing women, with a particular focus on the inseparable and reciprocal relationship between the private voices of individual lived experience of age(ing), and public discourses of ageing generated by the beauty and media industries. Research data collected and analysed for this thesis has three components: spoken data from 19 face-to-face qualitative interviews (the private voices), and a range of anti-ageing skincare and selected media texts (two forms of public discourse). The primary focus for the research is mid-life women, (aged 42-56) transitioning between youth and old(er) age. Principal findings suggest that for them ageing is a complex, non-unitary process, influenced by powerful cultural discourses which idealise youthfulness and problematise ageing, delivering gendered aesthetic judgements which profoundly shape individual discourses and evaluations and can be tracked in specific language features. Appearance is the ‘dominant signifier of ageing’, its changes constantly monitored in daily “mirror moments” and negatively evaluated through comparative language of ‘pinnacle’ and ‘loss’ as pressure of the cultural lens on the personal gaze drives an obligation to conform to external expectations. Here, the intersection of ageing and gendered selves, mediated through the cultural/media mirror, is articulated through conflicting discourses of reluctant acceptance and anxious resistance, in a continuing process of self-evaluation made more complex by the external pressures of beauty discourses and ambivalent media. There are implications both for gender and linguistic studies, not least as age-related stereotypes are increasingly challenged by a growing community of baby-boomers transitioning through mid-life to old(er) age.

Text summarisation is reducing a text document to a short substitute summary. Since the commencement of the field, almost all summarisation research works implemented to this date involve identification and extraction of the most important document/cluster segments, called extraction. This typically involves scoring each document sentence according to a composite scoring function consisting of surface level and semantic features. Enabling machines to analyse text features and understand their meaning potentially requires both text semantic analysis and equipping computers with an external semantic knowledge. This thesis addresses extractive text summarisation by proposing a number of semantic and knowledge-based approaches. The work combines the high-quality semantic information in WordNet, the crowdsourced encyclopaedic knowledge in Wikipedia, and the manually crafted categorial variation in CatVar, to improve the summary quality. Such improvements are accomplished through sentence level morphological analysis and the incorporation of Wikipedia-based named-entity semantic relatedness while using heuristic algorithms. The study also investigates how sentence-level semantic analysis based on semantic role labelling (SRL), leveraged with a background world knowledge, influences sentence textual similarity and text summarisation. The proposed sentence similarity and summarisation methods were evaluated on standard publicly available datasets such as the Microsoft Research Paraphrase Corpus (MSRPC), TREC-9 Question Variants, and the Document Understanding Conference 2002, 2005, 2006 (DUC 2002, DUC 2005, DUC 2006) Corpora. The project also uses Recall-Oriented Understudy for Gisting Evaluation (ROUGE) for the quantitative assessment of the proposed summarisers’ performances. Results of our systems showed their effectiveness as compared to related state-of-the-art summarisation methods and baselines. Of the proposed summarisers, the SRL Wikipedia-based system demonstrated the best performance.

This study uses the lens of community of practice and teacher development studies to show the teacher development processes of three young novice American teachers who participated in the TaLK (Teach and Learn in Korea) programme, a Korean languageteaching programme launched in 2008. Hired as ‘TaLK scholars’, after four weeks of TaLK orientation they were allocated to local primary schools to teach after-school English classes for 15 hours a week. The study conceptualises these two sites each as a community of practice. The fieldwork for this study was carried out from February 2012 to November 2012. The data were collected through diary entries, interviews and classroom observations. This study uses the lens of community of practice and teacher development studies to show the teacher development processes of three young novice American teachers who participated in the TaLK (Teach and Learn in Korea) programme, a Korean language teaching programme launched in 2008. Hired as ‘TaLK scholars’, after four weeks of TaLK orientation they were allocated to local primary schools to teach after-school English classes for 15 hours a week. The study conceptualises these two sites each as a community of practice. The fieldwork for this study was carried out from February 2012 to November 2012. The data were collected through diary entries, interviews and classroom observations. The findings from this study are that, first, both the TaLK programme and the host schools must do more to engender a sense of belonging, so that young novice teachers can become legitimate members of their two communities. Secondly, novice teachers can best develop their identities as practitioners when they are allowed and encouraged to be creative in their learning and teaching activities. Thirdly, working in a new linguistic and cultural environment demands intensive learning on the part of all collaborating teachers, and this requires an openness to cultural difference.