The current thesis aimed to explore potential contributing factors to the difficulty that young children may experience with moving past previously effective word learning strategies. The particular focus of this thesis was how children overcome an early tendency to focus on perceptual features as their basis for word meaning and the potentially greater difficulty that children may experience with linking words to relational concepts. These aims were explored through a series of experiments that looked at 2- to 5-year-olds’ extensions of words (e.g. nouns, noun-noun compounds, verbs). Findings suggest: that children’s difficulty with correctly attributing meaning to words which are primarily defined by relations is truly due to their relational nature and not their dynamic nature; that children’s tendency to base word meanings on relations can be increased by explicitly highlighting the relation; that comparisons across more than one exemplars can help children attribute verb meaning to actions alone instead of an object-action combination; that inhibition ability may be a contributing factor in children’s ability to overcome their focus on perceptual features when understanding word meaning; and that children with autism spectrum disorders may not make use of some processes that typically developing children employ to move beyond basing word meaning on shared perceptual features.

This thesis presented ten experiments investigating the role of working memory and long-term memory in forming, storing and using representations of what is known (i.e., common ground) among people engaged in communication. Chapter 1 provided a general review of common ground and perspective-taking effects in referential communication. Chapters 2 and 3 examined how memory loads and memory capacities constrain adults and children’s ability to use a speaker’s perspective in language comprehension. Experiment 1 employed eye-tracking with adult participants, and indicated dissociable roles of working memory and long-term in perspective encoding and perspective integration. Experiments 2-3 observed an age-related improvement in the use of perspective information in language comprehension between 8- and 10-year-olds. Chapters 5 and 6 explored whether effects of common ground could be achieved via a low-level memory-based mechanism reviewed in Chapter 4, without necessarily going though explicit inferences about perspectives. Experiments 4-7 tested whether partner-specific effects could be achieved via memory associations between conversational partners and referents. Experiments 8-10 explored whether an object being in common ground or privileged ground during a preceding discourse would influence people’s memory for this object. Finally, Chapter 7 provided a brief general discussion of the findings, and suggested some potential future directions.

Wars and conflicts have no recognised linguistic boundaries as they break out irrespective of differing languages and cultures. However, verbal negotiations for truce, ceasefire, and peace conventions still need to be engaged in between the conflicting sides. Consequently, the need for interpreters to overcome language barriers in war zones has recently increased significantly as even local conflicts are given a global dimension in the contemporary political scene. Despite all this, there has been a lack of studies submitted in the field for which this thesis is a focus: the roles that war-zone interpreters can play in framing narratives of conflicts. The contribution this study attempts to achieve is in developing a new model to assess how narratives are framed in the field of interpreting. This model can be used as an analytical framework in order to collect and analyse oral interpreting data; in addition, it is designed to be used in other conflict interpreting studies. This thesis examines the roles that Libyan interpreters played in framing narratives of Libyan conflict in the Libyan uprising during the period from the first days of the uprising on the 17th February 2011 to the implementation of the intervention on the 19th March 2011.

Building good relationships at work is crucial for individual wellbeing and workplace satisfaction. Yet, managing these relationships is far from easy and concerns over relationship management and getting along well are integral to people’s daily lives (Knobloch, 2010). Research indicates that good relationships are particularly scarce in intercultural teams (e.g. Mannix & Neale, 2005; Stahl, Maznevski, Voigt, & Jonsen, 2010), yet little research has been undertaken to investigate just how it is that team members and colleagues get along and how they relate around working together. To address this gap, this thesis draws on 25 hours of interactional data from the meetings of an intercultural team of MBA students recorded over 8 months. Analysis of the transcripts is supplemented by observations and interviews conducted with team members at the start and end of their teamwork. The study investigates one talk activity in depth, troubles talk, that is demonstrated to have played a central role in relating in the team. It explores how rapport management (Spencer-Oatey, 2008) is done in troubles talk across different domains and provides a thick description of troubles talk itself. It also explores the functions troubles talk seems to fulfil for relating in the team including building common ground, a shared perspective, shared norms, empathy, solidarity and trust, team member identity and group mood, in addition to supporting team member coping. The findings reveal that these functions are realised through a number of different strategies that can be used in troubles talk, including: (reciprocal) self-disclosures, troubles humour, swearing, commiserating and developing shared narratives. Troubles talk as such appears as a kind of super-strategy (cf. Brown & Levinson, 1987) in which many other strategies for relating can be embedded, and which seem less permissible in other types of talk. The thesis thus advances our understanding of relational strategies and practices around relating especially in workplace contexts and of troubles talk, a seemingly ubiquitous everyday talk phenomenon. It concludes by proposing some theoretical developments around relating and rapport management and offering recommendations for future research.

This thesis examines the crucial diagnostic and productive roles that the concepts of minor and major practice, two interrelated modes of cultural production set out by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari in Kafka: toward a Minor Literature (1975), have to play in the present era of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics that Deleuze himself has influentially described as the control society. In first establishing the conditions of majority and majority, Deleuze and Guattari's historical focus in Kafka is the early twentieth century period of Franz Kafka's writing, a period which, for Deleuze, marks the start of a transition between two types of society – the disciplinary society described by Michel Foucault in Discipline and Punish and the control society that is set apart by its distribution, indifferent technical processes and the replacement of the individual with the dividual in social and political thought. Because of their unique conceptual location, at the transition between societies, the concepts of majority and minority present an essential framework for understanding the impact of ubiquitous digital technology and informatics on cultural production in the twentieth century and beyond. In order to determine the conditions of contemporary major and minor practice across the transition from disciplinary to control societies, the thesis is comprised of two interconnecting threads corresponding to majority and minority respectively. Drawing on the theoretical work of Deleuze and Guattari, Friedrich Kittler and Fredric Jameson alongside pioneering figures in the historical development of computation and informatics (Alan Turing, Claude Shannon and others), material observation on the technical function of digital machines, and the close examination of emblematic cultural forms, I determine the specific conditions of majority that emerge through the development of the contemporary control era. Alongside this delineation of the conditions of majority I examine the prospective tactics, corresponding to the characteristics of minority set out by Deleuze and Guattari in Kafka, which emerge as a contemporary counter-practice within the control-era. This is carried out through the close observation of key examples of cultural production in the fields of literature, film, video, television and the videogame that manifest prospective tactics for a control-era minor practice within the overarching technical characteristics of the control-era major. Through an examination of these interrelated threads the thesis presents a framework for both addressing the significant political and cultural changes that ubiquitous computation effects in constituting the contemporary control society and determining the ways in which these changes can be addressed and countered through cultural production.

This study contributes to the understanding of how language learners make use of a second language, specifically how French English learners make use of the English modals may and can. The study is based on the assumptions that (i) acquiring a new language is a cognitively demanding task which requires the acquirer to identify [a] large amount of co-occurrence data, that (ii) those data are probabilistic in nature rather than absolute, and (iii) that semantic differences are particularly hard to discern and learn as they are not oxplicably noticeable. This study applies Divjak and Grie's (2008) behavioural Profile approach to semantic analysis to a corpus of native and learner English and native French in order to offer a fine-grained quantitative investigation of the co-occurrence patterns of may and can in both English varieties. It shows not only that may and can can be characterised and differentiated on the basis of their co-occurrence patterns, but also that such co-occurrence patterns vary systematically in native English and French-English interlanguage. This finding is supported by monofactorial and multifactorial statistical results indicating that (i) the meanings and the functions of may and can in both English varieties are correlated with the distributions of formal elements within their contexts of occurrence and (ii) that the uses of may and can activate different linguistic levels simultaneously. Generally, these results suggest that the grammatical context of the forms' occurrences presents processing constraints that influence and ultimately characterise learners' choices of may and can. More specifically, the study identifies six grammatical components that systematically trigger the use of may and can in a non-native fashion. Overall, the study shows that (i) it is possible to predict learner language on the basis of corpus-based and psychologically-informed hypotheses on the processing and the acquisition of lexical items of second language learners.

Dictionaries can be effective learning tools, capable of promoting learning autonomy to fill the gap left by an inefficient education for instance. The functional quality of these works is, however, tied to a good understanding of the profile of their intended users. In the field of lexicography, this understanding can be achieved by means of user-studies. Currently, most EFL dictionaries target a very generic profile - English learners - and neglect the fact that learners from different cultures and linguistic backgrounds may have different needs and preferences. This thesis presents and discusses the results of a lexicographic user-study conducted in Brazil with 61 English learners. The objective of this study was to investigate the profile of Brazilian learners of English as a target-group for EFL dictionaries. The study combined two methods of investigating dictionary use: written protocol and questionnaire. Through the written protocol, data about participants’ look-up strategies and samples of their performance in both receptive and productive EFL tasks were collected. The questionnaire gathered information about participants’ socio-cultural background and their consultation preferences. All data were analysed as follows: principles of Error Analysis were used to build a taxonomy capable of classifying participants’ errors resulting from reference source consultation (meaning, grammar, spelling or usage). The taxonomy was built based on the premise that it can be a valuable way of identifying the weakness of EFL learners in order to develop a dictionary to address their needs. With the results of this classification, it was possible to identify participants’ most frequent difficulties when performing EFL tasks. Once participants’ errors were located and classified, information about their look-up strategies was used to retrace the consulted reference source in order to find clues to explain why the consultation resulted in error. Finally, participants’ self-reported behaviour in the questionnaire was compared to their actual behaviour in the experiment. The results of this user-study suggest that both linguistic and socio-cultural background have an impact on learners’ expectations about dictionaries, their preferences, and the difficulties they experience while trying to access relevant linguistic information. The outcomes of this study shed light on the average profile of the Brazilian learner of English and it would be useful for other investigations towards the development of a lexicographic reference source to address the specific needs of this target group.

The thesis argues that by mapping three selected discursive practices – Explanations, Accounts, and Formulations – and by interpreting their respective roles and interrelations, it is possible to assess how, through talk, decisions are developed and implemented in meetings. Drawing on a longitudinal, year-long observation of business meetings undertaken by managerial teams in a large UK Chamber of Commerce and on analyses of authentic audio data, the thesis investigates how decision making is enacted in meetings discourse in the context of organisational change. A structured, Conversation-analytical approach is employed to examine the transcribed data and develops a macro-/micro- matrix within which to understand the behaviour and influences of the practices on decision-making. The research specifically expands the role of Explanations and furthers the established communicative properties of Accounts and Formulations proposed in the ground-breaking work of Scott and Lyman (1968) and Heritage and Watson (1979), respectively. Most importantly, the analysis identifies the significance of long turns in the meetings data, and documents the link between decision-making and the recurrence and clustering of the three practices in or around these.

In recent work on the Lexical-Functional Grammar (LFG) formalism, argument structure (a-structure) and lexical mapping theory have been used to explain many linguistic behaviours across languages. It has been suggested that the combination of c-structure, f-structure and a-structure might form a suitable architecture for Universal Grammar. If this suggestion is valid, the LFG formalism would be a suitable linguistic model for Machine Translation (MT). This thesis reports on the investigations carried out on using a-structure and lexical mapping theory for aiding various sub-tasks in MT. The two investigations described in this thesis are the abilities of a-structure and lexical mapping theory to: (1) aid different kinds of lexical and structural disambiguations involving verbs and prepositions, and (2) act as a suitable medium for carrying out source-to-target language transfer. Based on the results of these investigations, this thesis also gives an evaluation of how well a-structure and lexical mapping theory can improve the existing models of linguistic-based MT.

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the use of “wh” sentences by language learners, in language textbooks and in authentic written discourse. It focuses on the polysemeous nature of “wh” words, which can be usedas interrogatives, declaratives and to introduce subordinate clauses. The analysis of “wh” sentences in EFL textbooks showed that there are more prototypical examples at low proficiency levels. When teaching the interrogative, textbooks focus almost exclusively on grammatical words, particularly at the beginners’ level. The analysis of “wh” sentences elicited from Chinese speaking learners of English and Expert users of English suggested that the prototypical structure is very strong in both sets of data, although native speakers tend to use more prefabricated chunks of language. The analysis of “wh” sentences from native speakers and non-native speakers’ written corpora suggested that subordinate clauses are strongly present in both corpora, except for the word “why” in non-native speakers’ data. The use of different words occurring immediately after “wh” words in the two corpora can be explained by (1) the relatively small vocabulary size of the L2 speakers; (2) non-native speakers’ lack of awareness of restricted collocations; (3) L1 transfer; (4) over/under-generalization of rules and (5) textbooks.