In the winter of 2009, Barbie celebrated her 50th birthday. The occasion was marked with all the pageantry befitting a debutante, starlet, or modern-day princess. Lavish parties were hosted in her honour, and fashion models impersonated the doll on the catwalk. Luxury brands created limited edition Barbie products—from cosmetics to cars—to commemorate the milestone. And, at the height of the revelry, the plastic doll even underwent ‘plastic surgery’ in order to squeeze into a couture pair of birthday stilettos. Taking this distinctive cultural moment as its starting point, this thesis examines how the Barbie doll’s complex and indefatigable cultural presence is understood in Western popular culture. A range of media and industries engage with representations of the doll: advertising, consumer, and celebrity cultures; the fashion, beauty, and cosmetic surgery industries; music; reality television; social networking; and pornography. This thesis interrogates how these media and industries, and the discursive practices therein, reproduce images and narratives of Barbie as a uniform and idealised representation of white, affluent femininity in the West. However, as her birthday celebrations suggest, Barbie is also written as a ‘real’ girl. This thesis also interrogates this narrative of ‘realness’ as it helps to explain why the doll has remained relevant for over 50 years, while complicating readings of her position as a uniform cultural object. Moreover, while Barbie is being portrayed as a ‘real’ girl, popular culture narratives also present ‘becoming Barbie’ as an achievable goal for young women and girls. Motivating this research throughout is the question of how such a referential relationship reinforces and destabilises constructions of the feminine subject in our postmodern and posthuman times.

This study explores how British children make sense of traditional Chinese stories through participatory drama, by means of physical and verbal responses. The author conducted her fieldwork through teaching identical drama schemes within two demographically and ethnically distinctive primary schools. The key underpinning methodological approach within the study is ethnographic case studies. The field work lasted one term in each school, with between 13 to 15 hours of teaching time per group. The methods for collecting data included the pre-questionnaire and interviews with children, as well as the following: drama conventions such as forum theatre and still images, visual and image evidence captured by video camera and photography, children’s writing and drawing, a post-evaluation sheet, interviews with teachers, participant observations and field notes. The analysis of qualitative data is presented in two interwoven threads. One thread follows the logic of the ethnographic approach to present the findings of each scheme of work in both schools, in chronological order. The other thread is a thematic analysis, based on grounded theory. These methods may be seen to be integral and complementary to one another. In essence, the author suggests that drama education is a practical model for the pursuit of cosmopolitan education within the modern globalised world. Some limitations and constraints in the research are nonetheless discussed, and pertinent alternatives and improvements are presented. Suggestions for future researchers who wish to conduct similar research projects are provided, and the potential for this research to be extended on a larger scale is indicated.

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Counterfactual reasoning, an understanding of events that are counter to reality, or false, is an essential ingredient of our everyday cognition. Counterfactual situations are frequently depicted through language, yet surprisingly little is known of how they are processed during reading or listening. This is remarkable given the social importance of understanding counterfactuals and the wealth of psychological research that has focused on the production of counterfactual statements. In this thesis, I present eight experiments that investigate how a counterfactual discourse can disrupt or facilitate processing of some subsequent linguistic input and address related comprehension issues involving negation and theory of mind. The main findings suggest that a counterfactual scenario (e.g. ‘If cats were vegetarians’) leads the comprehender to rapidly update their processing model to incorporate a counterfactual continuation. However, a secondary process briefly interferes at the point of ambiguity resolution in cases where world knowledge has been violated (e.g. ‘Families could feed their cat a bowl of fish/ carrots’). The effects are compared across the different experimental paradigms used, including eye- tracking, event- related brain potentials and the visual world paradigm, which reveal distinct integration, neural and anticipatory processes. Finally, these findings are discussed in relation to existing research on counterfactuals and the processing relationships between counterfactuals, negation and theory of mind reasoning.

The majority of the available studies which have been done on word order in Arabic are derived from improvised and restricted data taken from the classical variety of Arabic. ALL these studies are generatively-oriented, and consequently their main concern was to find out which word order is the basic one and which orders derive from it. In brief, all these studies are basically structural and have very little, if anything, to do with the situations in which the language was used or with the factors that motivated it's use. We think that such treatments are inadequate, because: (1) the modern standard variety has been totally neglected, and (2) the basic functions of Language as a tool of human communication is not accounted for by these studies. To make up for these inadequacies we are going to approach the issue of word order from a functional vantage point which seeks to relate the structure and it's function. Secondly, we will choose 'Modern Standard Arabic' to be our field of inquiry. Thirdly, all the examples which we are going to discuss will be taken from concrete linguistic situations. We intend to test the following hypotheses: 1. The traditional dichotomy of word order in marked/unmarked terms at the sentence level is unsatisfactory. 2. It is useful to differentiate between basicness and unmarkedness of word order. 3. The frequency with which each word order type occurs may depend on the type of text, and the attitude of the writer towards his/her addressees. 4. A switch from a certain word order-type to another within the same text can sometimes be determined by a shift in the text-typologicalfocus. 5. Permutations of sentence constituents in Arabic sometimes change the grammatical status of the constituents permuted and sometimes do not. 6. The Principle of Functional Sentence Perspective has great influence in Arabic Language, 7. Passivization as a syntactic device influences the order of words in Arabic. 8. Reasons for having different word orders in Arabic can be elucidated by appealing to other cornrnunicative considerations. 9. Different word orders in Arabic serve semantic, syntactic and pragmatic functions.

This thesis addresses the issue of the publication of translations, specifically the under-representation of literary works in one language of limited diffusion (LLD), the Malay language, in English translation. It sets out to examine the role of two parties which are thought to play a vital role in the publication of Malay literary works in English translation for international consumption: publishers in the United Kingdom and the translation organisation in Malaysia. The aim of the research, more specifically, is to investigate how both parties bear upon the translation of Malay literary works into English. Some of the questions which are central to the issue of the publication of Malay literary works in English translation include: To what extent are the two parties involved in the publication of Malay literary works in English translation for international consumption? What are the policies of these organisations where the translation of Malay literary works and other literary works in LLD are concerned? Who decides what to translate? What factors are taken into account in deciding what to publish in English translation? Given that this thesis sets out to examine the role of the two parties mentioned above, two main strategies have been employed: surveys and case studies. Drawing on responses from individuals from publishing companies, translation organisations, and other organisations which support translation, I have been able to show that the problem in the publication of Malay literary works in English translation is not merely a translation problem but also a problem of image and promotion. This study thus details the different forces working against the translation of Malay literary works into English for international consumption.

This thesis is an empirical and interdisciplinary investigation into the consecutive conference interpreter’s (CCIr) role as intercultural mediator. It seeks to determine whether there is a case for intercultural mediation in conference interpreting despite the greater degree of cultural transparency that characterises discourse in conference interpreting situations (CISs) when compared with other settings such as community and/or court interpreting. It also proposes an account of the CCIr’s role as intercultural mediator as an alternative to other accounts of the interpreter’s role in the literature on conference interpreting because those accounts do not explain clearly the CCIr’s role or are in conflict with very well-established concepts and principles associated with translation/interpreting such as faithfulness, accuracy, neutrality or accessibility. The account of the CCIr’s role as intercultural mediator is derived from the principles of a theoretical framework that draws on the findings of the theory of sense (Seleskovitch and Lederer 1995) and Sperber and Wilson’s (1986; 1995) relevance theory of communication (RT). The account provides the basis for formulating a clearer definition of the concept of intercultural mediation in the context of consecutive conference interpreting (CCI). Analyses of two types of data underpin the investigation: data from authentic examples from interpreters’ actual performance and data from 295 responses to a worldwide survey of professional conference interpreters conducted by this researcher for use in this thesis. Results of both analyses confirm the case for intercultural mediation in CISs and the validity of the proposed account of the CCIr’s role as intercultural mediator though situationality has been found to play an important role in the extent to which intercultural mediation is needed. Results also shed light on CCIrs’ use of cultural mediation procedures and the role of interpreters’ professional status, experience and language direction on their ability/willingness to perform intercultural mediation.

Despite many studies of language use in motivational interviewing, the vast majority have based this upon the quantitative coding of practitioner and client linguistic behaviours in order to relate these to client change outcomes. The current study aimed to investigate how clients and practitioners co-constructed the process of change using discourse analysis. Ten MI sessions for alcohol use were analysed in terms of how alcohol was verbally constructed, the functions and effects of rhetorical strategies employed and subject positions. Power and subjectivity were considered alongside these strands of analysis. The findings suggest that clients and therapists constructed alcohol as either a destroyer or facilitator, drawing upon discourses of differing degrees of power, which impacted upon the availability of client positions of agency and expertise in relation to alcohol. There was also a diversity of function within categories of client and practitioner speech. These findings have implications for clinical practice, in terms of moving beyond the recognition of ‘types of client talk’ and responding with an ‘MI consistent’ verbal behaviour, and moving towards reinvigorating the spirit of MI in relation to clinical outcome.

This thesis is an investigation of how written words are processed and represented for output. A single case study of an acquired dysgraphic patient is presented who produced a serial position effect in spelling tasks characterised by an increase in error rate from word beginning of word end. This pattern is assumed to reflect a deficit in the retrieval of stored orthographic representations. It is suggested that the order of output of letters may be encoded by an ordering of activation values. The nature of the deficit in terms of distinctions between input and output and access and storage are considered. The findings are discussed in relation to an existing connectionist model of spelling which was implemented and lesioned in an attempt to reproduce certain aspects of the patients data. Furthermore, a detailed analysis of the patients spelling errors suggests that orthographic representations consist of representational units other than the single letter and whole word. Finally, the role of the semantic system in lexical retrieval was investigated with regards to the distinction between proper names and common nouns. The ability of two patients to write/read proper names semantically was studied. Differences in the representational properties of proper names may result in them being selectively spared or impaired.

Conservative religious believers often make use of language that represents the perception that there are clear, fixed differences between their view of the world and the worldview of others, and that their view is unambiguously true and other views are not. This thesis explores the validity of that notion through an analysis of conservative religious language from a cognitive linguistic perspective. It first examines the research relating to what is involved in the process of categorising the environment around us and applies it to how that process can lead to and even encourage the perception of conservative religious believers that reality can be simplified into sets of fixed, binary categories. It then investigates whether there are clear, fixed differences between a 15,225 word collection of Evangelical Times Christian testimonials and a 29,067 word collection of islamfortoday.com Muslim testimonials in terms of their use of movement and proximity metaphors to express their way of believing. This thesis concludes with an analysis of the language of three pairs of conservative Muslims and Christians during a videoed discussion focusing on the differences in their experience as believers. In contrast to the first study`s focus on collections of texts, this analysis focuses on individual differences in their use of proximity and movement metaphors and empathetic language. The results of these studies suggest that, despite the fact that such believers perceive their views of the world as clear and fixed, the expression of their perceived experience of interacting with a divine agent can only be accurately described in terms of varying patterns of emphasis. In addition, not only is it sometimes quite difficult to mark out clear differences between different belief communities in terms of this type of language, it is also possible for individuals within the same communities to exhibit as much divergence as individuals from two different communities.