Willingness to communicate in a second language (L2 WTC) has become an important focus of inquiry in applied linguistics over the last decade or so. However, little is currently understood about the practical tasks of producing communicatively competent L2 users in Chinese higher education, an aim which has been fully recognized by the English language teaching (ELT) sector in China. In order to fill this gap, this research study was conducted in one of the universities in mid-east China over a period of one academic term with the aim to produce an empirically-supported fine-grained portrait of Chinese EFL learners’ L2 WTC in actual communication actions. Informed by complexity theory and adopting a qualitative multi-case study research design, this research focused on five first-year postgraduate student participants and investigated their L2 WTC experiences in communicative actions through multiple sources of data, including individual life story interviews, ethnographic classroom observations followed by stimulated recall interviews, and photo-based interviews. The findings confirm L2 WTC as a multidimensional and complex construct, and further demonstrated that the features and trajectories of individuals’ L2 WTC are interrelated, dynamic and largely unpredictable. This study has also identified a construct that seems central to understand L2 WTC: socially constructed future self-guides. The study has shown that our understanding of students’ actual L2 engagement offers critical pointers for practical interventions for encouraging and supporting language learners’ development of a healthy sense of self with regards to L2 learning and, consequently, of their L2 WTC.

This study investigates the representations of sexuality within a unique corpus of sex education manuals for British teenagers, published between the years 1950 and 2014. It brings together a disparate set of linguistic and multimodal analyses under the aegis of Queer Linguistics, which takes as its focus the way writers and speakers orient themselves and others to social and sexual normativities. Queer Linguistics is an emerging discipline, and it is hoped that the present study will contribute to the field by demonstrating its applicability to a wide range of linguistic perspectives and approaches. The study draws upon the SexEd corpus, which comprises a unique collection of 88 sex education manuals published in Britain. It represents the only longitudinal body of texts of its type, and the only such body to be subjected to rigorous linguistic analyses.

In the late 1990s, the donor community espoused a new metanorm, poverty reduction. Against this backdrop, Lionel Jospin, elected French Prime Minister in 1997, promised a shift in French aid policy away from a paternalistic and interest-driven approach towards a more needs-focused, empowering strategy. This thesis asks, with reference to the 1997-2015 period and to the Cameroonianian case, how far, how and why France’s aid discourse on poverty reduction and empowerment has been translated into practice. Our introduction sets out this research question. Our literature review demonstrates that there have been no detailed studies of French aid to Cameroon and looks more broadly at research on French coopération, empowerment and African agency. Chapter three identifies our methodological and theoretical framework, focusing particularly on neo-classical realism and a template of hard, soft and smart power. Chapter 4 shows how French aid sructures and instruments were neo-colonial in the early post-colonial decades. It then highlights reforms under Jospin and President Jacques Chirac’s second term, paying particular attention to the aid instruments deployed in Cameroon and their ‘fitness for the purpose’. Chapter 5 sets out the aid promises of French Presidents Nicolas Sarkozy and François Hollande, identifying the reformist pressures they faced. Chapter 6 explains why important but ultimately limited changes took place in the French assistance programme to Cameroon. Drawing on a neoclassical realist framework, it shows how the French policy-making establishment was divided between the conservative old guard resisting and modernisers promoting aid conditionalities. Chapter 7 addresses weaknesses in the NCR framework, notably its crude definition of power and failure to include African agency. It shows how francophone Cameroonian elites facilitate or constrain the implementation of French aid. Our conclusion summarises our findings, identifies future aid trends and explores the wider significance of this research.

This PhD thesis develops a critical account of discursive practices of bordering in the EUropean migration regime. By articulating recent advances from the fields of Critical Migration and Border Studies and Discourse Studies, it develops a theoretical and methodological framework that enables grasping discursive borders in their heterogeneity. On a broader level, it is interested in re-approaching post-structuralist and materialist strands of theory and analysis by going back to their beginnings in structural Marxism and psychoanalysis. EUrope’s discursive borders are scrutinised through the lens of different contexts that allow emphasising the entangled nature of policy, academic, and activist discourse. First, the present research scrutinises a set of practices of discursive bordering with a relatively high stability over time. Adopting a post-colonial, macro-historical perspective, it shows how EUrope’s colonial history infuses the conceptual apparatus of the EU’s contemporary migration policy. This serves as a foundation for the following chapters, that examine practices of discursive bordering from a micro-enunciative and a situated perspective. While the second analysis focuses on the construction and supraversion of the labour / refugee divide in German discourses on EUropean migration, the third shows how discursive borders are turned into a political stake in a migrant protest. This allows conceiving of categorisation and differentiation as discursive practices that are scattered in time and space, and characterised by resonances, contradictions, and subversions instead of following a common rationality or having a central point of reference.

Personal names form one of the most important sections in the system of proper names that are traditionally studied within the field of onomastics. Personal names contain history, tradition, culture as well as all characteristic features of each ethnic community. The general aim of this research project is to have a cross-cultural approach to personal naming based on the systems of Vietnamese and English. Due to the broad scope of the topic of personal names, my research focuses on given names only. First of all, to establish a theoretical background, I dwell on onomastic problems with the focus on the semantic characterisation of proper names, and cultural issues in the study of personal names. I then argue that the views on meaning of names espoused by the Millian and Fregean schools can be reconciled, and that as a cultural universal, names convey both denotational and connotational contents but the content of names can only be determined in each specific language community based on clarification of traditional and cultural values embodied in naming process. Next, the thesis approaches Vietnamese and English given names by reviewing their historical and linguistic characteristics and then classifying them into relevant groups and subgroups. The main purpose of these taxonomies is to bring out the topological characteristics of Vietnamese and English given names as well as the naming trends and forces that have formed the two cultures over the past centuries. Finally, I present a comparison and contrast of Vietnamese and English given names covering all the aspects on the basis of which I institutionalise the theoretical reconciliation of Vietnamese and English personal naming systems, and establish that a reconciliation of the two naming systems is possible within a single overarching framework for their theoretical discussion.

Joseph Priestley (1733-1804) is usually remembered for his experiments in natural philosophy and celebrated for his isolation of the gas we now call oxygen. However, Priestley had a wide range of interests and published extensively on education, history, politics, political philosophy, language, theology and religion. He dedicated his life to elucidating a coherent set of epistemological, metaphysical and theological principles which he believed explained the human mind, the natural world and the nature of God and revelation. Recent studies of Priestley have emphasised the difficulties that arise from isolating the various aspects of his thought and the fruitful outcome of uncovering the many connections between his diverse areas of study. With this in mind, the present dissertation aims to elucidate the relationship between two aspects of Priestley's thought that have not previously been studied together. It examines his theory of language and argument alongside his work on theology and the evidences of revelation. Chapter One provides an overview of Priestley's epistemology, focusing on his work on induction, judgment and assent. Chapter Two looks at Priestley's analysis of the role of the passions in our assent to propositions and the progressive generation of the personality, while paying particular attention to the origins of figurative language. Chapter Three examines Priestley's theory of language development including the relationship between figurative language and the extension of vocabulary and the close connection between language and culture. Chapter Four demonstrates that Priestley's discussion of the evidences of revealed religion is structured around his theory of assent and judgment. It also explains how assent to revelation is essential for the generation and transcendence of the ‘self'. Chapter Five brings all the themes of the dissertation together in a discussion of Priestley's rational theology and examines his analysis of figurative language in scripture.

Writing has a central role in UK higher education as a technology for, and signifier of, the learning, teaching and assessment of students. The nature and quality of student writing has also become an important issue outside the academy, particularly in the context of a globalised neo-liberal knowledge economy discourse which emphasises the importance of transferable and employability skills. Although there is a considerable body of research relating to student writing, the work that I undertook for earlier professional doctorate assignments suggested that the role of academic staff in regulating student writing was under-researched and under-theorised. The research carried out for this thesis sought to address this gap in knowledge by focussing on two central questions. Firstly, what role do academic staff play in regulating student writing? Secondly, how is this role shaped by the specific departmental, disciplinary and institutional contexts in which they are located? The research was undertaken in a criminology department in a post-1992 university in the UK. It was positioned in an academic literacies framework which conceptualises writing as a social practice, and drew on linguistic ethnographic methodologies to explore the written feedback that staff give on student writing. The written feedback encounter is where staff and student expectations about academic writing practices intersect, and is therefore a telling site for the study of educational discourses relating to knowledge and how it is represented. Data were collected from three main sources: written feedback and comments given by academic staff on 120 pieces of student work; 18 interviews with staff about academic writing; and institutional policies and procedures relating to marking, assessment and feedback. Employing a range of theoretical perspectives, including those informed by feminist and poststructuralist analysis, these texts were analysed to explore the relationship between institutional discourses, pedagogical practices and identity construction. My research showed that there was a considerable disjuncture between the institutional discourses which governed marking, assessment and feedback and the actual feedback practices of staff. Despite the strong scientific and positivist discourse that pervaded institutional documentation on assessment and feedback, some staff drew on a range of alternative pedagogical discourses and engaged in assessment practices which were more subjective and localised in nature. This gap between the institutional discourse and the situated literacy practices was mediated to some extent by the assessment coversheet and marking procedures which worked to provide an appearance of consistency and agreement to external audiences. This promoted a technical rational approach to feedback which obscured the epistemological and gatekeeping functions of feedback. The thesis concludes that the effective theorisation and teaching of student writing rests on an understanding of how academic staff construct and police the boundaries of appropriate knowledge in their discipline. This approach draws on existing academic literacies theories but argues for a more holistic model which understands academic writing as co-constructed through the practices of both students who produce the written work and the academic staff who mark it.

It is common practice in psychophysical studies to investigate speech processing by manipulating or reducing spectral and temporal information in the input signal. Such investigations, along with the often surprising performance of modern cochlear implants, have highlighted the robustness of the auditory system to severe degradations and suggest that the ability to discriminate speech sounds is fundamentally limited by the complexity of the input signal. It is not clear, however, how and to what extent this is underpinned by neural processing mechanisms. This thesis examines the effect on the neural representation of reducing spectral and temporal information in the signal. A stimulus set from an existing psychophysical study was emulated, comprising a set of 16 vowel-consonant-vowel phoneme sequences (VCVs) each produced by multiple talkers, which were parametrically degraded using a noise-vocoder. Neuronal representations were simulated using a published computational model of the auditory nerve. Representations were also recorded in the inferior colliculus (IC) and auditory cortex (AC) of anaesthetised guinea pigs. Their discriminability was quantified using a novel neural classifier. Commensurate with investigations using simple stimuli, high rate envelope modulations in complex signals are represented in the auditory nerve and midbrain. It is demonstrated here that representations of these features are efficacious in a closed-set speech recognition task where appropriate decoding mechanisms are available, yet do not appear to be accessible perceptually. Optimal encoding windows for speech discrimination increase from of the order of 1 millisecond in the auditory nerve to 10s of milliseconds in the IC and the AC. Recent publications suggest that millisecond-precise neuronal activity is important for speech recognition. It is demonstrated here that the relevance of millisecond-precise responses in this context is highly dependent on the brain region, the nature of the speech recognition task and the complexity of the stimulus set.

It is hypothesised that the development of concepts in formal education can be understood through the ideas of non-literal language and conceptual integration networks. The notions of concept, understanding and meaning are examined in some depth from philosophical, psychological and linguistic standpoints. The view that most concepts are grasped through non-literal means such as metaphor and conceptual blend is adopted. The central contention is that this applies both to everyday ideas and to those presented to students in formal educational contexts, and that consequently such learning is best seen in those terms. Such learning is not founded upon literal language, but a construction by the student of a complex network of metaphor and conceptual blends. This is examined in the context of students learning programming, in particular in the language Java. The hypothesis is tested by analysing transcribed interviews with a wide range of students, triangulated with an examination of teaching materials, and the data is shown to be consistent with the hypothesis. However the approach is fundamental and is not concerned with specific features of programming or Java, so that conclusions are relevant across a wide range of disciplines, especially mathematics, science and engineering. The thesis provides a new way of examining course design and learning materials including lectures and textbooks. Discourse which might seem to be literal is in fact metaphorical and blended, since it is in that way that the expert community understands the ideas. The students’ construction of corresponding blends is on the basis of their learning experience, and course design features such as examples can be explained and evaluated in such terms.

This thesis addresses women's agency in the mediation and reception of mid nineteenth-century fiction from the end of the 1840s until the beginning of the 1870s. It demonstrates how women participated in shaping an ideology of the feminine by utilising the platform of periodical reviewing to monitor constructions of womanhood in the novels of women writers. The notion of a feminine critical discourse about gender is a familiar one. There has been academic interest in the reactions of reviewers such as Margaret Oliphant and Geraldine Jewsbury to images of the feminine in sensation novels, but no study exists that brings together a body of women's criticism of this period, or examines the critical responses of women to a much wider spectrum of female representation, for example, in the field of domestic or religious fiction. This thesis explores the critical reaction, not simply to the transgressive or improper feminine, but to idealised images of the domestic angel. It points to a reshaping of the idea of the heroic which allowed women to take centre stage in fiction, and goes on to explore several constructions of the feminine that became a locus of concern for women commentators: the martyr to selfsacrifice; the injured wife; the governess; the religious heroine; the transgressor of sensation novels, and the assertive "Girl of the Period" in her various phases. Interrogating those texts and themes that preoccupied nineteenth-century women critics, the thesis retrieves a lost context to women's writing of the period and argues that the discourses surrounding forgotten novels by writers such as Harriet Parr and Charlotte Riddell provided a forum which allowed representations of gender to be contested, re-negotiated and re-defined. Bringing to light new critical material by reviewers such as Eleanor Eden and Jane Williams, the thesis examines many articles and reviews that have received no previous academic attention.