This thesis investigates how the strong verb system inherited from Old English evolved in the regional dialects of Middle English (ca. 1100-1500). Old English texts preserve a relatively complex system of strong verbs, in which traditionally seven different ablaut classes are distinguished. This system becomes seriously disrupted from the Late Old English and Early Middle English periods onwards. As a result, many strong verbs die out, or have their ablaut patterns affected by sound change and morphological analogy, or transfer to the weak conjugation. In my thesis, I study the beginnings of two of these developments in two strong verb classes to find out what the evidence from Middle English regional dialects can tell us about their origins and diffusion. Chapter 2 concentrates on the strong-to-weak shift in Class III verbs, and investigates to what extent strong, mixed and weak past tense and participle forms vary in Middle English dialects, and whether the variation is more pronounced in the paradigms of specific verbs or sub-classes. Chapter 3 analyses the regional distribution of ablaut levelling in strong Class IV verbs throughout the Middle English period. The Class III and IV data for the Early Middle English period are drawn from A Linguistic Atlas of Early Middle English, and the data for the Late Middle English period from a sub-corpus of files from The Penn-Helsinki Parsed Corpus of Middle English and The Middle English Grammar Corpus. Furthermore, The English Dialect Dictionary and Grammar are consulted as an additional reference point to find out to what extent the Middle English developments are reflected in Late Modern English dialects. Finally, referring to modern insights into language variation and change and linguistic interference, Chapter 4 discusses to what extent intra- and extra-linguistc factors, such as token and type frequency, stem structure and language contact, might correlate with the strong-to-weak shift and ablaut levelling in Class III and IV verbs in the Middle English period. The thesis is accompanied by six appendices that contain further information about my distinction of Middle English dialect areas (Appendix A), historical Class III and IV verbs (B and C) and the text samples and linguistic data from the Middle English text corpora (D, E and F).

Colour words abound with figurative meanings, expressing much more than visual signals. Some of these figurative properties are well known; in English, for example, black is associated with EVIL and blue with DEPRESSION. Colours themselves are also described in metaphorical terms using lexis from other domains of experience, such as when we talk of deep blue, drawing on the domain of spatial position. Both metaphor and colour are of central concern to semantic theory; moreover, colour is recognised as a highly productive metaphoric field. Despite this, comparatively few works have dealt with these topics in unison, and even those few have tended to focus on Basic Colour Terms (BCTs) rather than including non-BCTs. This thesis addresses the need for an integrated study of both BCTs and non-BCTs, and provides an overview of metaphor and metonymy within the semantic area of colour. Conducted as part of the Mapping Metaphor project, this research uses the unique data source of the Historical Thesaurus of English (HT) to identify areas of meaning that share vocabulary with colour and thus point to figurative uses. The lexicographic evidence is then compared to current language use, found in the British National Corpus (BNC) and the Corpus of Contemporary American (COCA), to test for currency and further developments or changes in meaning. First, terms for saturation, tone and brightness are discussed. This lexis often functions as hue modifiers and is found to transfer into COLOUR from areas such as LIFE, EMOTION, TRUTH and MORALITY. The evidence for cross-modal links between COLOUR with SOUND, TOUCH and DIMENSION is then presented. Each BCT is discussed in turn, along with a selection of non-BCTs, where it is revealed how frequently hue terms engage in figurative meanings. This includes the secondary BCTs, with the only exception being orange, and a number of non-BCTs. All of the evidence discussed confirms that figurative uses of colour originate through a process of metonymy, although these are often extended into metaphor.

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 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.

Idioms, as multi-word units that contain literal and figurative meanings, are inherently complex and thus unsurprisingly difficult to acquire for second language learners. Though experimental studies on idioms have been carried out with pedagogically minded foci, none have examined the differential effects picture type has on correct interpretation of meaning or meaning recall. Because idioms have both literal and figurative senses, they can be pictorially expressed via either or both of their dual meanings. However, no one has yet tested whether figurative elements in pictures will aid or confuse second language learners when presented alongside idioms. Thus, the primary aim of this thesis is to experimentally test how different kinds of pictures affect the way in which second language learners interpret and recall the figurative meaning of metaphorical idioms. Furthermore, the role of semantic transparency and how it impacts the effectiveness of the picture type is examined. The overarching finding suggests that metaphorically imbued pictures overall facilitate the learning of idioms. However, highly contextualized pictures have the potential to mislead learners in specific and often unpredictable ways. In addition to the pedagogical implications uncovered, this thesis also addresses the nature of semantic transparency and teacher attitudes on idioms.

Cognitive approaches to language teaching recognize conceptual metaphor awareness-raising activities as techniques that aid the understanding of metaphors in second or foreign languages (L2) such as English. However, the benefits of these techniques do not extend to the retention, production or interpretation of metaphors. These are important skills that could help language learners in their use of metaphor in the real world. This thesis focuses on the embodied nature of L2 metaphors through awareness-raising activities that incorporate bodily actions and tactile contact. Through four experimental classroom studies with university-level female EFL Saudi learners, this thesis explores the impacts of employing awareness-raising activities of conceptual metaphors and embodied metaphors. The first and second studies compare conceptual metaphor awareness to traditional semantic clustering and highlight the role of conceptual metaphor awareness in understanding metaphoric expressions. The third study introduces embodied metaphor awareness-raising activities through bodily actions and compares them to conceptual metaphor awareness and semantic clustering. The fourth study explores the benefits of using embodied tactile metaphor awareness-raising activities in the learning of linguistic and pictorial metaphors in advertising. The thesis finds that awareness-raising activities based on embodied metaphors have the potential to foster a deeper learning of metaphors in the L2.

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.

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.

This thesis investigates the impact of an intensive programme of English for academic purposes upon the second language writing development of postgraduate students at the University of Birmingham. The study uses a 300,000 word corpus (EAPCORP) of essays from the beginning and end of the programme covering two separate years, in order to identify and measure written linguistic feature development. A multidimensional investigative approach underpins both of the two main analytical tools applied to the EAPCORP, with the basic premise that it is possible to identify register differences between different types of language by the assemblage and analysis of a large number of textual features. Firstly, Coh-Metrix is a programme employing a range of algorithms applied to a series of data bases to analyse the linguistic structure of texts. Secondly, MAT (Multidimensional Analysis Tagger) employs algorithms developed by Douglas Biber and uses an automated text tagger. The analyses suggest strongly that there has been progression from the initial production of a high frequency of features characteristic of speech to that more typical of academic writing. The results emphasise the importance of well-designed EAP programmes especially in uncertain economic contexts.