Pragmatic competence, the ability to use language effectively in a contextually appropriate fashion, has been a central concern in pragmatic studies for more than four decades. A large number of pragmatic competence studies have examined the pragmatics of native and non-native speakers of English, investigating the significance of the spread of the language across the globe. In the majority of studies, the focus has been on the pragmatic norms of native speakers, the development of English language learners' pragmatic competence, and the apparent pragmatic differences between native speakers and language learners. However, there is a dearth of studies contrasting the pragmatic competence of EFL and ESL learners. The present study targets this under researched area, by evaluating the pragmatic competence of Saudi EFL learners in Saudi Arabia and Saudi ESL learners in the UK. More specifically, it investigates how EFL and ESL groups perform the speech acts of requests and refusals in English, in contrast with British native speakers of English (NSE) as a point of comparison. The participants in this study are 90 Saudi EFL learners, 90 Saudi ESL learners, and 60 British NSE. The data set, including the utterances of requests and refusals in English, was compiled using two quantitative research methods: (1) a discourse-completion task (DCT) comprising nine request scenarios and nine refusal scenarios, and (2) a role-play task (RPT), involving six request scenarios and nine refusal scenarios. The pragmatic features of the requests were categorised, quantified and analysed using the classifications set out by Blum-Kulka, House, and Kasper (1989), whilst the pragmatic features of refusals were categorised according to the Universal Refusal Strategies Taxonomy of Beebe, Takahashi, and Uliss-Weltz (1990, pp. 72-73). The results indicate notable pragmatic similarities and differences in the requests and refusals across the three groups. To summarise, the ESL and NSE groups' results showed relatively more similarities when compared with the EFL group, in terms of directness, politeness norms and modifications. The data also revealed that sociological variables (e.g. power, social distance) influence participants' speech acts, and the length of time spent learning English and the intensity of communication affect the non-native groups' acquisition of speech acts.

The present study focuses on the negotiation of "topical coherence" (Geluykkens, 1999). Using a Map Task, it investigates how the interaction between 'Thematic Structure': Theme and Rheme and 'Information Structure': Given and New (Halliday and Matthiessen, 2014; Halliday, 1967a, b) achieves coherence in informal English discourse. The starting point for investigation of topical coherence is the idea that Theme and Given coincide in unmarked cases. The study examines instances where the two systems do not coincide and examines the meanings that are generated through this divergence in order to reveal what effect this divergence has on the spoken interaction. Marked Themes by being usually realised in their own tone groups are information units with information foci and thus informationally foregrounded (Tench, 1996). The focus of information will fall on the Theme as well as on the Rheme. The study examines what role the intonational realisations of the marked Theme, tonicity, tonality and key system will have in structuring map task interactions and in facilitating the successful completion of a map task. Data gleaned from map task shows that marked Theme aids the interlocutors in their negotiation as it is used to foreground previously mentioned information (e.g. a landmark or location on the map) by taking it as point of departure to more easily guide the hearers to the intended location. The data shows also that the previously mentioned information within the marked Theme is made tonic, projected as if it were New and marked Theme is presented as an information unit, in separate tone group, to attract hearers' attention to the importance of the information within the marked Theme. Therefore, the interaction between word order and intonation contributes to guiding the hearers more easily to the intended location. The data also shows that there is an interaction between key and marked Theme. Marked Theme is uttered on high key in contexts that demand the projection of particular information within the marked Theme to draw hearers' attention to the exact location on the map and on mid key to denote the addition of information and to confirm and clarify the details. The information uttered on high key within the marked Theme is previously introduced information (i.e. recoverable). It is concluded that marked Theme aids the interlocutors of the map task in their interaction about the route and contributes to achieving a coherent interaction on the topic of the map task, the route.

This research project sheds light on how language and culture can shape gestures with certain gesture features. It consists of two studies: a cross-cultural study and a second language study. In the cross-cultural study, gestures of a group of the English speakers and a group of the Arabic speakers were compared in term of certain gesture features: expression of motion events, dual gestures, use of gesture space and gesture rate. Gestures were elicited through narrations of the Tomato Man video clips. It was found that English speakers produced more conflated gestures than the Arabic speakers. It was also found that the English speakers produced fewer dual gestures than the Arabic speakers. Moreover, it was found that the English speakers produced fewer representational gestures and used smaller gesture space than the Arabic speakers. In the second language study, gestures produced during the Arabic and English descriptions of the Arabic early learners of English were compared within subjects. The same methodology was applied. It was found that the speakers produced more conflated gestures while speaking L2 English than while speaking L1 Arabic. It was also found that they produced more dual gestures while speaking their L2 English than while speaking their L1 Arabic. In regard to the use of gesture space and gesture rate, there was no difference between L1 Arabic and L2 English.

This three-module thesis employs quantitative and qualitative methods to investigate evaluative language in Canadian secondary school and university history textbooks. The first module overviews approaches to the study of evaluation and key issues of historical discourse in need of research. The second module proposes a framework (Levels of Evaluation) for investigating history texts that combines methods from Martin and White’s (2005) Appraisal theory, and Hunston’s (2011) Status, Value and Relevance. The third module further theorizes this framework, employing Kress and van Leeuwen’s (2006) methods to account for evaluative features of visual texts. The Appraisal framework is also elaborated to include two subcategories of Judgment: Normality, and the Appreciation network is reworked to account for different types of historical significance. Coffin’s (2000) Voices of History framework is expanded to include an intermediary voice between Recorder and Appraiser, which was found to be a salient feature of history textbooks. Key findings include a higher frequency in secondary school than university textbooks of inscribed Attitude, a high overall occurrence of the resources of Affect, and a low overall occurrence of extra-evaluation, the evaluative level concerned with disciplinary engagement. Implications for the study of evaluation in historical discourse and history education are discussed.

This thesis used the Incongruity Resolution (IR) Theory of humour (Suls 1972, 1983) as a framework within which to investigate English speaking children’s ability to comprehend different types of ambiguity in verbal riddles. Five types of ambiguity (lexical, phonological, morphological, syntactic and idiomatic) were defined by the researcher based upon the way(s) in which linguistic features embedded within riddle form(s) (ie. their actual wording) contributed to producing an ambiguity. These definitions were then used to investigate participants’ comprehension of verbal riddles. These definitions are recommended for future application in order to overcome previous inconsistencies in types of language phenomena constituting discrete ambiguity types when testing children’s humour development and ambiguity comprehension. Participants comprised sixty children equally divided into three primary school Year Groups: Year 2 (aged 6-7), Year 4 (aged 8-9) and Year 6 (aged 10-11). Comprehension of ambiguities was measured (a) receptively through a multiple choice task in which participants were required to identify an ambiguous punchline and (b) productively through a verbal explanation task in which participants were required to explain their understanding of a riddle containing an ambiguous word/phrase. Comprehension criteria were developed to accommodate the different ways in which participants communicated their understanding of ambiguities. Results were used to identify areas of accelerated development in ambiguity comprehension and to establish whether some types of ambiguity are easier/harder for young children to comprehend. Facility of comprehension was linked to linguistic properties manipulated to elicit humour and to the different processing demands they require. A parallel was drawn between the developing ability to comprehend verbal ambiguities and children’s early language acquisition which itself relies upon the sequential acquisition of increasingly complex language processing skills. Findings from the study were applied theoretically to further understanding of humour development and suggestions were made as to how the final stage in McGhee’s (2002) five-step framework might be further refined. Results were evaluated in order to inform classroom practice and to show how verbal riddles might be used in the classroom to meet stipulated criteria for ‘learning experiences’ and ‘skills development’ as detailed in the new (2015) Primary Curriculum for the teaching of English in Wales – specifically those relating to oracy.

This thesis contributes to on-going discussions amongst academics on broadcast political discourse with respect to the multiplicity and transformation of institutional roles and relations in political news interviews. The thesis has as a starting point the way hybridity in broadcast talk challenges “traditional” standards and participants’ identities in political news interviews. Adopting a conversation analytic perspective, it examines how these modified standards and identities shape political news interviews at a micro and a macro level. At a micro level, this thesis investigates episodes of adversarial talk in one-on-one 2012 Greek election campaign interviews, in terms of the turn-taking system and power relations between participants. Doing so, it points to changes in political news interviews (a sub-genre of which is the election campaign interview). In particular, the thesis explores and discusses how, through their hybrid (antagonistic) practices, Greek politicians and journalists transform the televised election campaign news interview into an antagonistic arena where the winner is the one who shows that s/he plays the game of televised news interview in a fair way. At a macro level this thesis contributes with empirical, micro-analytic evidence to wider debates related to politics and media communication by discussing the significance of both participants’ hybrid practices regarding: 1) how (mainstream) populism as political style, becomes manifest and 2) the epistemology of TV journalism in relation to its knowledge producing practices. It is argued that the collaboratively produced hybrid practices identified promote antagonistic politics as the norm and legitimise mainstream politicians’ populist performances.

This thesis is the result of an attempt to investigate the determinants of word association responses. The aim of this work was to identify those properties of words - their frequency, grammatical class, and textual distribution, for example - which influence the generation of word association responses, and to align these effects with wider sycholinguistic views of the mental lexicon. The experimental work in the early chapters focuses on grammatical influences on wordassociation. In particular, it is demonstrated that both grammatical class and verb transitivity influence the type of response most likely to be selected by participants. The immediately following chapters ask why this would be so. The analysis of several models of word association suggests that the development of a clearer understanding of the way in which a word's textual distribution impacts upon associative response patterns may be an important stepping stone towards a coherent model of associative response generation. In the later part of the thesis, a series of novel experiments is conducted comparing word association response patterns with corpus-derived data. This work in turn lays the foundation for the development of a new usage-based model of word association, which is shown, in the penultimate chapter, to be capable of explaining a wide range of research findings, including not only the grammatical class and transitivity-related findings described above, but also earlier findings relating to the influence of lexical variables on the structure of the associative network, and to the discovery of individual and age-related response patterns in word association.

For the dynamic construction of Chinese students’ disciplinary identities in transnational institution, the roles of language and context in constructing multiplicity of identity remain unexplored. Based on the social and linguistic studies on identities construction, this study proposes the idea of group membership affiliation: a multi-faceted meaning-making process that mediates the relation between individual and context, in which the individual uses language to habitually engage in activities, construe positive imagination of the community and align her or himself with the other members in the groups and so gain membership. Systemic Functional Linguistics, Sociocultural theory, social identity theory and Hyland’s (2012) idea of proximity provide the theoretical and analytical frameworks for the study. The research applies an integrated methodology, drawing on lexicogrammatical and discourse-semantic approaches, as well as small amount of qualitative case study data. The findings of the study relate to two aspects: that is, situated cultures and developmental use of disciplinary language. The first aspect is an integrated sociocultural and systemic functional linguistic approach which analyses both the public and private documents. The subsequent results show that although a mixed global and local culture is promoted in the context, non-Chinese teachers and non-Chinese students hold different understandings and acceptances to the Chinese social and contextual culture as well, as to the Chinese students. Furthermore, the study shows that the Chinese students shape proximal past, current and future possible disciplinary selves along a developmental trajectory; in the meantime, they shape their own values in the context. The second aspect is a systemic functional linguistic approach to measure the lexicogrammatical and semantic performance and negotiation in classroom discourse texts from year one to year four. The increased use of certain ideational and interpersonal resources at individual and classroom levels reveals that there is a developmental trajectory of the Chinese students’ disciplinary identities construction in the use of disciplinary language.

Drawing on three Chinese translations each of Amy Tan's The Joy Luck Club (1989) and The Kitchen God's Wife (1991), this project examines, from a feminist perspective, gender issues in Chinese translations of Chinese American women's literature, with special attention paid to the translators' gender consciousness and ideologies as reflected in their translations of 'female alienation'. Existing studies on Chinese American women's literature, in both America and mainland China, mainly address identity politics, culture, Orientalism, and feminism, and fail to consider the role of translation. This project, however, analyses both the feminist consciousness and the issues which are reflected in these two novels and in their Chinese translations. This project innovatively applies the feminist concept of 'female alienation' to literary translation studies. The concept of 'female alienation', which originates from Karl Marx's theory of labour alienation, is developed by Alison Jaggar through feminist discussions of women's oppression and subordinate status. Women in a patriarchal society are alienated by men's power and separated from their self and nature; this leads to their loss of subjectivity and independence. Jaggar believes that women are alienated in all aspects of their lives, particularly in their sexuality, motherhood, and intellectual capacities, and this project discusses the influence of race and self-Orientalization on that alienation. Indeed, it enriches Jaggar's concept of female alienation by adding sisterhood alienation. A new classification is then proposed to study different patterns of alienation and women's psychological experiences with it, both active and passive, as reflected in Tan's works and the Chinese translations of those works. In terms of translation studies, this project combines translation equivalence and norms theories with feminist translation theory; it proposes a set of feminist translation norms and a concept of feminist translation equivalence to study feminist translation in the Chinese context. Feminist translation norms include feminist preliminary, expectancy, operational, accountability, communication, and relation norms. It is the feminist preliminary and expectancy norms that are used to analyse the translators' motives, intentions, and expectations of their translation. The feminist operational norm is used to analyse the translation strategies adopted by the translators. The feminist accountability norm refers to feminist translation ethics of fidelity; that is, the translation must be faithful to the writer's, or the translator's, own feminist consciousness, thoughts, and intentions. The feminist communication norm means that translations convey the writer's, or translator's, own feminist thoughts to the maximum possible extent. The feminist relation norm means that the relationship between the translation and the source text is the feminist translation equivalence, which means that the feminist thoughts reflected by the words or expressions in the source text, or by the translators' own feminist thoughts, are "faithfully" represented in the translation, even if the translator does not use the precisely equivalent words or expressions to achieve linguistic equivalence. Comparing the Chinese translations in order to study the translators' translation behaviours and the effects of their translations, this project explores how the feminist consciousness and thoughts on female alienation of the source text are represented in the Chinese translations, and in what way the translations achieve (feminist) translation equivalence. Summarising the regularities of the translation behaviour of the translator subgroups, and the (feminist) translation equivalence the translations achieve, this project provides evidence that the feminist translation ethics of fidelity do not necessarily contradict the traditional translation ethics of fidelity which focuses on linguistic equivalence. Meanwhile, it also verifies that so-called "feminist translation strategies" actually refer to all translation strategies which help the translations achieve feminist translation equivalence. This corrects the research misconception concerning feminist translation strategies in mainland China. Finally, by examining the translators' motives and expectations, reflected in their paratexts as well as in the translations, this project summarises feminist translation norms in the Chinese context, and defines the role of gender in translating female alienation in the texts in question.

Whilst learning an additional language throughout compulsory schooling is increasingly the norm across the world, this is not the case in England, where currently fewer than 50% of young people study a modern language at upper secondary level (key stage 4). However, a recent change to education policy has required the 'vast majority' of young people to study a language to GCSE level as part of the combination of subjects which form the English Baccalaureate (EBacc) performance measure. This research explores the interrelated nature of the factors that help and hinder schools in responding to this policy requirement to extend participation in language learning. The study adopts a multiple case study approach and draws on qualitative data generated from semi-structured interviews, participant observation and document analysis in three schools to develop an in-depth understanding of how schools make sense of education policy and make policy their own. In order to preserve the voices of the participants the findings are presented in the form of three portraits which aim to capture the cultural and linguistic identities of the schools and their communities. A range of theoretical resources are drawn upon in the analysis, including Ball et al.'s theory of 'policy enactment' (2012) and Bourdieu's tools of habitus, capital and field. These are used as lenses through which to analyse the contested field of participation in modern languages at KS4. The study finds that the evolving national policy imperative is understood and enacted locally in different and unequal ways according to a complex interplay of habitus, capital and field - the interplay of school specific factors, circumstances, contexts, histories, and the dispositions of school leaders. This determines the differing opportunities afforded to young people to learn a language at KS4. The Bourdieusian analysis suggests that, in the current political context of school accountability and linear examinations, schools' enactment of the language policy reform can be understood as a 'game within a game', and that the field of modern languages at KS4 cannot be seen in isolation from the broader education field which has a significant impact on how schools understand and enact language education policy. The research concludes that given the complex interrelated range of factors at play, sustainable change cannot be effected by schools alone and that action is required at all levels to address the inequalities that persist in language education at KS4. While individual schools and educators may exercise considerable agency and work hard to meet the language policy expectations at a local level, the multiplicity of factors and the tensions and contradictions made transparent in this research illuminate how these interrelated aspects need to be recognised and addressed at national and regional levels, as well as locally. The study puts forward a number of recommendations for action at these different levels. The study also sheds light on opportunities for change and spaces for action. It offers positive examples of how schools strive to offer more equitable language learning opportunities for young people. The findings contribute to a more hopeful and critical discourse than the one that currently characterises language education in England by challenging taken-for-granted binaries and illuminating how educators are key actors rather than merely subjects in the language education policy process. The research also points to the need for educators to maintain a focus on the 'bigger picture' of why language learning matters in the 21st century in their day-to-day practices. It highlights the need for educators to exercise critical agency and to develop 'a feel for the game' (Bourdieu, 1990) in order to offer all young people an inclusive and high-quality modern languages education at KS4 which will enable them to embrace the linguistic and cultural diversity of the global 21st century.