The thesis investigates the sociological, cultural and ideological factors that affect the production and marketing of two major translations published in Fascist Italy and targeting both adult and young readers. The dissertation focuses upon a selected corpus of translations of the American novels, Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852) and Little Women (1868), which were repeatedly translated between the 1920s and 1940s. By adopting an interdisciplinary approach, which encompasses fields such as the history of publishing, the sociology of translation, children’s literature, studies on the role and functions of the Paratext and scholarship on Fascism and its cultural policy, this study aims to offer a detailed examination of the Italian publishing market during the Ventennio. It probes the contexts informing the publishing history of these translations, their readerships, and interrelations with the growing importance of cinema, as well as questions related to the various retranslations produced. Furthermore, given the central role of publishing in the shaping of political consent and the contradictory attitude of the regime towards translations, this thesis explores ideological influences affecting selected translations of these novels that centre on issues of particular resonance for the regime, namely, race and gender. The dissertation is divided in two parallel sections, each one divided into three chapters. The opening chapters in each part examine the publishing history of Uncle Tom’s Cabin and Little Women respectively, with attention to the USA, the UK, and France and a primary focus upon Italy, above all Fascist Italy. The following chapters in each section investigate the role that the visual representations of these two books played in conveying racial and gender aspects and in contributing to the construction of their meaning by the readers. Finally, the closing chapters of each section are devoted to a translation analysis of selected passages in order to survey translational behaviours used to depict feminine and racial features, given that these were known to be especially problematic during the Ventennio. This survey aims to pinpoint norms informing translations targeting both young people and adults.

In this thesis, I propose a theoretical framework to understand the process of secularization produced by the revolutions of language and life. Thanks to the linguistic turn it has discovered that knowledge is kept within language. As Agamben explains, the Copernican revolution of language has made us “the first human beings who have become completely conscious of language. For the first time, what preceding generations called God, Being, spirit, unconscious appear to us as what they are: names for language. This is why for us, any philosophy, any religion, or any knowledge that has not become conscious of this turn belongs irrevocably to the past”(Agamben, 2005a: 45). Thanks to the vitalist turn, modern thought has found out that human beings are natural beings and, in spite of the peculiarity of their characteristics, their origin is the result of the natural process of evolution. I will maintain that this process of secularization leads to a new theological way of thinking definable as secularized theology. The peculiarity of secularized theology lies in the fact that it finds its ownmost reason of existence in the demonstration of the “death of God” but, the absence of revelation becomes the true revelation. The absence of the theological God reveals a secularized form of God – the God of those who believe of being without God. The name of this new divinity comes from Nietzsche who wrote that he would believe only in a God able to dance: The Dancing God. In La vita. Un’invezione recente, the Italian philosopher Davide Tarizzo argues that before modernity human beings did not exist “in the sense that the question of the humanity of man was not being asked, nor was there any ‘analysis of finitude’ in which ‘man’s being is always maintained, in relation to man himself, in a remoteness and a distance that constitute him”(Tarizzo, 2011: 53). Modernity becomes the process of secularization whereby the human being no longer measures himself against God, but becomes the measure of himself. The human being himself is the subject and the object of his own inquiry. The linguistic and the vitalist turns are, first and foremost, a reaction to theology. If in theology human being measures himself with respect to God, the disappearance of God makes human being size of himself. What distinguishes and opposes them is the definition of the human being, the unit of measure used to establish the humanity of man. On the one hand, the essence of the human being becomes language, on the other, the nature of the human being starts being biological life. Modernity is the epoch of the Dancing God and language and life are the two opposing doctrines fighting for the orthodoxy. The ultimate reason for this conflict is the definition of the essence or nature of the human being. In order to let emerge the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turns, I will address the question of the philosophy of biopolitics. Biopolitics is the discipline aimed at envisioning a politics able to give voice to the nature of the human being. Before proposing a biopolitical account it is therefore necessary to answer the philosophical question concerning the definition of the human being. I will claim that the fracture between the linguistic and the vitalist turn in defining what it means to be human is the source of modern monotheism. Thinking beyond secularized theology ultimately means to challenge the Copernican revolution of language and the Darwinian revolution of life in order to envision a new ontology grounded on a different understating of the human being. In the present work – which represents the pars dentures of this theoretical project – I will demonstrate that the revolution of language and life has to be understood as a form of revelation, more precisely, as the revelation of the lack of revelation. I will enquiry the linguistic and vitalist approach to the philosophy of biopolitics through the analysis of the work of three contemporary Italian philosophers: Giorgio Agamben, Roberto Esposito, and Davide Tarizzo. The decision to focus on Italian biopolitical theory is determined by the conviction that this philosophical approach offers one of the clearest and best-articulated insights into the fracture between life and language.

This variationist sociolinguistic study investigates language change in the Francoprovençal speaking communities of les monts du Lyonnais in France, and the Canton of Valais in Switzerland. In Chapter 1 we give a brief overview of Francoprovençal, and outline the parameters of the study. Chapter 2 presents an overview of where Francoprovençal has come from and why it is so controversial. Beginning with its origins, we give a brief history of dialectalisation for our fieldwork areas, before discussing Francoprovençal as an exceptional case in the Romance linguistic literature. Case studies on language maintenance and shift are presented in Chapter 3, where we contextualise our study on Francoprovençal and the emergence of the 'Arpitan' revitalisation movement. We argue that Francoprovencal does not quite fit the mould of other multidialectal contexts such as Breton or Corsican. Chapter 4 outlines the methods employed in undertaking the empirical and ethnographic fieldwork for the study. In Chapters 5, 6, and 7 we examine each of the linguistic variables in the study in relation to a number of extra-linguistic factors. Our findings indicate that, while older traditional speakers produce localised dialectal variants in a more monitored speech style, there is variation. Conversely, the new speakers not only show substantial linguistic divergence from other speakers in the sample, but also from each other. We present evidence to suggest that the pan-regional norm is having some impact on language use. In Chapter 8 we focus specifically on the Arpitan movement and its effects, asking in what ways a commitment to the revitalisation cause is driving change for some participants in the study. A novel Arpitan Engagement Index is employed to assess the extent to which speakers are connected with the movement and how this correlates with language use: we focus on the social significance of a series of 'new' Arpitan forms. We terminate with our conclusions in Chapter 9, where we advance a number of hypotheses in relation to language change in the communities under investigation. In particular, we suggest that convergence is taking place in the direction of both national and regional norms. Lastly, we suggest avenues for future research trajectories.

The present study was carried out to investigate the possible effects of two types of form-focused instruction (henceforth FFI) on the acquisition of a specific feature of the Italian verbal morphology system: namely the future tense, which has hitherto never been researched within this framework. Processing instruction was compared to a more traditional type of grammar instruction output-based. The impact of these two types of FFI was investigated on a well documented strategy (Musumeci 1989) used by second language (henceforth L2) learners when interpreting tenses. This strategy consists in giving precedence to lexical items (in this case temporal adverbs, i.e. oggi, domani) over morphological markers during learner's interpretation of tenses. In order to carry out this investigation, first year students (39 subjects) in their second semester, learning Italian at the University of Greenwich were randomly assigned to three groups. One group received processing instruction, which involved grammar explanation and comprehension practice directed at altering the way second language learners process input and make correct meaning-form connections; the other group received output-based type of instruction which consisted in an explanation of grammar rules followed by written and oral practice which was directed at altering the way L2 learners produce the target language; the third group was used as a control group and received no instruction. The groups were exposed to two consecutive days of instructional treatment and pre-tests and post-tests were carried out. The tests consisted of an aural interpretation task, a written completion text and an oral limited response production task. A delayed post-test was also administered to assess the possible effects of instruction after three weeks. Based on previous research carried out in a feature of Spanish (Cadierno 1993) verbal morphology, it was hypothesised that processing instruction would have positive effects on the accuracy with which subjects interpreted sentences in Italian (future tense vs present tense) in which temporal reference is only expressed by verb morphology. It was also hypothesized that the effects of processing instruction would be visible on the production of both the written and the oral task. A further hypothesis was that the effects of instruction would/hold over a post-test session three weeks later. Overall the statistical analyses carried out on the data supported the three hypotheses of this study. The results obtained in this research provide some evidence that processing instruction has positive effects on the acquisition of Italian verbal morphology, these effects being greater on the developing system of beginners, L2 learners, than output-based instruction. However the output-based group performed better than the control group in the interpretation task. This is an interesting finding as it was not hypothesised, but is likely to have significant implications for further research within this framework. The present study also showed that processing instruction was successful in altering the way in which learners processed the input and its effects had also an impact on the way learners produced future tense at sentence level in both a written and an oral production task. Finally, these effects were proved durable over a three week period. The results obtained in the present study have implications at two levels. At the theoretical level this study provides further support for the role that input processing plays in SLA. At the pedagogical level it demonstrates the effectiveness of processing instruction not only on an interpretation task but also on a written and oral production task. This is further evidence of the suitability of this pedagogical approach to encourage linguistic competence among L2 learners.

L'imagerie par résonance magnétique cinétique en contraste de phase (IRM-PC) sensible aux flux permet la quantification et la caractérisation des écoulements sanguins in-vivo de manière non-invasive. En clinique, cette séquence est principalement appliquée en une coupe à deux dimensions (2D), mais elle a évolué vers une acquisition volumique des vitesses (4D IRM-PC) offrant une quantification complète de l'écoulement dans l'ensemble d'une arborescence vasculaire. Cependant, cette technique nécessite d'outils de post-traitement qui sont encore peu nombreux et d'une évaluation de la précision de la mesure des vitesses en 2D et 4D dans des vaisseaux de petits diamètres. Dans ce travail de thèse, un logiciel de post-traitement des images 2D et 4D IRM-PC a été mis au point avec une interface facile et est utilisé par des équipes de recherches et des cliniciens. Des protocoles d'acquisitions des vitesses par IRM pour des vaisseaux constitués de diamètres millimétriques ont été développés. Ces protocoles ont été validés in-vitro à partir d'un travail réalisé sur fantôme qui montre une erreur inférieure à 10% dans la précision des mesures. Les protocoles validés ont été appliqués sur les artères de la région cervico-faciale chez 30 volontaires sains afin de constituer la première base hémodynamique des vaisseaux de cette région. Des patients atteints de pathologies cervico-faciale ont bénéficié de ce protocole et son intérêt a été montré dans le suivi du patient et pour la planification chirurgicale / Phase-Contrast Magnetic Resonance imaging (PC-MRI) is a non-invasive technique used for quantification and characterization of the blood flow. In clinical pratice, this sequence is principally used in a two-dimensional single slice (2D), but it evolved to a velocity volumic acquisition (4D PC-MRI) allowing a complete quantification of the flow through a vascular tree. However, this technique requires post-processing software which are few and an evaluation of the velocity accuracy in 2D and 4D to quantify vessels with millimetric diameter. In this thesis work, a user-friendly post-processing software of 2D and 4D MRI images has been developed and it is used by research teams and clinicians. MRI acquisitions protocols of velocities for vessels composed by millimetric has been created. These protocols developed in-vitro form a phantom work show an error in the measurement accuracy less than 10%. These validated protocols are applied in facial area arteries in 30 healthy volunteers to create the first hemodynamic data base of arteries in this area. Then, the protocols have been performed to patients with pathologies affecting the facial area to show is interest on patient follow-up and surgical treatment

This thesis is concerned with Spanish weak dative pronominals. Similar elements-generally labelled as clitics- in many languages have been focus of much research in Linguistics. The present study, however, abstracts away from classic approaches that had the external form of clitics as their main focus and provides description and analysis of very specific uses of dative pronominal items, namely when they appear on ditransitive constructions, with psychological predicates or in a configuration where they are not lexically specified in the valency of the verb, the so-called non-selected datives. The analysis of the dative in ditransitive constructions is twofold. We claim that the distribution of the dative in such configurations has semantic and syntactic implications. The presence of the dative pronoun is becoming grammaticalised and provides an entailment of affectedness. In instances of clitic doubling where we have both the pronoun and a noun phrase, we are treating the pronoun as the element that the predicate subcategorises for and the noun phrase is linked to it through information structure. This analysis is quite innovative as it ensures both elements are linked but they retain syntactic independence, in contrast with their treatment in previous approaches. With psychological predicates, we are concerned with what the status of the dative marked argument is; as previous approaches have contradictory views of it as subject or object. We analyse this dative with the tools provided by Lexical Mapping Theory and disagree with previous accounts by proposing an analysis of this dative as OBJɵ. With regards to non-selected datives in Spanish, they have not been widely discussed in the literature. We describe the different types and propose a finer grouping based on their ability to be treated as derived arguments. We sketch an analysis that adds a dative argument to the valency of a predicate through a lexical operation.

The published work submitted herewith involves the application of Relevance theory (as a theory of verbal communication) to the description of Galician and Spanish, and to translation. The phenomena studied within these areas are examined from the point of view of language use. This allows us to see them together as instantiations of language and thus as being theoretically and fundamentally of a kind. As a result, they are also subject to the same principles of communication. The theoretical approach used and applied throughout is that of Relevance theory. This approach allows for an explanatory theory of verbal communication, which encompasses the two areas under study and thus provides a unitary theoretical framework to account for the phenomena examined. The various aspects of language description and translation explored here are therefore seen as instances of verbal communication to be studied precisely under a single general theory (and not as instances of different fields that should be examined by different theories). This submission is structured in three parts. The first part involves an introduction to the publications submitted, which includes a brief literature review. This review provides an overview of the most important approaches to communication, including the code mode, the Gricean approach and the approach adopted here, namely, Relevance theory. This introductory part also includes a discussion of the overall coherence of the publications submitted, together with their impact and contributions in the wider context of the field of study. The second part of this submission deals with applications of Relevance theory to the description of Galician and Spanish in a range of areas, including prepositional direct objects, presuppositional effects, interpretive use of language, and non-declarative sentences. In all these cases, current approaches are reviewed and critiqued, and alternative accounts are provided as applications of the theoretical framework provided by Relevance theory. The third and final part of this submission deals with applications of Relevance theory to translation in a number of areas, including interlingual interpretive use of language, interlingual enrichment, interlingual impoverishment, and degrees of acceptability in translation. One of the main themes in common between all these areas is the notion of discrepancy between original and target texts in translation. It is shown that many of these translation discrepancies arise from the gap found in verbal communication between what is encoded and what is communicated. Some of the most important types of gap that exist in verbal communication are examined in detail and their impact on translation explored throughout.

Many studies have investigated third language acquisition (L3A) as an independent area of research. The core common interest of these studies has been to search for the source of cross-linguistic influence (CLI) among the previously acquired languages (i.e. L1 and L2) in the learning of an L3. In the domain of morpho-syntax, three competing hypotheses have emerged: one attributes a primary role to the L1 as the source of CLI (Jin, 2009; Hermas, 2014); a second proposes the L2 as the main source of transfer (Bardel and Falk, 2007; Falk and Bardel, 2011); while a third considers that the order of acquisition per se is not the significant factor triggering CLI in L3A, but rather the degree of typological proximity between the L1/L2 and the L3 (Rothman, 2011, 2013, 2015). This study set out to test these hypotheses in the learning of L3 French by two groups: L1 speakers of Spanish and L1 speakers of Turkish, both of whom had learned English as an L2. Each group was further sub-divided by their L2 proficiency into lower intermediates (LIs) and advanced (Adv). Using a ‘mixed methods approach’ consisting of quantitative and qualitative instruments, the acquisition of four morpho-syntactic properties was investigated: (i) Gender, (ii) Number Concord, (iii) Definiteness/Specificity and (iv) Verb Raising. Results were consistent with the proposal of Rothman (2011, 2013, 2015); (psycho)typological proximity seems indeed to be a determining factor triggering CLI in L3A. However, unlike Rothman, who always advocates holistic typological proximity, this study found evidence for CLI based on property-by-property structural similarity. In particular, it is argued that in the absence of clear holistic typological similarity, structural similarity on a property-by-property basis (actual and perceived) is the driving variable for CLI at the initial state of L3A. These findings led to the proposal of a new model entitled the property-based structural proximity (PSP) hypothesis.

Michel de Montaigne believed that to judge a man, we must follow his traces long and carefully. This chronological study of Fou Lei (1908-1966) traces, firstly, his footsteps as a cogent critic of art, literature, music and politics, and as the most accomplished translator of French literature in China of the twentieth century, and secondly reveals a fraction of an intellectual labyrinth meandering through China’s fragmented modern history, almost Oedipal in its disposition towards its past, and its tragic love relations with the West, real or envisioned. Fou Lei the translator of Balzac and Fou Lei the art critic have been the subjects of recent scholarly work of Nicolai Volland and Claire Roberts. This thesis proposes an intellectual biography of Fou Lei and commences, by necessity, with a narrative of his youth – especially the years he spent in Europe – which he himself scarcely mentioned, and the analysis of which is sorely missing in existing literature. Hitherto unpublished documents that I discovered in France and Switzerland contribute to this biography. A close examination of Fou Lei’s early, especially emotional, life is made with the purpose of contextualising his subsequent moral and existential choices. These choices in turn are historicised through his writing, translation and correspondence. Archival findings in Paris lend significant insight into the agony in which he lived during his last years in China, where political predicaments alone were responsible for his death. There are two dimensions to this investigation: intellectual and linguistic. A recurring theme is that of parallels, and a sustained inquiry that of how to reconstruct, then deconstruct, the process of cultural translation and appropriation. Allowing the material to dictate my treatment of it, I make as my focus the internal life of an individual against external conditions. Fou Lei, who chose to live a strictly sedentary life in response to his circumstances, justifies and demands this treatment. Squarely through the point of view of an intellectual who made sense of external and internal realities by way of rigid dichotomy, I obliquely challenge generalised ideas, in particular those of this intellectual himself. I thereby draw attention to the specific thought process of his generalising and the possible ways of understanding it, throwing into question the linguistic instability inherent in these efforts. Under psychological considerations, pre-supposed categorisations dissolve. The ingenium of an individual scrutinised in a given historical situation makes specific the notion of “culture” in a defined context, itself routinely entangled not least semantically. Other than situating Fou Lei, where necessary, in his social milieu, I make apparent, and give accent to, a milieu of words, one with indistinct geographical and temporal boundaries, to glimpse the mental world of a multilingual literatus, the devotion of whose entire adult life was to the craft of language. For the same reason that a thesis on Joseph Conrad might not be expected to discuss Poland, I restrain, where possible, inclined elaboration on the elephantine subject that is China in my study of Fou Lei. I hope to illustrate the “obsession with China” – as C. T. Hsia termed it – that he shared with his contemporaries without falling victim myself to that obsession. This individualistically-driven narrative yet serves a historical purpose. It allows Fou Lei himself to take us from a post-revolutionary, post-May Fourth, post-White Terror Shanghai to an inter-war Europe during the Great Depression, and back to a China entering the Sino-Japanese War, then the Civil War, changing thereafter from a Republic to a People’s Republic under progressively totalitarian control, and traversing endless upheavals into the Cultural Revolution. This voyage becomes thereupon itself a witness both to Fou Lei’s desperate interaction with his time, and to his fierce insistence on autonomy. Notwithstanding our way of arguing being by and large linear, in no way should Fou Lei’s journey be conceptualised as so. In a peculiarly three-dimensional manner, there was more a dislocation, or a continuous array of dislocations, that he had to make sense of in relation to his own country, the political signification of which changed several times over in the lifetime of that particular generation, than the easily supposed confrontation and integration between the so-called East and West. What this modern Chinese intellectual, decidedly archaic in his moral standing and profoundly romantic in a nineteenth-century European sense, obliges, is multi-disciplinary research from multiple angles. What this study of his youth, now positioned in relation to his entire life, reveals, are aspirations that were never fulfilled, seeds that never grew. What it portrays is a sensitivity determined to educate himself against all odds. To a certain extent, this is not so much an analysis of what he achieved – and achieve he did, formidably – as of how he was aborted, and why. In Fou Lei and his Alibis, we observe a man of letters turning time and again to art and literature as a refuge, and I raise, and leave open, questions about his conditions and reactions, still unresolved; questions of alienation and exile, imposed and chosen; questions of perceived roots, perceived universality; the question, as Simone Weil put it, of the relationship between destiny and the human soul.

This master’s thesis deals with measuring temperature inside personal computer. The main goal of this work is to develop tool which is able to measure temperatures in several places, display a store the values. Theoretical section is concentrated on selection of temperature sensor, that have suitable interface for microcontrollers and has sufficient accuracy for this application. In next part there is complete hardware and software design of instrument. Software solution is based on real-time operating system. Device is projected as a battery-operated compact tool. With created application for personal computer, measured data can be downloaded through USB and displayed in graphic format.