This thesis addresses a largely uncharted area within language motivation research, which is the motivation of teachers of English as a foreign language (EFL). A qualitative research approach was employed to identify and document different motivational influences affecting EFL teacher motivation. The method of analysis employed in our dataset, which consisted of a series of in-depth qualitative interviews with Greek state EFL and non-EFL teachers, followed the principles of grounded theory. Most of the findings coincided with insights from other teacher motivation studies; namely that the intrinsic aspect of teaching was the most satisfying, and thus the most motivating, of all motivational factors, while the extrinsic aspect both within and outside the school context was one of the main contributors to teacher demotivation. However, the findings have also highlighted an area that had not been paid much attention to in the literature, the temporal dimension of teacher motivation, which plays an important role in the development and motivation of the teacher due to the fact that teaching as a profession is a lifelong engagement. The study has offered several insights into EFL teacher motivation and the results are hoped to facilitate the alleviation of the problem of teacher demotivation and dissatisfaction. The thesis concludes with implications for future work in this novel area of research.

This Ph.D. thesis investigates the extent to which certain linguistic variables affect the perceived success of an abstract. In his opening chapter, the author situates the work as a contribution to discourse theory and formulates a set of seven basic research questions the study seeks to answer. Chapter 2 considers the most satisfactory design for the research. Part Two provides a survey of the relevant source material, consisting of reviews of: the Linguistics and Psychology literature; Artificial Intelligence computational summarising systems; and standards and guidelines taken from Information and Library Science. Part Three discusses the data collection: first, the collection of naturally occurring abstracts from a teaching establishment; second, the collection of judgements elicited by means of a set of questionnaires. The remainder of the thesis constitutes an attempt to reconcile these two types of data, words and opinions. The author draws a distinction between the qualitative and quantitative opinions of the judges (which he refers to as 'external measures') and the linguistic features present in the different abstracts ('internal measures') which determine these subjective opinions. Part Four discusses the data analysis, which draws on grammatical techniques from Systemic-Functional theory. In Part Four, hypotheses are investigated which relate the success of the different abstracts as perceived by the judges to the linguistic features present in the texts. Five different types of analysis are piloted using a small number of texts; three of these analyses are taken further and applied to all the abstracts. Part Five consists of two chapters. The first details the conclusions to be drawn from the study and explicitly answers the seven basic research questions introduced in Chapter 1. The second provides some suggestions for further research, chiefly concerning the collection of further external and internal measures. Finally, techniques from multivariate statistics are briefly sketched as a means of reconciling the two types of measure in the future. Abstract 2 This Ph.D. thesis investigates the extent to which certain linguistic variables affect the perceived success of an abstract. More specifically, answers to seven basic research questions are sought. These include: what reasons do readers give for preferring one abstract over another?; is 'success' better explained by correlation with one, or with many, linguistic variables?; to what extent do readers agree with each other in their various preferences? and which linguistic features can help to explain readers' preferences? In order to answer these questions, a total of 42 naturally occurring abstracts were collected from 29 second year Library and Information Science students at Brighton Polytechnic. 26 of these abstracts summarised General Knowledge source texts. 17 summarised Information Science (I.S.) source texts of three different types: journal articles, newspaper items and book chapters. The shortest I.S. abstract consisted of 111 words, the longest 651. Subjective data in the form of opinions of these abstracts were elicited by means of a set of six questionnaires. These questionnaires were administered to the students, to their two lecturers, and to 14 judges representing model consumers of such abstracts. The questionnaires elicited both quantitative and qualitative data. The 8 I.S. judges, for example, were asked to rank up to five different abstract versions summarising the same source text according to how helpful they believed them to be. They were also asked to provide reasons for their preferences. Different grammatical analyses from Systemic-Functional theory were employed to discover to what extent certain linguistic features in the abstracts determine their overall quality as perceived by the judges. Although some suggestions were made to overcome problems with the descriptive frameworks, analyses of generic structure and of cohesive harmony were found to be insufficiently reliable to enable precise hypothesis testing. However, the following linguistic phenomena were investigated more extensively and yielded interesting results: lexical texture; grammatical intricacy and choice of Theme. The answers to the above research questions are as follows. The reasons judges provide for preferring one abstract over another are many and varied; the two most common concern content and what might be termed 'reader-friendliness'. Success in text is a multivariate notion; anyone linguistic measure cannot explain all the variation in judges' preferences. Judges hold widely differing views of what constitutes a successful abstract: scores for Kendall's Coefficient of Concordance, W, a measure of inter-judge agreement, range from 0.109 to 0.597, suggesting that there are different drivers of success and that judges prioritise the importance of these drivers differently. In answer to the question, which linguistic features can help to explain readers' preferences?, the following results were obtained from the various hypotheses tested. Counter-intuitively, it was found that the more successful abstracts were characterised by lower levels of lexical density and were described as being 'clear'. Low levels of lexical density and lexical variation seem to be more the mark of 'reader-friendly' abstract writing, whereas higher levels of lexical density and lexical variation characterise abstracts which contain more information, but are correspondingly harder to process. In contrast to what is claimed in the literature, the hypothesis which stated that abstracts with a larger amount of clause level complexity would be generally preferred over abstracts with a smaller amount of clause level complexity was generally supported. Also, some clause combining strategies were noticeably preferred by the judges~ while others were noticeably dispreferred. However, these preferences were not shared across the different abstract sets. Judges were found to be particularly sensitive to choice of Theme. A new type of Theme was identified to complement the two already existing sub-types of topical Theme, interactional and informational: Themes are to be regarded as discoursal if they refer to aspects of the source material, or to studies which are themselves discussed by the source material. Eight hypotheses concerning choice of Theme were investigated. For example, hypothesis 8 claimed that abstracts with more informational Themes would be preferred over abstracts with fewer informational Themes. This was supported for the Tanzanian set (H8c), but falsified for the other three. The judges seem to be indicating that they deem an informational style to be more appropriate for the Tanzanian source text. The three different types of topical theme serve different functions: informational themes primarily reflect the writer's desire to enlighten, by presenting the raw facts of the message for readers' consideration; discoursal themes primarily reflect the writer's desire in orient their readers, by providing a way of navigating through the various channels in which the information is presented; interactional themes primarily reflect the writer's desire to make it easy for readers to integrate the knowledge, by showing readers how the information relates to the various people involved in its transfer.

This thesis on metaphor and metaphor study covers theoretical and practical issues in the past and the present both in the occidental and oriental worlds. Metaphor in rhetoric, cognitive and applied linguistics is described briefly, mostly as a theoretical issue. It states that metaphor was treated as part of rhetoric in the past, however, recently it has developed more broadly into a facet of human cognition. As a practical issue, professional studies assessing metaphorical competence are highlighted, which inform the measurement of metaphorical competence of Japanese learners of English (Japanese EFL students, hereafter). The author developed her original measurement instruments (tests and evaluations of metaphorical competence) to assess the receptive and productive metaphorical abilities of Japanese EFL students. The tests aims to measure Japanese EFL students' metaphorical competence and discover the answers to what factors affect their comprehension and use of English metaphorical expressions and what kinds of metaphorical expressions are salient or opaque for them. This study showed that the Japanese EFL students' receptive ability was better than their productive ability. It further indicated that the size of their mental lexicons, the elasticity of their linguistic ability, the degree of semantic expansion, and their cognitive flexibility (e.g. analogical reasoning, mapping and networking) were important factors affecting their ability to handle metaphorical expressions. Another important discovery was that L1 transfer might play an ambivalent role. As for the salience and opacity of metaphorical expressions, the degree of clarity of expressions was an important element. For example, the expressions with images easy to visualise were the easiest for the Japanese EFL students to understand and use metaphorically. The highly conventional idioms involving metaphorical meanings were problematic for them to understand and especially to use.

The main research question investigated in this thesis is: In an era when English is increasingly used in international contexts, how relevant are the grammatical findings of native speaker spoken corpora in the ELT classroom? In terms of original research data, the thesis draws, initially, on data from a large-scale quantitative survey into the attitudes of students and teachers to conforming to native speaker norms. The data from this survey shows that a desire to conform to native speaker norms is not restricted to learners with an obvious need to interact with native speakers. The research evidence also indicates that there is some interest among both teachers and students in conforming to native speaker spoken norms, though there is uncertainty about what these norms are, and reservations about whether they should be part of the learner's productive repertoire. The thesis includes a set of materials designed to be consistent both with the results from the attitudinal research and with current methodological insights from second language acquisition research. The thesis describes how these materials were evaluated and piloted, both to elicit further research evidence concerning the attitudes of learners and teachers to native speaker spoken norms, and to assess the potential viability of the materials in the classroom. In the light of the theoretical arguments and research evidence presented, the thesis concludes that it is both possible and potentially desirable to design materials which raise awareness of aspects of native speaker spoken grammar, while respecting that English is no longer the exclusive property of its native speakers. The wider, concluding argument of this thesis is that it is both possible and desirable for the native speaker in contemporary ELT to be an object of reference without being an object of deference.

This thesis is an investigation into the medieval dialect of the pre-1974 county of Herefordshire. The main source materials consist of a group of literary texts of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, localised in the Herefordshire area by linguistic means. The study builds on the methodology developed in connection with the Linguistic Atlas of Late Medieval English (McIntosh, Samuels and Benskin 1986), but goes far beyond it both in its analysis of the individual texts and in using the data for descriptive and interpretative study. The aim is to contextualise and evaluate the evidence, as well as to gain a broad view of the characteristics of the dialect, including both diatopic and diachronic patterns and developments. In order to assess their value as evidence, a detailed dialect is carried out for each individual text; as part of this process, the Atlas localisations are reviewed, taking into consideration the full material now available, and various linguistic and textual questions are discussed. A set of dialect criteria for the localisation of texts within Herefordshire and the South-West Midland area is defined. While the study focuses on the fourteenth- and fifteenth-century materials, comparisons with earlier and later periods are made. Several thirteenth-century literary texts are discussed in detail, including the well-known 'AB-language' and the two manuscripts of The Owl and the Nightingale; the material is further related to the available evidence for the Old, Early Modern and Present-Day English periods. A series of studies of specific areas of grammar and phonology are carried out, covering topics such as the changes affecting the systems of gender, case and number since the Old English period, and the developments of the Early Middle English front rounded vowels, and of Germanic a. A language contact-based explanation of the Old English sound-change known as 'second fronting' is suggested. The linguistic patterns are related to the external history of the dialect, including geographical, political and settlement patterns, language contact with Welsh, and social/economic factors.

My thesis consists of an examination of various types of place-name formations, as evidence of the linguistic contact and interaction which occurred between incoming Scandinavian speakers and the native population of northern Britain, in light of current theories of language contact. The first chapter analyses the nature of the relationship between Scandinavian and Celtic speakers in areas of primary settlement in Scotland, and considers how this relationship is likely to have affected the language and, more specifically, the toponymy in regions of secondary settlement such as the North-West of England, the South-West of Scotland and the Isle of Man. The subsequent chapters examine four different types of place-name formation which are found chiefly in these secondary Scandinavian settlements: inversion-compound names, ǽrgi names, kirk- compound names and bý names. Each chapter looks at the nature and distribution of one of these groups, and investigates how language contact phenomena including bilingualism, lexical borrowing and substratum transfer may have influenced the form and development of such name-types. I have concluded that differing types of linguistic contact, occurring both in primary and secondary settlement areas, may account for the differing usage and distribution of the four categories of place-names. The inception of the inversion-compounds has been re-evaluated and it is argued that rather then having been coined by Scandinavians who were influenced by Celtic work-order, these names were instead created by Gaelic-speakers who had shifted to the Scandinavian language. It is also argued that the more widespread distribution of names in ǽrgi in comparison with the inversion names is not due to the two groups of names by coined by different groups of immigrants, nor because of the secondary dissemination of the element ǽrgi amongst non-Scandinavian speakers, as had previously been suggested. Rather, the disparity in distribution is likely to reflect the fact that the ǽrgi names result from the straightforward lexical transfer of a Gaelic element into the Scandinavian language, whereas the inversion names were created by a specific bilingual substrate element amongst the Scandinavian settlers. In the case of inversion-compounds with the initial kirk- it is argued that rather than representing partial translations of English cirice- or Gaelic cill- names, the names were coined as kirk- compounds within a Gaelic-Scandinavian context. The predominantly Scottish distribution of this toponymic group reflects secondary dissemination of the name-type amongst monolingual Gaelic-speakers in the South-West. In the case of names in bý, it is argued that this group do not represent a purely Danish wave of settlement throughout the Irish seaboard, as has previously been suggested. Rather, linguistic contact between Danes and Norwegians, and later English-speakers, led to the more widespread utilisation of this element.

The central part of this thesis (chapter 3) consists of a classification of 9071 lexical items comprising the semantic field Good and Evil. This classified semantic field, with minor alterations, will form part of the Historical Thesaurus of English currently being compiled in the English Language Department of Glasgow University. Some significant features of the Good and Evil classification system, devised and explained in this thesis, have also been adopted by the Historical Thesaurus. Chapter 1 places the thesis in a wider academic context. It explains briefly the Historical Thesaurus project, and describes how the classification of Good and Evil contributes to this. It also relates the thesis to linguistics, semantics, and especially to semantic theory, lexicography, and semantic classification. Chapter 2 defines the semantic field Good and Evil and discusses how the field was assembled. It provides details of those areas which were either rejected or extended in order to form the semantic field. It then describes in some detail the classification system devised for Good and Evil. The structure of the classification is explained, the use of the parts of speech as a valuable classificatory device is justified, and the contribution of other classificatory work is acknowledged. The chapter also discusses some particular problems and features of the Old English corpus. It ends with lists of stylistic and other conventions. Chapter 3 contains the Good and Evil classification, and chapter 4 consists of detailed notes on the classification. These notes discuss points relating to dating. Old English material, classificatory devices, closely connected categories, and some problems of dictionary definitions, among other things. Chapter 5 conducts a number of studies based on historical and etymological information drawn from the classification. The relative numbers of accessions and losses in different centuries in the categories are presented and discussed. The range of sources of origin of a limited number of categories arc detailed. The patterns of change, and the extent and rate of influence of different languages in different centuries, are then commented on and compared. Chapter 6 selects one area of vocabulary from Good and Evil - animal names used as names for people - and subjects this area to a detailed examination. The variety of animal names, and the range of people to whom they arc applied, arc discussed, and various statistics and comparisons arc drawn up. Also considered is the time gap between the first literal use of an animal name and the first figurative or metaphorical application of the same term to a person. In the process some interesting and, on occasion, unproven points about animal metaphor are brought to light. The thesis ends with three appendices. The first contains extra Good and Evil material not in the main classification, the second details 19th century obsolescences, and the third gives a numerical distribution of items in each category by part of speech

This thesis is an edition of the English texts in British Library MS Sloane 3285, an important fifteenth century medical collection, hitherto unpublished. After an introductory preface, the thesis consists of five chapters, followed by the text, notes and a glossary. Non English items are presented in appendices. Chapter 1 offers a description of the book’s make-up, and gives an account of its place within the Sloane collection. This chapter includes a paleographical discussion of various hands in the manuscript. Chapter 2 discusses the language of the different hands. Chapter 3 places the contents of texts in relation to medieval medical practice and theory. This chapter also offers an outline of the various traditions that lie behind these texts. Chapter 4 discusses the medieval provenance of the manuscript and relates it to its intellectual milieu. Chapter 5 outlines the editorial practice of the edition. An edition of the texts then follows, edited on conservative principles as outlined in chapter 5. The intention of this thesis is to reconstruct the mental landscape that informed the creation of this remarkable medieval artefact.

The present study is an exercise in applied linguistics and discourse analysis. It consists of two parts. While the first part is concerned with aspects of process in EFL academic writing settings, the second part is concerned with aspects of product. In investigating the aspects of process, a survey involving questionnaires and interviews was undertaken, the aim of which was to elicit EFL student and tutor perceptions of the process and acquisition of writing. 210 students studying English at two Jordanian universities: the University of Jordan and Yarmouk University, completed a questionnaire with 'closed' and 'open-ended' questions. In addition, 26 professors from the same universities completed another version of the same questionnaire. In investigating the aspects of product in the writing of EFL students, two mini-corpora of 'successful' and 'unsuccessful' texts, written by a volunteering sample of the students who responded to the questionnaire, were analysed. The aim of the analysis was to explore how EFL students choose formal aspects - syntactical and lexical - to make meanings in their texts. Halliday's systemic-functional grammar formed the basis for the different analytical frameworks (Lexical Density, Theme and Contextual Configuration and Text Structure) used in the analysis of the sample texts. The major findings of the present study are summarised as follows: with respect to the first part of the study, the results appear to be equivocal. Both student and tutor participants in the study confirmed that students in EFL academic writing settings are in need of both low-level and global tuition in English to enable them to write better. There was evidence from both parts of the study that both bottom-up: linguistic aspects such as words and grammar, and top-down: rhetorical aspects, such as the organisation and structure of text, content, and purpose are inseparable factors in the writing process.

This dissertation examines the ways in which cultural definitions of gender, sex, and race have equally impacted and disrupted women and their relationships in postcolonial culture. Such relationships can be with either with oneself or with others. My argument throughout this project is that colonialism as an act of systematic physical and psychological violence, together with its residual effects that split the individual and his/her community, is a primary cause of transgression. Breaking social boundaries takes place through a process of coding and decoding the body where female characters portrayed from a selected range of fiction demand agency in environments that deny them such power. In order to track the development or loss of feminine identity, I comparatively study the characters and incidents alongside one another to show how oppression, across time and space, can produce different expressions of revolt. Unlike colonized men who are also forced to question the integrity and wholeness of their body, with women the oppression is twofold: she is made inferior by nature of her race and her sex. Until today, this has serious implications that hinder the cultural development and economic progress of postcolonial cultures. Hence, the discussions presented in this project call for a feminist and postcolonial understanding of the corporeal body and challenges Cartesian ethics which conceptualize the mind as superior to the body. Arguably, they contribute to other dualities which participate in similar hierarchical ideals when discussing racial and sexual difference such as, self/other, masculine/feminine, civil/uncivilized. Crossing over different geographies, writers such as, Ahdaf Soueif and Toni Morrison showcase women who reject the dualisms, even if some of their struggles end tragically. Representing postcolonial women in this light invites a less biased understanding of the body as lived, and its reactions as consequent to where and how it goes about such living.