Going beyond Orientalism in its examination of novels dealing with British colonisation in the West, as well as the East Indies, the postcolonial frame of my thesis develops recent theorisations of the Romantic ‘stranger’. Analysing a range of novels from the much anthologised Mansfield Park (1814), to less well-known narratives such as John Thelwall’s The Daughter of Adoption (1801) and Sir Walter Scott’s Saint Ronan’s Well (1823), my thesis seeks to account for a model of ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ within fiction of the period. Considering the cosmopolitan dimensions of the transferential rhetoric of slavery, my thesis explores the ways in which, Jane Austen, Amelia Opie and Maria Edgeworth consider the position of women in domestic society through a West Indian frame. Demonstrating the need for reform both at home and abroad, such novels are representative of a fledgling cosmopolitanism that is often overlooked in current criticism. In seeking to account for ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’ as a new model for reading fiction composed during the Romantic period, my thesis attempts to add further nuance to current understandings of sympathetic exchange during the process of British colonisation. In chapters four and five I will develop my analysis of novels dealing with colonial expansion in the Caribbean to consider novels which deal with the Indian subcontinent. Although stopping short of questioning colonial expansion, discourses of ‘colonial cosmopolitanism’, as my thesis demonstrates, provided a foundation for humanitarian and cultural engagement which was mutually transformative for both the coloniser and the colonised.

This thesis combines corpus stylistic, literary and historical linguistic approaches to test critical observations about the language of Shakespeare’s late plays. It finds substantial evidence of increased syntactic complexity, and identifies significant linguistic differences between members of the wider group of later plays. Chapter One outlines the critical history of the late works, including consideration of stylometric approaches to Shakespeare’s language. Chapter Two describes the stylistic methodology and corpus techniques employed. Chapter Three reports the finding of salient which frequency in the late plays, and details the analytical categories to be used in the examination of which usage, the results of which are discussed in Chapter Four. Chapter Five describes two further analyses, where a broader group of ten late plays is considered on the basis of their high which frequency. The relativisation syntax of the five post-1608 plays (Cymbeline, The Winter’s Tale, The Tempest, Henry VIII and The Two Noble Kinsmen) is found to distinguish them unequivocally as a group, while Pericles stands out as an anomaly. Finally, in Chapter Six it is argued that Shakespeare’s syntax reflects a stylistic phenomenon unrelated to individual dramatic characterisation, motivated by his re-association with the Elizabethan romance writers of the sixteenth century.

This thesis investigates the use to which William Langland puts the Glossa Ordinaria to authorise his vision of ethical, social and ecclesiastical reform in Piers Plowman. There was much in late fourteenth-century England to arouse the ire of the reformer and satirist and among Langland's targets was glossing the Bible. Yet the Bible was only available in glossed editions; so why and how did he differentiate between the Glossa Ordinaria and contemporary glossing? The answer seems to lie in the exploitative and dishonest use to which glossing was often put. Langland sees beyond that, however, recognising the ethical perils of linguistic diversity and more serious still, the lack of ethical content in, and even the antinomian tendencies of conventional (mostly Augustinian) understandings of some major Christian doctrines, such as predestination and free will, original sin, grace, the image of God in man, the Incarnation of Christ, and the relationship between wisdom, knowledge and love. This thesis examines the extent to which Langland deviates from these conventional understandings and revisits older understandings with more ethical productivity and a greater motivation for the laity to live ethically. He finds in the Gloss a source of such understandings.

This is a study exploring the feasibility of a fully automated analysis of linguistic data. It identifies a requirement for large-scale investigations, which cannot be done manually by a human researcher. Instead, methods from natural language processing are suggested as a way to analyse large amounts of corpus data without any human intervention. Human involvement hinders scalability and introduces a bias which prevents studies from being completely replicable. The fundamental assumption underlying this work is that linguistic analysis must be empirical, and that reliance on existing theories or even descriptive categories should be avoided as far as possible. In this thesis we report the results of a number of case studies investigating various areas of language description, lexis, grammar, and meaning. The aim of these case studies is to see how far we can automate the analysis of different aspects of language, both with data gathering and subsequent processing of the data. The outcomes of the feasibility studies demonstrate the practicability of such automated analyses.

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.

By analysing the codicology and other features of a group of fifteenth-century medical manuscripts, my thesis aims to shed some light into the unexplored role of the compilers of medical material. These individuals assembled a number of booklets mostly produced in Middle English, and put them together with the intention to create volumes entirely dedicated to medicine. The thesis proposes a typology that will show the existence of a type of medical codices, whose substantial codicological alteration evince the involvement of the medical practitioners and earliest owners of the volumes in their making. I will argue that the manuscripts were gathered, arranged, and sometimes copied by these practitioners, who, in an attempt to create their own medical handbooks, customised their books in a manner they considered to be pertinent and useful for their practice. A comprehensive analysis of York Minster Library, MS XVI E, one of these practitioner-compiled composites (as I have labelled them) will offer new insights into a codex which has never been examined in detail. The study will eventually demonstrate that medical practitioners played a significant role in the production of fifteenth-century English medical books, especially in the compilation and arrangement of the codices’ booklets.

The Reformation had exposed ideas of female religiosity, ridiculing the contested site of the gendered bodies of nuns. Nevertheless, memories of pre-Reformation religion could not be easily destroyed. Nuns and nunneries are memorialised in a range of early modern English texts, among which this thesis identifies a number of tropes featuring nuns in historiography and drama. The first two chapters examine works by authors with differing agendas, John Foxe and Raphael Holinshed (Chapter 1), and John Stow and William Dugdale (Chapter 2), which can be regarded as memory banks of nun tropes. The next three chapters focus on tropes featuring nuns in drama from the mid 1580s to circa 1640. Chapter 3 examines references or allusions to dramatic nuns, which are generally stereotypical, suggesting the onset of cultural forgetting. Chapter 4 explores plays featuring nuns as characters, where nuns assume various roles, sometimes demonstrating a mix of tropical and innovative in a single play. Shakespeare’s utilisation of nun tropes while accommodating the symbolic value of female religious life to artistic needs is treated separately in Chapter 5. These dramatic tropes are seen to draw from and in turn feed into the tropes circulating in the culture of early modern England.