The research explores an aspect of writer-reader interaction in native and non-native speaker student argumentative essays. Based on the assumption that writing is inherently a dialogue between writers and readers, this study looks in detail at key aspects of the ways in which Iranian and British students interact with their readers, bring them into the text, and involve them in the construction of the discourse and the arguments in order to contribute to the interactiveness and persuasiveness of the text. Three linguistic resources – interactant pronouns, questions, and directives – are looked at in a corpus totalling 334 short argumentative essays produced by Iranian EFL writers (at two proficiency levels of high and low and two test versions of Academic and General) and British A-level students. The texts are analyzed using specially devised analytical frameworks and with the help of WordSmith Tools, a corpus analysis software. The results reveal that both language groups use the three linguistic devices for fairly similar purposes, indicating the generic similarities in the writings of both groups of students. The findings, however, show noticeable quantitative differences: the British students use questions more frequently than the Iranian students, whereas the Iranian students use interactant pronouns and directives considerably more frequently than the British students. The quantitative differences seem to be related to distinct cultural conventions as well as the Iranians’ overall lower proficiency level. Within the Iranian sub-corpora, Iranian high-scoring and Iranian Academic students use the three interactive resources more frequently than their low-scoring and General counterparts. The pedagogical implications of the study for novice EFL writers are outlined.

This thesis is about two things. Firstly, drawing on Michael Hoey’s Lexical Priming, it aims to extend the research represented in that book – into the roots of the concept of priming and into how far Hoey’s claims are valid for spoken English corpora. The thesis traces the development of the concept of priming, which was initially work done by computational analysts, psychologists and psycho-linguists, to present a clearer picture of what priming means and in how far the phenomenon of priming has been proven to be a salient model of how man’s mind works. Moving on from that, I demonstrate how this model can be adapted to provide a model of language generation and use as Sinclair (2004) and Hoey (2003 etc.) have done, leading to the linguistic theory of Lexical Priming. Secondly, throughout the thesis two speech communities are compared: a general community of English speakers throughout the UK and a specific community, namely the Liverpool English (Scouse) speakers of Liverpool, UK. In the course of this work, a socio-economic discussion highlights the notion of Liverpool Exceptionalism and, grounded in the theory of lexical priming, I aim to show through corporaled research that this Exceptionalism manifests itself, linguistically, through (amongst other things) specific use of particular words and phrases. I thus research the lexical use of Liverpool speakers in direct comparison to the use by other UK English speakers. I explore the use of “I” and people, indefinite pronouns (anybody, someone etc.), discourse markers (like, really, well, yeah etc.) amongst other key items of spoken discourse where features of two varieties of English may systematically differ. The focus is on divergence found in their collocation, colligation, semantic preference and their lexically driven grammatical patterns. Comparing casual spoken Liverpool English with the casual spoken (UK) English found in the Macmillan and BNC subcorpora, this study finds primings in the patterns of language use that appear in all three corpora. Beyond that, there are primings of language use that appear to be specific to the Liverpool English corpus. With Scouse as the example under the microscope, this is an exploration into how speakers in different speech communities use the same language – but differently. It is not only the phonetic realisation, or the grammatical or lexical differences that define them as a separate speech group – it is the fact that they use the same lexicon in a distinct way. This means that lexical use, rather than just lexical stock, is a characterising feature of dialects.

This thesis uses the philosophy of Jacques Derrida to propose a performative method of close reading, which it uses to explore the relationship between language and identity in early modern literary representations of magicians. It addresses the common assumptions we make about the authority and stability of language by exploring the tensions that arise as the magicians attempt to use performative language to realise impossible ambitions of absolute power, knowledge and self presence. The texts studied are a combination of prose and drama from 1512 to 1607. They are read in light of Derrida’s engagement with speech act theory in ‘Signature Event Context’ and ‘Limited Inc a b c . . .’ , and also other related work of his on the performative foundations of literature and the law, including ‘Before the Law’, ‘The Law of Genre’, and ‘Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations’ of Authority’. The final chapter also takes in Aporias. The magicians’ trajectories are followed in three chapters. The first is on the founding violences of their authoritative identities. Working with Derrida’s accounts of the law, it begins by describing how the foundation of authority is self-authorizing and therefore performative. It then explores how performative pacts, deals and contracts with the devil are used to establish and authorize the magicians and their supernatural worlds. This metatextual authority is reflected in the magician’s own ambitions for the certainty and stability of absolute power and knowledge. Using the early modern sense of ‘perform’ as to complete, carry out or make something, the second chapter focuses upon materiality and embodiment as attempts to stabilise or fix performative utterances. Fake suicide notes and contracts written in blood are analysed to demonstrate the slip and drift equally at work in the structures of writing and signatures. In addition, Friar Bacon’s enormous brass head with its promise of ‘sound aphorisms’ is discussed as an alternative example of the misinformed urge to embody certainty. The final chapter addresses why almost all the stories of magicians, good and bad, end with their deaths. Following Derrida’s Aporias, death is represented as the ultimate opening limit, which undermines all attempts at certainty and self-presence. This leads to discussion of the other’s role in identity and, it follows, death. The magicians’ ends are compared, with particular focus on the sense of a coming event in the final scene of Doctor Faustus. The use of Derrida’s work to engage with early modern texts responds to a significant gap in the field. It offers original, contemporary insight into traditional themes of power, language and identity that are usually approached from a historicist perspective. The critical-creative close reading describes and carries out by the thesis suggests an exciting way to performatively respond to literature of the past, bearing witness to it but also transforming it into something new.

This thesis investigates the way English L2 learners of Spanish communicate face-to-face with other learners (NNS), and native speakers (NS) by means of communication strategies (CSs). The final aim is to examine the learners’ strategic use of the target language as influenced by three variables: the proficiency level, the type of task and the type of dyad. Learners with different proficiency levels interacted face-to-face when carrying out two types of tasks. 36 interactions with different combinations of dyad and task were elicited by means of video and audio recording, observation of participants’ interactions and stimulated recall methodology. Quantitative and qualitative analyses were conducted to investigate possible associations between CSs and tasks, dyads and proficiency levels in each setting. The major findings in this study indicate a higher use of CSs in beginner levels, which was reflected in the lower level learners’ concern for solving lexis-related problems, and their tendency to focus on less complex grammatical features of the language. The higher level learners, however, seemed to focus more on grammar-related problems, as well as on more complex aspects of the target language. A similar lexis-grammar distinction was observed for the task variable. The open task, a free-conversation activity, involved higher cognitive demands due to the lack of visual support and the linguistic freedom provided by the topics given. This pushed the learners to invest more in the conversation, by attempting to produce more L2 and more conceptually complex ideas, thus making it a more grammar-oriented activity. Conversely, the closed task, a jigsaw activity, resulted in a more linguistically demanding task due to its linguistic restrictions, through the visual context provided, posing more lexis-related problems. Finally, the NNS-NS’s non-shared status was the major influence on the learners’ CSs. The NS – through their linguistic expertise – did not only assist and guide the learners, when this help was elicited through the learners’ CSs, but also triggered comprehension problems because of their more complex speech. The NNSs’ similar status, on the other hand, although also triggered the learners’ appeal for help – albeit to a lesser extent – the interlocutor was less likely to provide the assistance required, and just acknowledged their peer’s message to avoid a communication breakdown and maintain the conversation. It seemed that the learners do not expect this assistance as much as when interacting with a NS, as they are aware of their mutual lack of L2 resources, and because their shared characteristics also promote a mutual, implicit understanding between them.

This thesis argues that British and French novelists and illustrators in the late nineteenth century frequently represent pathological narcissism as a defining feature of masculinity in the period. It states that depictions of men’s illness in decadent and middle-brow novels and illustrations of the fin de siècle do not chiefly reflect models of self-obsessive sickness in nineteenth-century psychology. Instead, they anticipate the early and mid-twentieth-century narcissism and schizoid pathology outlined by Sigmund Freud and the object relations theorists Harry Guntrip, Ronald Fairbairn, and Donald Winnicott. Rather than diagnosing authors and illustrators, or suggesting that the artworks reflect a ‘real-life’ sickness in the period, the thesis constructs a fictional male self-obsession. It asserts that novelists and illustrators portray this illness as the almost inevitable result of male characters’ fin-de-siècle socio-economic and intellectual context. Further, it suggests that the novelists and illustrators represent the whole of society as exhibiting pathological self-absorption, but depict the narcissism of fictional men as distinct from that of their female counterparts, and as varying with the male characters’ class. Artists convey the sickness, the thesis argues, through both characterization and style. The Introduction provides an overview of key developments in the theme of pathological self-obsession in psychology, psychoanalysis, cultural commentary, and literary criticism from the nineteenth century to the present day. It presents the Freudian and object relations theories which provide a theoretical framework in subsequent chapters, and the socio-economic and intellectual factors which fin-de-siècle writers and illustrators portray as causes of male narcissistic illness. Chapter one constructs a pathology of male self-absorption in two novels often labeled quintessentially decadent: Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890, 1891) and J.-K. Huysmans’s A Rebours (1884).The fictional male aristocrats mistakenly believe that their choice to be ill distinguishes them from women and the masses, and qualifies them for membership of an elite. This portrayal of upper-class men’s sickness is contrasted with that of the Duke’s illness in Jean Lorrain’s Monsieur de Phocas (1901) in order to demonstrate how decadent representations of pathological masculinity changed during the late nineteenth century. Chapter two discusses two middle-brow novels: George and Weedon Grossmith’s illustrated The Diary of a Nobody (1888-89, 1892) and Jerome K. Jerome’s Three Men in a Boat (1889). The lower middle-class male characters exhibit the same schizoid illness as the aristocratic men in Dorian Gray and A Rebours. The way that the sickness manifests itself, however, is lower middle-class: unwittingly or otherwise, the men emulate the upper-class male’s illness whilst consciously celebrating health. Chapter three considers Max Beerbohm’s Zuleika Dobson (1911) and the illustrations and additions the author made to his copy of the novel in the two months after its first publication. It argues that Beerbohm looks back at the late nineteenth century and parodies its satire of pathological masculinity. The thesis emphasizes the fact that men in decadent and middle-brow novels and illustrations share the same illness, even though in the former the sickness is explicitly stated, and in the latter the pathology, for fear of destroying the novels’ light-hearted tone, is only intimated and is overlooked by critics. By considering these supposedly disparate genres alongside one another, I argue, the features of characterization and style which convey male narcissistic illness become evident in middle-brow novels and illustrations. The thesis, that is, interrogates the labels ‘decadent’ and ‘middle-brow’ and thereby provides fresh insights into both late nineteenth-century depictions of masculinity and fin-de-siècle aesthetics.

This thesis is a study of the literary practice of shared reading as practised by The Reader Organisation (TRO) in its Get into Reading (GIR) project. The first and shorter half of the thesis offers an introductory location of the key elements of GIR practice within TRO’s sense of the English literary tradition. The first two chapters thus examine the foundations for the reading of poetry (in chapter one with regard to the Elizabethan lyric) and prose (in chapter two in relation to Victorian realism) within GIR. Part two investigates the actual praxis of shared reading aloud in groups. Chapters three to five provide an account of the methodology and findings of research into the practice of GIR. ‘Bibliotherapy’ is problematised here as a term which, whilst it appeals to the idea of the relevance and use of books, and points to the existence of a place for reading within a specifically prescribed area, also risks narrowing down the idea of the shared reading model. Chapters three and four, forming the central part of the thesis, set out the terms of a literary-critical analysis of transcripts collected from GIR sessions, and outline the discovery within these transcripts of evidence of a varied model of literary thinking prompted by the reading-group leaders trained by TRO. Chapter three concentrates on the group-session transcripts; chapter four on individual case-studies across sessions. These chapters provide the focus for the thesis as a study of the non-specialist responses of real readers to what literature is. A toolkit is offered to identify certain tools and values that are implicit within the experience. It is to be hoped that future studies might refine, correct, or build upon the analyses set out in these chapters in particular through the use of established formal techniques such as conversation and discourse analysis. But the initial aim here was to investigate the phenomena in literary terms ahead of any such alignment with the categories of linguistics. In chapter five the findings of the present study are consolidated through a series of individual interviews with a number of the participants, offering their experience at another level and in reflective aftermath. Increasingly GIR is being introduced as a form of intervention within modern mental health care, and the thesis closes with a consideration of the place of shared group reading within the context of health and the languages of cure or therapy.

This thesis presents the design and evaluation of a new concordancer called The Prime Machine which has been developed as an English language learning and teaching tool. The software has been designed to provide learners with a multitude of examples from corpus texts and additional information about the contextual environment in which words and combinations of words tend to occur. The prevailing view of how language operates has been that grammar and lexis are separate systems and sentences can be constructed merely by choosing any syntactic structure and slotting in vocabulary. Over the last few decades, however, corpus linguistics has presented challenges to this view of language, drawing on evidence which can be found in the patterning of language choices in texts. Nevertheless, despite some reports of success from researchers in this area, only a limited number of teachers and learners of second language seem to make direct use of corpus software tools. The desire to develop a new corpus tool grew out of professional experience as an English language teacher and manager in China. This thesis begins by introducing some background information about the role of English in international higher education and the language learning context in China, and then goes on to describe the software architecture and the process by which corpus texts are transformed from their raw state into rows of data in a sophisticated database to be accessed by the concordancer. It then introduces innovations including several aspects of the search screen interface, the concordance line display and the use of collocation data. The software provides a rich learning platform for language learners to independently look up and compare similar words, different word forms, different collocations and the same words across two corpora. Underpinning the design is a view of language which draws on Michael Hoey's theory of Lexical Priming. The software is designed to make it possible to see tendencies of words and phrases which are not usually apparent in either dictionary examples or the output from other concordancing software. The design features are considered from a pedagogical perspective, focusing on English for Academic Purposes and including important software design principles from Computer Aided Language Learning. Through a small evaluation involving undergraduate students, the software has been shown to have great potential as a tool for the writing process. It is believed that The Prime Machine will be a very useful corpus tool which, while simple to operate, provides a wealth of information for English language teaching and self-tutoring.

The poetry of George Crabbe has for a long time not received the attention it deserves. Part of the reason for this is that it does not easily fit the preconceived trends in eighteenth and early nineteenth century verse. This thesis looks at Crabbe from a new direction, exploring his writing on its own terms. Using previously unexplored writing, the thesis builds a fuller picture of the poet’s interests in the world and examines how these informed the creation of his major achievement, the verse tale. The preface opens arguments for re-evaluating the critical reception. It considers the apparent twenty-two year gap in Crabbe’s writing career and argues that the activities of this period must be considered to fully understand the verse tales he produced in the latter period of his life. Chapter one examines the origins for the tale. Looking at Crabbe’s interest in redressing what he considered ‘failings’ in poetry it draws together examples of the poet’s original innovation. Using a hitherto unexamined poetic fragment in the John Murray Archive, a view is put forward that Crabbe had already begun writing tales during the twenty-two year gap, countering the opinion that the form was arrived at from experimentation in ‘The Parish Register’. Chapter two considers the largely overlooked impact that Crabbe’s faith had on his poetry. Examining a wide range of the poet’s unpublished religious manuscripts, it redresses the view that he entered the church simply to support himself writing poetry. It counters the opinion that these are simple ‘moral tales’, demonstrating a more complex view that Crabbe’s firm soteriological views did not allow such judgements to be made. Chapter three explores the poet’s naturalist endeavours and examines how his pursuits in scientific classification shaped the arrangement of his writing. It puts forward new evidence for the range of taxonomic systems the poet was using, and argues that the attention to specification had a significant impact on the poet’s realistic portrayals of the world. Chapter four draws together the arguments of these chapters in considering the poet’s representation of altered psychological states. It builds a detailed picture of key examples of realist narratives in Crabbe’s tales. In the conclusion, the impact of Crabbe’s writing is addressed. Looking at how his poetry influenced a wide range of writers in the nineteenth century and beyond, it argues that the poet’s refusal to simplify the complexities of the world set the foundations for Victorian realism.

This thesis examines the motif of terraforming from Wells’ War of the Worlds (1898) to James Cameron’s film Avatar (2009) in order to assess the dialogical development of ecological themes and its imbrication with politics in science fictional narratives of terraforming. It tracks the growth of the theme in four distinct phases that are contextualised by a short history of terraforming in the introductory first chapter. Chapter two examines the appearance of proto-terraforming and proto-Gaian themes in British scientific romance and American pulp sf prior to Jack Williamson’s coining of the term “terraform” in 1942. Environmental philosophical concepts of nature’s otherness, Lee’s Asymmetry, Autonomy and No-Teleology Theses and notions of identification with nature are examined in this connection to illustrate the character of these texts’ engagement with environmental philosophy and ecopolitics. Chapter three examines the development of the terraforming theme in primarily American 1950s terraforming stories and explores how the use of elements of the American Pastoral are deployed within the discourse of sf to consider the various ways in which the political import of terraforming is imagined. Chapter four explores the impact of the environmental movement of the 1960s in terraforming stories of the 1960s-1970s. Beginning with a consideration of the use of Gaian images in characterisations of alien ecologies, this chapter then progresses to consider a parallel strand of terraforming stories that transform the themes of the 1950s texts in the light of the impact of the 1960s environmental movement. Chapter five concludes this analysis by considering two major trilogies of terraforming written in the 1980s-1990s, Pamela Sargent’s Venus and Kim Stanley Robinson’s Mars trilogies. These works inherit the discourse of terraforming established by earlier works and re-configure them in ways that address contemporary environmental and geopolitical concerns.

The changing nature of English Language teaching in today’s world, driven by the forces of Globalisation, prompts a number of questions about the roles and identities of English language teachers. Previously acceptable dichotomies, notably ‘native/non-native speaker’ and ‘Centre/Periphery’ are consequently being challenged in studies of who teaches English, where they teach it and what they teach. I embarked on the current study because I felt that the ‘native/non-native’ dichotomy did not adequately describe the knowledge and skills of English teachers I had worked with worldwide. I developed a qualitative interpretative approach, as befitted the interpersonal nature of the study, and gathered data by recording conversations with fifteen participants from seven countries about their experiences of learning, using and teaching English in their contexts. The rich content they provided enabled me to delve below the oft-quoted dichotomies and uncover qualities rarely acknowledged in multilingual teachers. The most important features identified in the study concern the diminished importance of the ‘native speaker’ and the concomitant growth in the confidence of the multilingual teacher. My data reveals that this confidence has been acquired through depth of linguistic knowledge, through observance of other cultures, and through resistance to the encroachment of English by finding a place for the language which satisfies the needs of multilingual users without requiring subservience. In discovering these strengths of multilingual teachers, my exploration of their contexts demonstrates the importance of stepping outside the boundaries of one’s own limited environment and appreciating the range and depth of knowledge which individual English teachers are able to draw on to take ownership of their professionalism.