This is a study of the letters of Joan and Maria Thynne, 1575-1611. It achieves in bringing together archival research, close reading and socio-historical context with the methods and concepts from historical pragmatics. This cross-disciplinary and multi-dimensional approach is demonstrated to be a valuable way of providing more nuanced readings of the letters and of extracting their communicative forms and functions. These documents reward close scrutiny, and the findings of this study offer significant and important contributions to the fields of historical linguistics, early modern rhetoric, paleography, women’s history and letter-writing, as well as for the Thynne family more specifically. Following the theoretical introduction and a short biography of the Thynne family, there are five analytical chapters. The first, Chapter 3, asks how the letters’ prose was organized into meaningful units of information – describing a variety of pre-standard uses for punctuation as well as the organizational and elocutionary functions of other pragmatic markers. Chapter 4 examines the sociopragmatic significance of performative speech act verbs such as beseech and confess and shows how individual manifestations of these forms actually reflect and reiterate larger aspects of early modern English culture and sociability. Chapter 5 compares Joan’s holograph letters and those prepared for her by scribes, exhibiting the social, graphic and linguistic implications of using a scribe. The only direct correspondence from the letters – consisting of two letters sent between Joan and Lucy Audley (Maria’s mother) in 1602 – is the topic of Chapter 6, which discusses rhetoric, language and text as ways of negotiating an awkward relationship, concluding that these features must be considered in respect to one another and in relation to the other letter in order to fully describe their significance. Chapter 7 extends a discussion on ‘sincerity’ begun in Chapter 6 by considering it alongside other ‘voices’ in Maria’s letters – namely sarcasm and seriousness – which are described as interrelated communicative styles dependent upon an anxious awareness of the gap between expression and meaning. The sum of these analyses not only proves historical pragmatics to be a productive method of investigating and systematically describing meaning in individual letter-collections from early modern England, but also suggests a range of new questions, which are presented in the conclusion. Newly prepared diplomatic transcriptions of all the letters are provided in Appendix 1.

Many Koreans not only feel strongly motivated to study English but they also enthusiastically pursue learning the language, and yet when real contact situations arise in which English could be used, many Koreans remain unwilling to do so. Better understanding this phenomenon could benefit not only Koreans but also other groups of people who see great value in learning a language but undercut their own efforts by avoiding opportunities to use it. Through a series of interviews leading to a large quantitative study, this research investigates some underlying factors which influence Korean learners' decision over whether to use English in a particular situation. The main findings suggest that the quality and quantity of previous contact with the non-Korean world, for example through travel and friendship, along with the presence and relative status of other Koreans at the communication event, significantly influence language use. These results generally support the theories of the Contact Hypothesis (CH) and Willingness to Communicate (WTC). These disparate theories, together in the Korean context, suggest a need for greater focus on L2 friendship and L 1 status issues in language learning.

This thesis consists of ten chapters and its research methodology is a combination of quantitative and qualitative. Chapter One introduces the theme of the thesis, a demonstration of a corpus-based comparative approach in detecting the needs of the learners by looking for the similarities and disparities between the learner English (the COLEC corpus) and the NS English (the LOCNESS corpus). Chapter Two reviews the literature in relevant learner language studies and indicates the tasks of the research. The data and technology are introduced in Chapter Three. Chapter Four shows how two verb lemma lists can be made by using the Wordsmith Tools supported by other corpus and IT tools. How to make sense of the verb lemma lists is the focus of the second part of this chapter. Chapter Five deals with the individual forms of verbs and the findings suggest that there is less homogeneity in the learner English than the NS English. Chapter Six extends the research to verb–noun relationships in the learner English and the NS English and the result shows that the learners prioritise verbs over nouns. Chapter Seven studies the learners’ preferences in using the patterns of KEEP compared with those of the NSs, and finds that the learners have various problems in using this simple verb. In this chapter, too, my reservations about the traditional use of ‘overuse’ and ‘underuse’ are expressed and a finer classification system is suggested. Chapter Eight compares another frequently-occurring verb, TAKE, in the aspect of collocates and yields similar findings that the learners have problems even with such simple vocabulary. In Chapter Nine, the research findings from Chapter Four to Chapter Eight are revisited and discussed in relation to the theme of the thesis. The concluding chapter, Chapter Ten, summarises the previous chapters and envisages how learner language studies will develop in the coming few years.

This is a report of a six-year study of working and writing practices in an engineering environment. It is an investigation into a distinctive discourse community of design engineers conducted from an ethnographic perspective. It surveys the engineers’ attitudes towards writing and texts, and describes their distinctive writing practices, including collaborative writing. It shows them to have been acculturated into work attitudes, procedures, and a writing style which are at odds with actual demands made of them in the workplace. The engineering-lore about engineers being generally incompetent or indifferent writers is explored and, for the most part, debunked. The texts that design engineers write are identified, and it is shown that product design, the type of work activity that most engages and concerns the engineers, provides a common thread throughout all the documents considered. Particular attention is paid to proposals and executive summaries, since they give rise to specifications and requirements, all of which give most cause for concern to the engineers and the company. It is shown that proposals are ultimately persuasive in intent, in which engineers must convince the Customer of the superiority of their ‘solution’ over the proposal submissions from other companies. Pragmatism and problem-solving underpin the approach taken to proposal documents, the description and analysis of which is intended to be useful to the engineer writers themselves, and intended to reflect their collaborative writing practices. An analytical approach has been devised, based on information content, which is of potential use for diagnostic or evaluative purposes. Findings arising out the analysis suggest that the proposals and executive summaries written by design engineers comprise a selection of Information Components (ICs) drawn from a finite set of thirty-nine ICs. They indicate the existence of four major foci for proposal texts: three information-based, and one metadiscoursal. The results also seem to indicate that proposal writers may be focusing too much on product design in proposals to the detriment of other key information, which also contributes to the overall ‘solution’.

This thesis presents an analytical study of the expression of evaluation in a highly opinionated type of discourse. This exploration, chiefly motivated by a concern with pedagogical issues, sought to identify and describe some of the strategies used by writers to convey explicit and implicit interpersonal meanings in order to help non-native learners read more critically. In particular, the study attempted to account for some resources of indirect evaluation which have been little described so far. The analysis is on the one hand based on some aspects of the Appraisal Theory, especially on White's (2004, 2005/6) notions of naturalisation and unarguability, and on the other on evaluation conveyed through attributed material. It is argued that such resources indirectly position readers in a stance similar to the writer's own, which places him/her in control of the material and thus, ultimately, of the readers' views. The study concluded that none of the individual strategies was significantly powerful by itself, but that they all interact and reinforce each other's meanings, adding to the cumulative attitudinal effect of the text. It is suggested that the strategies identified in this particular type of text are likely to occur in other text types as well.

This study examines the representation of foreign countries in two US newspapers, the New York Times and the Washington Post. The corpus comprises foreign news reports between the years 1999-2003 amounting to approximately 42 million words of running text. The thesis presents 5 analyses each focusing on collocational and semantic patterns of a given set of keywords. In the first study, premodifiers of the keywords countries/ country/ nations/ nation are examined. It is argued that the semantic patterns of the premodifers construe a hierarchy and polarity among the countries concerned. In the second study, collocates indicating mental and verbal processes of Arab leaders and European/ European Union/ EU leaders are examined. In the third study, verbs of saying attributed to the keywords Blair and Hussein are examined. In the fourth study, the lexical collocate said and a set of grammatical collocates of the keywords China/ Japan/ North Korea/ South Korea are examined. These three analyses show that there are subtle and nuanced patterns in the representation of the countries and leaders which correspond to the countries’ relationship with the US and which transmit the ‘friend and foe’ or ‘us and them’ ideology. In the fifth study, the collocational patterns of the keyword democracy are examined. The analysis shows evaluative and rhetorical functions in the use of democracy in the context of foreign countries. Taken together, the analyses demonstrate cumulatively formed patterns of the representation of foreign countries which can be characterised by the two semantic themes of asymmetry and stereotyping.

This thesis reports a study using a corpus of text messages in English (CorTxt) to explore linguistic features which define texting as a language variety. It focuses on how the language of texting, Txt, is shaped by texters actively fulfilling interpersonal goals. The thesis starts with an overview of the literature on texting, which indicates the need for thorough linguistic investigation of Txt based on a large dataset. It then places texting within the tradition of research into the speech-writing continuum, which highlights limitations of focusing on mode at the expense of other user-variables. The thesis also argues the need for inductive investigation alongside the quantitative corpus-based frameworks that dominate the field. A number of studies are then reported which explore the unconventional nature of Txt. Firstly, drawing on the argument that respelling constitutes a meaning-making resource, spelling variants are retrieved using word-frequency lists and categorised according to form and function. Secondly, identification of everyday creativity in CorTxt challenges studies focusing solely on spelling as a creative resource, and suggests that creativity plays an important role in texting because of, rather than despite, physical constraints. Thirdly, word frequency analysis suggests that the distinct order of the most frequent words in CorTxt can be explained with reference to the frequent phrases in which they occur. Finally, application of a spoken grammar model reveals similarities and differences between spoken and texted interaction. The distinct strands of investigation highlight, on the one hand, the extent to which texting differs from speech and, on the other, the role of user agency, awareness and choice in shaping Txt. The argument is made that this can be explained through performativity and, in particular, the observation that texters perform brevity, speech-like informality and group deviance in construing identities through Txt.

This thesis reports a study of a corpus of 286 suicide notes collected from the Birmingham Coroner’s Office, with additional findings from 33 real and 33 fabricated notes from Los Angeles. Following some background regarding how suicide notes are treated by Coroners’ Courts and other courts in the U.K, the thesis compares topics used in real and fabricated suicide notes. Although there is considerable overlap between the two categories, they can be partially distinguished by some features that are more likely to occur in one category than the other. For example, dates, indications of author identity and trivia are more likely to occur in real notes than fabricated ones. The thesis then concentrates on fake notes and scrutinises instances of atypical language or phraseology and contextually inappropriate content. It is found that these oddities are far more frequent in the fake notes than in the genuine ones. Finally the thesis focuses on the corpus of genuine notes from the Birmingham Coroner’s Office, using an automatic semantic tagger. The findings are that suicide notes contain significant proportions of items indicating affection, the future and their authors’ kin. In addition, the notes include significant proportions of pronouns, names, negatives, intensifiers, maximum quantity terms, and discourse markers.

This thesis examines evaluation in experimental research articles in terms of the meanings made and their contribution to the organisation of the articles. After an introduction to the phenomenon of evaluation in Chapter 1, Chapter 2 surveys recent work concerning the process of scientific discovery and the writing of research articles. Chapter 3 returns to evaluation and its place in various theories of discourse, mainly those of Sinclair and of Halliday. The model of evaluation proposed in this thesis is set out in the next three chapters, dealing in turn with the Status, Value and Relevance functions of evaluation. Status is the function of evaluation which bestows entity, assessing along a certain-uncertain parameter. Value bestows quality and assesses along a good-bad parameter. Evaluation of Relevance is meta-discoursal and marks significance. Relevance Markers are identified, which progressively chunk and organise the text. Comparisons between texts analysed for Status, Value and Relevance demonstrate a movement towards the theoretical and an increase in complexity of argument as the sub-discipline under discussion progresses. Chapter 7 investigates the contribution of evaluation towards text structure and notes a number of ways in which discourse units in experimental research articles may be organised. The concluding chapter, Chapter 8, discusses some of the practical and theoretical implications of the work described in the thesis. The Appendix contains the research articles which comprise the corpus.

The purpose of this study is to investigate disciplinary variation in academic writing, focusing in particular on the use of adjective patterns followed by prepositions. The analysis proceeds through a detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of these patterns in two large corpora of authentic texts. The analysis focuses not only on the specific adjectives found in the patterns themselves, but also on collocations within and around each pattern. The empirical focus of the study will be on two ‘soft-applied’ disciplines (Becher and Trowler 2001), applied linguistics and business studies, as represented by two corpora of research articles drawn from 16 leading journals in each field. Comparison of the results for each corpus shows that there are many differences in form and meaning between the two disciplines: it is argued that the features revealed by my analysis are indicative of the epistemological characteristics of these two different disciplinary discourses. These differences reveal the particular culture and norm of applied linguistics and business studies.