Recent studies of metaphor have stressed both its importance to thinking and its pervasiveness in language. A number of researchers now claim that metaphorical transfer often connects semantic domains at the level of thought. This has implications for formal features of individual linguistic metaphors and for the lexical relations holding between them. The linguistic data used by metaphor researchers has largely been either intuitively derived or taken from small hand-sorted collections of texts. As yet, there have been few attempts to systematically examine metaphorical linguistic expressions in non-literary corpus data. In this thesis I use corpus data to examine a number of polysemous lexemes and I attempt to establish whether their metaphorical meanings, the lexical relations holding between these meanings, and aspects of their collocational and syntactic behaviour can be accounted for by a theory of metaphor as conceptual mapping. The investigation comprises a number of studies of non-innovative metaphorical expressions and their literal counterparts. I conclude that the contemporary theory of conceptual metaphorical mapping accounts for some features of linguistic metaphor but that it does not completely explain the data.

This dissertation concentrates on the role of the conceptual metaphor LIFE IS A JOURNEY in English hymns of the 17th and 18th centuries, addressing the following research questions: 1) To what extent and in which contexts have elements of the lexical category of travel, applied metaphorically, been used in English spiritual language and literature in the period 1650–1800? 2) How has metaphorical extension affected the semantic development of this category? This dissertation discusses the use of travel metaphors as structural schemata for complete hymns, and analyzes the use of individual elements of travel-related terminology across a historical textual corpus. The analyses in this dissertation are undertaken in light of recent trends in semantics, and with the aim of contributing to the development of Cognitive Metaphor Theory as a tool for historical linguistic analysis and literary criticism.

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 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.

Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials has caused controversy as well as enjoyed great popularity among readers worldwide. Its influence has created a great impact in the field of children’s literature. The purpose of this thesis is two-fold. Firstly, the thesis analyzes gender representations in Pullman’s trilogy in the context of how he rewrites female archetypes through the subversive re-inscription of Eve, the invention of daemons, the reinvention of ‘femme fatale’, and the new portrayal of Gypsy women. Secondly, the thesis aims at comparing and examining how gender representations in the source text are translated, transformed or / and manipulated in its Chinese translation. With reference to Chinese gender ideology, which includes the Chinese concept of the ying-yang polarities, Buddhist notions of gender, the notion of the femme fatale, and the stereotypical image of Chinese grannies, the syntactic and semantic alterations made by the Chinese translator are investigated. Issues regarding how Chinese gender views may influence and alter the translation product are discussed in detail. By studying the similarities and differences in gender representations between the texts, the thesis attempts to shed light on the gender ideology of both English and Chinese contemporary cultures.

Personal names form one of the most important sections in the system of proper names that are traditionally studied within the field of onomastics. Personal names contain history, tradition, culture as well as all characteristic features of each ethnic community. The general aim of this research project is to have a cross-cultural approach to personal naming based on the systems of Vietnamese and English. Due to the broad scope of the topic of personal names, my research focuses on given names only. First of all, to establish a theoretical background, I dwell on onomastic problems with the focus on the semantic characterisation of proper names, and cultural issues in the study of personal names. I then argue that the views on meaning of names espoused by the Millian and Fregean schools can be reconciled, and that as a cultural universal, names convey both denotational and connotational contents but the content of names can only be determined in each specific language community based on clarification of traditional and cultural values embodied in naming process. Next, the thesis approaches Vietnamese and English given names by reviewing their historical and linguistic characteristics and then classifying them into relevant groups and subgroups. The main purpose of these taxonomies is to bring out the topological characteristics of Vietnamese and English given names as well as the naming trends and forces that have formed the two cultures over the past centuries. Finally, I present a comparison and contrast of Vietnamese and English given names covering all the aspects on the basis of which I institutionalise the theoretical reconciliation of Vietnamese and English personal naming systems, and establish that a reconciliation of the two naming systems is possible within a single overarching framework for their theoretical discussion.