A major challenge in second-language pedagogy and research is that of determining linguistic competence. Spontaneous oral production gives some indication of the state of a learner’s interlanguage, but the presence of non-target-like forms in such production confounds the analysis since the teacher or researcher cannot be certain whether such forms are random or systematic. Corrective feedback (CF) in oral production, usually in the form of recasts or elicitation, can thus appear arbitrary and inconsistent. This thesis investigates the effectiveness of delayed CF, in which representative samples of learners’ non-target-like production are systematically collected and tracked. The investigation employed three methods: first, accuracy and fluency in production were measured by means of a test in which learners reformulated their own non-target-like production and that of peers; second, accuracy and reaction time were measured as learners judged the well-formedness of those same reformulations; third, the developing complexity of learner production is monitored by means of an ‘error corpus’. Results indicate that delayed CF of this kind is effective in pushing learners towards greater complexity and accuracy in both production and recognition, and constitutes an approach to the problem of determining what the individual learner knows that has theoretical validity and pedagogical relevance.

This study ascertains what is recognisably distinctive about seventeenth-century Quaker prose compared to other contemporary varieties of prose, and identifies characteristic features of that style. By compiling and investigating through corpus analysis techniques a collection of texts from a wide range of authors, I reveal key elements of the language through quantitative methods not previously applied to this subject. The study is not genre-based nor is it a literary investigation of a single author. The corpus is unusual in comprising texts by many different people within the same community of practice, demonstrating a remarkable uniformity of style and discourse. Typical stylistic features include a speech-like informal register, idiosyncratic syntax and sentence length, and I suggest reasons why Quakers developed this sociolect. In key Quaker lexis I found unexpected frequencies and usage, including findings that differ from assertions in the critical literature. Corpus analysis provides new insights into early Quakerism as well as establishing a new mode of research. My findings clarify understanding of early Quaker writing, experience and practice, dispelling some present-day misconceptions.

This thesis surveys the gradual emergence and development of the English testament from the earliest surviving examples until 1499. The introductory section of this interdisciplinary study examines the religious and legal origins of the first vernacular dispositive acts, the oral roots of the testamentary process in the Anglo-Saxon period, and the development of the written will in the centuries before and after the Conquest, including detailed comparisons between early thirteenth-century texts from Worcester and Exeter. The second section begins by examining the processes of will-writing in later-medieval England in detail, analysing the essential linguistic components of the canonical testament before using two specific groups of wills from mid-fourteenth- and late-fifteenth-century London to explore nuances of composition and phrasing. Having established the context and structure of the developed form, a detailed comparative analysis of the testamentary language contrasts the phrasing of wills written in Latin and French with that used in the emerging English texts. The succeeding chapters focus on the testamentary archives of Bury St Edmunds and York, these case studies including examination of vernacular texts composed on behalf of women, trends in urban and rural usage, the effect of periods of high mortality on language choice, scribal methods, and the regional character of testamentary language.

Although there has been considerable research into Language Learning Strategies (LLS) in a variety of educational and cultural contexts, it is still the case that there have been few sociocultural LLS studies that have tried to understand learners’ approaches to learning and using a second language within a particular cultural context. In contrast to widespread LLS studies conducted within a cognitive psychology framework, this interpretive study has attempted to understand the dynamics of the shifts and developments in language learning strategies used by a group of Chinese Masters students in a UK University within a sociocultural theoretical framework. A qualitative approach was used in this research. Data was collected at three stages over a time span of one year of Chinese students' MA academic study in the UK. The first and second stage data collection involved interviews that explored the participants’ LLS use and how this changed and developed during their period of study abroad. The third stage data collection involved a questionnaire survey to validate whether the salient findings identified from the first and second stage interviews also applied to a wider group. Findings suggest the overall characteristics of the participants’ LLS use tend to be creative, flexible, voluntary and independent. The participants’ dynamic changing language learning strategies were shaped by interaction with various social mediating agents: peers, teachers and tutors and other native speakers, social material resources, technology and other artefacts, socio-contextual realities, assessment modes, and all in interaction with learner agency. The outcomes provide insightful and useful guidance to Chinese university students who are planning to pursue their higher education abroad in English-speaking education systems and offer suggestions to teachers and policy makers in China and the UK about the kinds of support that they can offer Chinese students, especially in terms of the development of their competence in their studies through English.

This is a practitioner-research study of the development of criticality in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) contexts, via pedagogy for autonomy, exploratory practice (EP), and arts-enriched research methods. The study begins with an exploration of criticality with respect to the literature on Critical English for Academic Purposes (CEAP), critical pedagogy, critical thinking, and critical theory. The context for the empirical research was three short programmes/modules on academic English, involving 56 students in total, at two HE institutions in the UK and a partner university in China, over a total period of seven months. The aim of the research was to identify signs of criticality in what we did; and whether and how pedagogy for autonomy, EP, and arts-enriched research methods were conducive to criticality development. Data collected included my own diary; students’ reflective writing; reflective drawings/paintings; voice- and video-recorded group discussions and presentations; posters made in class; semi-structured interviews; and conversations. Themes emerging in each teaching phase/cycle are presented in three central chapters, followed by a cross-phase rearrangement which reveals three main overarching themes: being in charge; sociological and cultural awareness; and collaboration and others. These serve as the basis on which to identify signs of criticality and to discuss to what extent and how pedagogy for autonomy, EP and arts-informed research methods contributed to criticality development. The main signs of criticality included students’ enquiries into their own epistemic doubts; dialogue for understanding and joint enquiry; and developing awareness of the constructed nature of knowledge and socio-cultural discourses and practices, and of struggles in the performance of difference. The study contributes to understanding of the nature of criticality and how to develop it in EAP contexts; and of aspects of pedagogy for autonomy, EP and arts-enriched methods. The study shows the value to EAP of a broader understanding of criticality with contributions from CEAP, critical pedagogy, critical thinking and critical theory. The value of pedagogy for autonomy, EP and arts-enriched research methods in the development of criticality is also highlighted, and practitioner-research is shown to contribute insights that can illuminate other practitioners and the field more broadly.

This thesis investigates Free Indirect Discourse for speech presentations [FIS] in the work of Jane Austen, and presents the discovery that it is a substantial feature of her narrative style, unexpectedly versatile, performing various functions and effects, ranging from the basic to the sophisticated. Critics have often discussed the primary function of Free Indirect Discourse for both speech and thought presentations [FID] as a means of merging the voices of the narrator and a character. They have focused especially on Free Indirect Discourse for thought presentations [FIT] as an important vehicle for presenting the heroine’s subjective ideas within the narrative. A primary function of FIS identified by previous critics is, on the other hand, the narrator’s mimicry of a character’s speech, owing to the gap in the dual perspectives of the narrator and a character. I have made a strict distinction between FIS and FIT and conduct a full survey of Austen’s FIS with a stylistic approach, which demonstrates that Austen’s FIS is not limited to the basic functions formerly discussed. I propose that it serves at least eleven functions, both satirical and non-satirical. I have given names to these functions, for example, FIS for ‘Formal Politeness’, ‘Condensed Conversations’, ‘Voices in Harmony’ and ‘Filtering Information’. The narrator in Austen’s novels sometimes restrains her subjective view and exists as a transparent mediator to present a character’s speech, as in modernist novels. Austen uses these different functions of FIS in specific episodes to silently guide the reader’s interpretation. On a larger scale, Austen uses the embedded nature of FIS in contrast with FIT or Direct Thought in the foreground, which is similar to the painter’s technique of using ‘light and shade’ to create perspective. As a case study, I have analysed Austen’s technique of FIS for ‘Concealment of Plot Development’ in Emma. As part of my survey, I also revise the origin of Austen’s FID. Critics have presumed that Austen must have discovered FID in the work of immediate precursors, particularly Frances Burney. It is true that the writers of the late eighteenth century sporadically used FIT. However, in respect of FIS, I argue that its origin can be traced back to the early eighteenth century, and changes in punctuation marks for speech in English typesetting. Proto-FIS and FIS occasionally appear in the work of major writers of the eighteenth century, such as Samuel Richardson, Joseph Fielding, Laurence Sterne, and Mary Wollstonecraft. Austen may have gained ideas about FIS from the limited usage in their works. However, while FIT became a feature of the fiction of some writers, such as Charlotte Smith and Ann Radcliffe in the 1790s, FIS was rarely used in this period. Austen excavated the proto-style and developed it with remarkable speed. Austen is not just the first writer who employed FIS in a substantial way, but a brilliant exponent of the technique.

Hospitals and other health institutions around the world have begun to tie staff promotion and careers to publication; accordingly, an increasing number of medical journal articles are being written by non-native English speakers and novice writers. This work aims to analyse medical journal articles as a genre, and follows Swales’ (1990) framework for doing so, by interviewing a sample of the discourse community and finding the Rhetorical Moves that make up the genre, with additional investigation of stance, via selected reporting verbs, and cohesion, through selected discourse markers. I compiled one of the larger corpora of medical research articles (250), as well as one of the most recent (2001-2011). Previous studies reviewed 50 articles at most, drawn from earlier periods of time. As part of the examination of the genre, this study includes discussions with a sample of the discourse community, the users of the genre, with interviews from ten doctors and five editors from around the world who have a wide range of experience in writing, publishing and editing articles. In addition, I identified 17 Rhetorical Moves, with four considered optional, with the idea to identify a sequence that writers and educators can use to see how the medical article may be written. I also examined 13 reporting verbs to determine if it is possible to identify authorial stance regarding the information being reported, and were coded as being factive (the authors agreed with the information), non-factive (the authors conveyed no judgement on the information) and counter-factive (the authors disagreed with the information being reported). Finally, the study looked at how cohesion is maintained through examples of the five types of discourse markers. This study presents the most comprehensive examination of the genre to date, which, through the utilization of corpus analysis techniques, allows a more in-depth analysis than previous studies.

By examining language simultaneously along the paradigmatic and syntagmatic axes, Sinclair (2004a) identified the lexical item as an object of the discourse comprising an obligatory core and semantic prosody, and optional collocates, colligates and semantic preferences. This research investigates Sinclair’s theoretical model by locating the lexical items that are associated with the complementary verbs come and go in the spoken and written discourses in a selection of the International Corpora of English (ICE). The corpora selected are ICE-Canada, -GB, -India and –Jamaica. This research is innovative in that it adapts Sinclair’s methodology to examine high frequency lexical items across different discourses and different World Englishes It establishes that there is a significantly greater difference in frequency of the lexical items associated with come and go within the different discourses of the ICE corpora in comparison to between the ICE corpora. It replaces the core with the node, it introduces structural preference and discourse preference as co-selection components of the lexical item, and it substitutes semantic force for the term semantic prosody as defined by Sinclair: the ‘reason why [the item] is chosen’ (Sinclair 2004a: 144). Thus the lexical item comprises an obligatory node and semantic force, and optional collocates, colligates, structural preferences, semantic preferences and discourse preferences. As a consequence of these theoretical and methodological adaptations, this research shows that semantic forces with the associated co-selection components can function in tandem and that semantic forces, again with the associated co-selection components, can function in layers. The research concludes that the lexical item is not an identifiable object in the discourse, but it is the syntagmatic realisations of a paradigmatic choice.

This thesis examines the intellectual history of male friendship through its articulation in non-Shakespearean early modern drama; and considers how dramatic texts engage with the classical ideals of male friendship. Cicero’s \(De amicitia\) provided the theoretical model for perfect friendship for the early modern period; and this thesis argues for the further relevance of early modern translations of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and in particular, Seneca’s De beneficiis, both of which open up meanings of different formulations and practices of friendship. This thesis, then, analyses how dramatists contributed to the discourse of male friendship through representations that expanded the bounds of amity beyond the paradigmatic ‘one soul in two bodies’, into different conceptions of friendship both ideal and otherwise. Through a consideration of selected dramatic works in their early modern cultural contexts, this thesis adds to our understanding of how amicable relations between men were arranged, performed, read and understood in the early modern period.

As cognitive linguistics argues, the meaning construction processes that we employ to understand and interact with the world around us are dynamic processes and are highly metaphorical. Conceptual Metaphor Theory proposed by Lakoff and Johnson appears to be insufficient to explain the fuzziness in categorization and the emergence of mixed metaphors. Categorization theory indicates that meaning construction processes are not fixed while the presence of mixed metaphor casts doubt on the idea whether metaphor production is simply a cross domain mapping. Moreover, metaphor is also cultural-cognitive that it is a good tool to explore the ways of thinking, evaluations, values and attitudes of the people speaking the metaphor. On the pragmatic level, the choice of metaphor helps deliver the stance and achieve the persuasive ends of the writers. In my study, I compare how the commonly used word ‗economy‘ is construed with metaphors in the economic discourse in two locations, Britain and Hong Kong, in an attempt to illustrate the above mentioned ideas. Firstly, on the cognitive level, I compare the conceptual metaphors manifested in shaping the concepts concerning ‗economy‘. I argue that primary metaphors are near-universal across cultures. Moreover, I discuss some of these mixed metaphors observed in my corpora in order to illustrate that meaning construction processes is dynamic processes. I also suggest observing cross-cultural differences in conceptual metaphor by looking at the change of image schema. Then, I further investigate these conceptual metaphors on the cultural-cognitive level, in an attempt to explore the ideas attached with the word ‗economy‘ in these two locations. Finally, I attempt to illustrate the pragmatic functions of metaphors, that is, how the choice of metaphors helps achieve the persuasive ends of the writers.