This thesis offers an exploratory study of certain aspects of the psychological status of the senses of four polysemous words, over, under, above and below, using three sets of sentence-sorting experiments. The thesis assumes that word senses are examples of linguistic categories; therefore, it is further assumed that categorisation tasks will offer insights into their nature as categories, and that effects predicted by existing models of categorisation can be tested. The first set of experiments questions the representativity of linguists’ intuitions about the senses of these words. The results indicate that expert and naïve speakers’ intuitions do not reliably coincide. This is consistent with existing research into the representativity of expert intuitions in syntax (e.g., Schütze, 1996). The possibility that this is due to individual differences is the subject of the second experiment. The data gathered suggest that there may be individual differences in word senses, consistent with observations of individual differences in other areas of language (e.g., Bates et al., 1995; Street and Dąbrowska, 2014). It is noted that lack of consensus may be a product of the task design, and that the scale of the task may have caused fatigue, forgetting, or semantic satiation. This was remedied in the final set of experiments. Further evidence of individual variation in word senses was found. In addition, the versatility of the methodology was exploited to test whether word senses are stored in memory, and in a manner compatible with the Generalised Context Model of Classification, or exemplar model (Nosofsky, 1986). Participants sorted the same stimuli twice, divided by a period of two months. In general, participants reached better consensus with themselves than with others. This indicates that word senses may have some form of mental representation. Effects of selective attention, a central prediction of the exemplar model, were observed in sorting behaviour. Four original contributions to knowledge are made: (1) there appear to be individual differences in word senses; (2) expert intuitions about what the senses of a given polysemous word are do not correspond to those of other speakers; (3) word senses do appear to have some form of mental representation, but not in the fixed form previously suggested (e.g., Tyler and Evans, 2001); and (4) selective attention effects are observed in this example of linguistic categorisation. The findings indicate that the exemplar model can account for the representation of word senses. This allows the conclusion that we may understand word senses as potential categories of exemplars.

This thesis is a sociolinguistic examination of the ways in which multilingual children and parents negotiate their language use. Through a critical ethnographic inquiry, it focuses in particular on Japanese-English multilingual parents and their pre- and early-school age children living in the UK, across two fields: a Japanese government approved complementary school (Hoshuko), and the family home where parents employ multilingual family language policies (FLP). My main interest is in exploring the ways in which discourses emerging from the policies (governmental and institutional policies regarding Hoshuko, and FLP) are reproduced and/or challenged by individuals’ situated practices and perceptions. Defining multilingualism as a set of social practices and processes, the thesis explores the following four themes: 1) discourses of Hoshuko policies and of FLP, 2) individuals’ language practices and 3) perceptions in the Hoshuko and in the family home; and 4) the mutual influence of discourses, practices and perceptions. By employing Critical Discourse Analysis to analyse relevant Japanese governmental policy documents, as well as the school prospectuses of all nine Hoshuko in the UK, I disclosed the governmental and institutional discourses (Chapter 4). The discourses were then compared with individuals’ situated practices and perceptions identified at one of those Hoshuko, where I conducted a 16-month ethnographic fieldwork (Chapter 5). The discourse of FLP was also scrutinised by comparing it with family language practices and perceptions in the family home (Chapter 6). As a whole, this thesis reveals discrepancies between the governmental and institutional discourse, as well as individuals’ situated practices and perceptions. On one hand, governmental and institutional discourses are undermined by individuals’ flexible practices in particular situations. On the other hand, multilingual individuals also seem to be influenced by discourses which they reflect in their own perceptions; consequently, some multilingual practices go unacknowledged at the level of perceptions. Overall, this thesis enriches our understanding of the dynamics between macro level ideological influences emerging from policy discourses and micro level practices, and of the complexity of individuals’ perceptions involved in the legitimation of their practices in the context of a complementary school and the family home.

The current study sets out to investigate the level of Pakistani university students’ willingness to communicate (WTC) in English and what affects users’ willingness in a setting where English has been taught, learnt, and used as a foreign language. Pakistan is a linguistically complex society where ethnic diversity and multiple educational systems increasingly makes English language teaching (ELT) daunting and challenging. This thesis, therefore, highlights particularly the linguistic issues users of English face while perceiving their willingness to communicate in English in their day-to-day affairs. I argue that linguists and policy makers, in Pakistan, have largely neglected or failed to address the issues related to users of English ability to communicate in English. Moreover, I argue that studying these users’ willingness to communicate in English has also been essential in a sense to comprehend that how such users perceive their level of willingness to communicate under various conversational contexts with different types of interlocutors. The present study was conducted at Shah Abdul Latif University (SALU), Khairpur, Pakistan. Khairpur is one of the oldest cities of Pakistan with its rich cultural heritage and political history. However, the educational standard is still in its early stages of development due to the rural location and lack of interest from the government. Using mixed-method research measures, the current study recruited N=350 research participants for self-administered questionnaires and N=15 for semi-structured interviews. The findings of the present study suggested that users of English from SALU did not have a high level of WTC and their WTC was affected by a host of factors such as topic, task type, interlocutors, interactional contexts, desire to get good grades, gender, lack of self-confidence and communication anxiety, and some of the background variables. Evidence from self-report questionnaires and semi-structured interviews indicated that familiarity with interlocutors and knowledge of the interactional contexts encouraged L2 learners to be more willing to communicate. Results of the study further revealed that the influence of the combination of variables differed between individuals and interrelationship could be too complex to be predicted. At the end, acknowledging the limitations of the current study, recommendations for future research have been proposed along with possible pedagogical implications.

At the forefront of investigations into the cognitive underpinnings of language acquisition is the question of domain-specificity, i.e. whether the processes involved in learning language are unique to language. Recent investigations suggest that the mechanisms employed in language learning are also involved in sequential learning of non-linguistic stimuli and are therefore domain-general. Non-adjacent dependencies are an important feature of natural languages. They describe relationships between two elements separated by an arbitrary number of intervening items, and thus potentially pose a challenge for learners. As a hallmark of natural languages they are ubiquitous, an example from English being subject-verb agreement: The socks on the floor are red. Here, learners are required to track the dependencies amongst the two underlined elements across an intervening prepositional phrase. Importantly, it has been shown that non-adjacent dependencies can be learned in the linguistic (Gómez, 2002) and non-linguistic (Creel, Newport & Aslin, 2004) domain. The majority of work presented in this thesis is based on Gómez’s (2002) artificial language learning experiment involving non-adjacent dependencies, adapted to directly compare adults’ learning in the linguistic and non-linguistic domain, in order to build a comprehensive map showing factors and conditions that enhance/ inhibit the learnability of non-adjacencies. Experiment 1 shows that the Gestalt Principle of Similarity is not a requirement for the detection of non-adjacent dependencies in the linguistic domain. Experiment 2 aims to explore the robustness of the ability to track non-adjacent regularities between linguistic elements by removing cues that indicate the correct level of analysis (i.e. interword breaks). Experiments 3 and 4 study domain-specificity in the acquisition of non-adjacencies, and show that non-adjacent dependencies are learnable in the linguistic and nonlinguistic domain, provided that the non-linguistic materials are simple and lacking internal structure. However, language is rich in internal structure: it is combinatorial on the phonemic/ orthographic level in that it recombines elements (phonemes/graphemes) to form larger units. When exposed to non-linguistic stimuli which capture this componential character of language, adult participants fail to detect the non-adjacencies. However, when exposed to non-componential non-linguistic materials, adult participants succeed in learning the non-adjacent dependencies. Experiment 5 looks at modality effects in the acquisition of non-adjacent dependencies across the linguistic and non-linguistic domain. Experiment 6 provides evidence that high familiarity with componential non-linguistic patterns does not result in the correct extraction of non-adjacencies in sequence learning tasks involving these patterns. Overall, the work presented here demonstrates that the acquisition of nonadjacent dependencies is a domain-general ability, which is guided by stimulus simplicity.

This submission for a PhD by publication is situated in the discipline of Applied Linguistics, focusing specifically on the field of English Language Teaching (ELT) and the relationship between theoretical and disciplinary knowledge on the one hand, and English language teachers’ understandings of such knowledge and its relevance for their own situated pedagogic practice on the other. The submitted work harnesses practitioner experiences in relation to theoretical knowledge and challenges traditional tenets of ELT thought and practice, particularly around the key pedagogic issue of own-language use in the classroom. My publications make an original contribution to the field of ELT from an Applied Linguistics perspective by: •framing a problem-posing approach to professional practice and disciplinary knowledge based on the tenet that practitioner understanding depends on teachers’ own sense of plausibility (publications b, d, and e) •contributing to the development of practitioner understanding of the theory-practice interface in ELT, by: illuminating research and research dilemmas in practice (publication a); exploring the relationship between disciplinary knowledge and local pedagogic practice (publications b, d, and e); and mapping and, where appropriate, challenging traditional assumptions underpinning ELT, particularly concerning own-language use in the classroom (c, d and e). •developing disciplinary knowledge through the collection and analysis of primary data drawn from teachers’ understanding of their own practices and pedagogic contexts (publications a, d, e) or through the shaping of academic and professional discourse through the synthesis of sources (b and c). Consequently, my publications have resulted in a range of impacts and practical applications in the field of ELT across a variety of contexts around the world, in: classroom pedagogy, materials and resource development, curriculum design, and CPD and teacher training/education programmes. Thus, the work put forward in this submission lies on the boundaries of applied linguistic theory and ELT practice, mediating disciplinary knowledge in light of real world experiences, perspectives and problems.

The thesis investigates ways of communicating gratitude are perceived and realised in Jordan and England. It focuses on the impact of several variables on the expression of gratitude and examines the differences between the data elicited by pragmatic research instruments (DCT and role-play). Data were collected from native speakers: 46 Jordanian Arabic, 46 English natives using DCTs, role-plays and interviews. Slight similarities and significant cross-cultural differences were revealed in terms of gratitude expressions’ perception, number and strategy type. This cultural contrast reveals differences in the sociolinguistic patterns of conveying gratitude in verbal and nonverbal communication. The most important theoretical finding is that the data, while consistent with many views found in the existing literature, do not support Brown and Levinson’s (1987) claim that communicating gratitude intrinsically threatens the speaker’s negative face. Rather, it is argued that gratitude should be viewed as a means of establishing and sustaining social relationships. The findings suggest that cultural variation in expressing gratitude is due to the high degree of sensitivity to the interplay of several social and contextual variables. The findings provide worthwhile insights into theoretical issues concerning the nature of communicative acts, the relation between types of communicative acts and the general principles of human communication, especially rapport between people in social interaction, as well as the relation between culture-specific and universal features of communicative activity types. Differences were found between pragmatic research instruments. The outcomes indicate that using a mixture of methods is preferable as long as this serves the aim of the study as it merges their advantages by eliciting spontaneous data in controlled settings. The ramifications of this study for future multi-dimensional investigations of the contrasts between Arabic and English speaking cultures are expected to prove particularly significant in virtue of corroborating or refuting existing findings and in this way paving the way for new research.

Previous research has shown that the English article system poses a great challenge to second language learners of English. Thus, this current study aims at understanding the difficulties first year Libyan students have in acquiring the English article system by using the following three steps. First, the Contrastive Analysis Hypothesis (CAH) was adopted to compare the article system in both English and Arabic. This procedure was employed in order to predict the difficulties that Libyan learners might be confronted by. Therefore, based on CAH, several difficulties were predicted. Moreover, because there are different opinions between researchers from the Arabic world and those from the west regarding the effect of L1 in the acquisition of grammatical items, this study tests what role L1 may play when L2 Libyan learners of English acquire the English article system. The second part aims to investigate the effectiveness of two kinds of article instruction: an implicit teaching strategy (i.e. textual enhanced input) and an explicit teaching strategy (deductive teaching) with an evaluation of the long-term effects. These teaching strategies were compared in order to: 1. Measure the effectiveness in using the English article system appropriately, 2. Measure grammatical development using t-unit, 3. Measure lexical diversity using TTR. The experiment was administrated to three groups of ESL first year students at Garyounis University in Libya. One group (TEI) received instructions based on an input enhancement strategy. In order to direct the learners’ attention to the target features, the researcher manipulated the learners’ input with the aim of provoking development by deliberately engaging awareness and trying to increase the learners’ attention. The second group (DT) was instructed based on the deductive teaching strategy. It was instructed in accordance with two popular grammar books, specifically ‘Essential Grammar in Use’ by Murphy (1998) and ‘Oxford Practice Grammar’ by Eastwood (1999). The third group, the (CG) served as the control group and received exposure to language through reading passages. The procedure of this group was similar to that of the (TEI) group, with the only difference being that the articles in the texts for this group were not enhanced. All three groups were given a similar article test three times as the pre- test, post- test 1 and post-test 2. The pre-test was given prior to the treatment so that the results of the test served to ascertain a baseline for all groups. Then, eight weeks later, after the treatment was finished, post-test 1 was immediately given, in order to measure proficiency gains; post-test 2 was given to the students six months later to distinguish the long term effects on the learning process. With regards to the effectiveness of using the English article appropriately, the results showed that group DT improved from pre-test to post-tests 1& 2. The scores that were above chance in post-test1 & 2 were better than those in the pre-test. In the TEI group, the scores which were above chance, slightly improved from pre-test to post-tests 1 & 2. For the CG group, the scores in post-test 1 which were above chance, improved slightly from pre-test and that the scores in post-test 2 reduced from those of the pre-test. The measurement of lexical diversity was undertaken using TTR. The results showed that both groups TEI and CG presented better results (i.e. development in students’ writing) than the DT group in post-test 1. In post-test 2, only the TEI group improved significantly. This result suggests that the TEI group remained unchanged after 6 months of instruction. The third part of this study analyzed and classified learners’ errors. It confirmed the types of errors predicted previously in chapter 3: omission of a/an/the, unnecessary insertion of a/an / the and confusion between a and an. The results revealed that the percentage of omission of a/an was higher than the omission of ‘the’, and that the percentage of unnecessary insertion of a/an/the was less than the omission of a/an/the.

Previous research has shown some significant differences in the way speech acts are made and responded to in different cultures and languages. This study investigates two speech acts in particular, compliments and refusals, in two specific cultures, England and Poland. The project investigates the role of emotions in communication and social interaction with reference to these speech acts, which are particularly interesting due to their opposite emotional valence: compliments are perceived as positive and refusals are negative. English and Polish compliments and refusals are investigated as the two cultures are often perceived as proximate, which suggests that the observed differences will be particularly interesting as they have the potential to shed light on important and yet intractable distinguishing features of the two cultures. The research has two lines of investigation: theoretical and empirical. The theoretical aspect of research aims to bring together insights on the role of emotions in communication and a cognitive perspective on communication to explain the functions of compliments and refusals in social interaction and the relation between the cognitive and affective aspects of the production and reception of these speech acts. The empirical part of the research is based on an original study that presents new insights into complimenting and refusing behaviour in English and Polish culture. The comparison of English and Polish findings reveals many similarities in complimenting behaviour and some striking differences in refusing behaviour (most notably, Polish speakers tend to be less congruent than English speakers when making refusals and their refusals tend to be more detailed and more elaborate). The pragmatic analysis of the data has some interesting implications for the classification of compliment responses, suggesting that the classification should be based on appreciation, rather than on acceptance or rejection.