Thesis (Ph.D.)--City University of Hong Kong, 2009. / "Submitted to Department of English in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy." Includes bibliographical references (leaves 235-245)

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Texas at Austin, 2001. / Vita. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 132-137). Available also in a digital version from Dissertation Abstracts.

This study offers a pragmatic account of verbal irony, arguing that verbal irony can be best treated as a special type of conversational implicature.As the first part of the thesis, Grice's theory of conversational implicature is revised. This is done by 1)an addition to Grice's Maxim of Quality so that this maxim will be able to take presupposition into account; 2)an inclusion of the notion of mutual knowledge in Grice's framework and 3)an establishment of speakers' motivation for violating Grice's Maxims. This motivation is subsumed into three principles--the Politeness Principle (PP) (following previous writers such as R. Lakoff, Brown and Levinson), which embodies the speaker's need and want to be polite to others, the Selfishness Principle (SP), which constrains the speaker to say things that will bring him/her desirable consequences, and the Expressivity Principle (EP), by observing which the speaker will succeed in leaving more propositional and emotional impact on the hearer. Lastly, a heuristic of implicature production and understanding is offered which is believed to be more coherent and explanatory than Grice's original procedures for implicature calculation.Second, the revised theory is applied to verbal irony. Based on the heuristic of implicature production and understanding, a heuristic of irony production and understanding is provided. This heuristic demonstrates that irony is both similar to and different from ordinary conversational implicatures. It is similar in that it results from the speaker's observance of the motivating principles, and thus violation of Grice's maxims. It is different because 1)It is seen as the violation of the Maxim of Quality alone, while in ordinary conversational implicatures, any of the maxims may be violated; and 2)This violation is caused by all the three motivating principles, the PP, the SP, and the EP, whereas an ordinary conversational implicature is usually motivated by one of these three principles. Finally, this heuristic is applied to various cases of verbal irony, showing that the revised theory of conversational implicature is better than previous proposals on the subjuct. / Department of English

Most studies of pragmatic aspects of language learning have dealt mainly with two languages, a native language and a second or foreign language. None of these studies has investigated a multilingual situation where there is interaction among three different languages spoken by one person. Neither have they dealt with an African language as the first language.The present study was designed to discover the norms of the three languages under investigation and to see how people speaking a second and a foreign language, with different levels of fluency in each, can participate in the activity of the speech communities of the two languages without violating their socio-cultural norms, and what impact, if any, their knowledge of these languages has on each of the languages they speak.Data was elicited from monolingual English and French speakers and trilingual speakers native in Ciluba by written questionnaire, and from monolingual Ciluba speakers by oral interview. In addition, naturally occurring speech acts and TV dialogue were considered. It was found that for the speech acts of apologizing, complaining, and complimenting, Ciluba socio-cultural norms are different from those of English and French, which are similar to each other. In contrast to the socio-cultural norms of French and English, in Ciluba, social distance and relative power between the participants played an important role in deciding whether one of the three speech acts was to be performed or not. However, the results also revealed that, despite the difference in norms which exists between Ciluba and the other two languages, i.e., French and English, some subjects from the group of Ciluba monolingual speakers showed some similarities with the groups of French and English monolingual speakers in their responses to some items in the questionnaire. This deviation from the norms of their native Ciluba was hypothesized to be a result of their contact with the urban environment and its mixed culture.It was also discovered that the trilingual speakers (who were native in Ciluba) used in French and English pattern of address which is not used by native English and French speakers. / Department of English

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-78).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Hong Kong, 2000. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 75-78) Also available in print.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1983. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 140-161).

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1994. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 29, 1994." Also available in print.

Thesis (B.Sc)--University of Hong Kong, 1995. / "A dissertation submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Bachelor of Science (Speech and Hearing Sciences), The University of Hong Kong, April 28, 1995." Also available in print.

This study was designed to examine the hypothesis that the speech of criminal psychopaths is poorly integrated. Measures of cohesion (lexical, referential, conjunctive) and coherence (plot-units) were used to assess the degree to which independent clauses were linked together in the personal narratives of criminal psychopaths and criminal nonpsychopaths. General deviance in communication, as measured by the Scale for Thought, Language, and Communication Disorders (Andreasen, 1980), was also assessed. A significant number of psychopaths produced disordered communications. These communications failed on a number of levels: Psychopaths used relatively few cohesive links between sentences, failed to provide appropriate referents in discourse, failed to link action and resolution in stories, and showed significant clinical impairment in their ability to communicate. The results suggest that effective connections among speech units in psychopaths' discourse are not as numerous as those found in nonpsychopaths. In addition, psychopaths may suffer from a more general impairment in communication that is related to, among other things, discourse which has a tendancy to slip off track and a failure to directly answer a listener's questions. / Arts, Faculty of / Psychology, Department of / Graduate