O contexto econômico e social deste início de milênio impactado pela globalização dos mercados, emergência de novas potências, por conflitos sociais, desafios de sustentabilidade do planeta e uma das maiores crises do capitalismo no hemisfério ocidental indica a carência e a necessidade de novas lideranças para conduzir pessoas em países e organizações por esses ambientes turbulentos. Diante deste contexto, este estudo busca avançar na fronteira de estudos da liderança, associando as abordagens e discussões mais recentes neste campo com a expressão e manifestação de significado por executivos sobre suas próprias carreiras. Para tanto, aplicou-se a abordagem da gramática sistêmico-funcional como ferramenta de análise de redações autobiográficas de executivos, alunos de oito turmas de um curso de pós graduação - MBA Executivo Internacional - interpretando a expressão de significado em suas carreiras. Com base nestas informações sobre a expressão do significado e na classificação das características de liderança expressas por esses executivos, sendo estas inatas ou agênticas; transacionais ou transformacionais, propõem-se uma nova tipologia relacionando características de liderança com o significado. / The economic and social context of this new millennium has been impacted by the marketing globalization, emergence of new powers, social conflicts, challenges in sustainability and one of the deepest crises of financial capitalism in the Western Hemisphere in many years. It all suggests the lack and needing for new leadership to lead countries and organizations for these turbulent environments. In this context, this study seeks to advance the leadership studies frontier, combining the latest approaches and discussions in leadership\'s field, discussing the expression and manifestation of meaning by executives in their own careers. We apply the approach of systemicfunctional grammar to study executive\'s autobiographical essays, as a tool to construing the experience through meaning. Students from eight classes from a graduate course - Executive MBA - wrote their own autobiographical essays and by construing the expression of meaning in their careers, we analyzed the frequency of verbal processes. Based on that information, on the expression of the meaning, and sorting all verbs used in four categories, two by two, taken-for-granted or agentic; and transactional or transformational traits, we propose a new typology of leadership characteristics relating to the meaning expressed.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The distinctive objects designed by Dr Maria Montessori as the centrepiece of her approach to pedagogy are the topic of this study. The Montessori approach to pedagogy, celebrating its centenary in 2007, continues to be used in classrooms throughout the world. Despite such widespread and enduring use, there has been little analysis of the Montessori objects to evaluate or understand their pedagogic impact. This study begins by outlining the provenance of the Montessori objects, reaching the conclusion that the tendency to interpret them from the perspective of the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century fails to provide insights into the developmental potential embodied in the objects. In order to appreciate that potential more fully, the study explores the design of the objects, specifically, the way in which the semiotic qualities embodied in their design orient children to the meanings of educational knowledge. A meta-analytic framework comprising three components is used to analyse the semiotic potential of the Montessori objects as educational artefacts. First, Vygotsky’s model of development is used to analyse the objects as external mediational means and to recognise the objects as complexes of signs materialising educational knowledge. In order to understand how the objects capture, in the form of concrete analogues, the linguistic meanings which construe educational knowledge, systemic functional linguistics, the second component of the framework, is used to achieve a rich and detailed social semiotic analysis of these relations, in particular, material and linguistic representations of abstract educational meanings. Finally, the pedagogic device, a central feature of Bernstein’s sociology of pedagogy, is used to analyse how the Montessori objects re-contextualise educational knowledge as developmental pedagogy. Particular attention is paid to the Montessori literacy pedagogy, in which the study of grammar plays a central role. The study reveals a central design principle which distinguishes the Montessori objects. This principle is the redundant representation of educational knowledge across multiple semiotic modes. Each representation holds constant the underlying meaning relations which construe quanta of educational knowledge, giving children the freedom to engage with this knowledge playfully, independently and successfully. The conclusion drawn from this study is that the design of the Montessori objects represents valuable educational potential which deserves continued investigation, as well as wider recognition and application. To initiate this process, the findings in this study may provide insights which can be used to develop tools for evaluating and enhancing the implementation of Montessori pedagogy in Montessori schools. The findings may also be used to adapt Montessori design principles for the benefit of educators working in non-Montessori contexts, in particular, those educators concerned with developing pedagogies which promote equitable access to educational knowledge.

Purpose: Adults with stuttering (AWS) commonly demonstrate verbal avoidance behaviours as a result of speech-related anxiety. This can result in an experience of ‘communication restriction’. By nature, verbal avoidance and communication restriction are difficult to evaluate objectively, and existing evidence consists primarily of self-report data from qualitative interviews. However, recent preliminary evidence indicates the potential utility of systemic functional linguistics (SFL; Halliday, 1985) to this area of research. The SFL framework provides quantitative analyses for the objective examination of language use in sociolinguistic contexts. Recent data also suggest that the confrontation naming paradigm may be a second possible means for quantitatively evaluating aspects of functional linguistic behaviour in AWS. The purpose of the present study was to identify specific patterns of conversational language and confrontation naming behaviour in AWS using an objective methodology, and to explore these behaviours within the context of stuttering intervention and with reference to the experience of communication restriction. Method: Twenty AWS (14 males, 6 females) and 20 matched controls (AWNS), aged between 16 and 56 years, were recruited for this study. All participants were native speakers of English with no cognitive, language, motor speech, or hearing impairment (with the exception of stuttering in AWS). All participants completed: (a) self-rating scales of general and communication-related attitudes and anxiety; (b) the UC Picture ID (O’Beirne, 2011) picture naming task, designed to objectively evaluate verbal avoidance behaviour; and (c) 10 minutes of spontaneous conversation with an examiner, loosely structured around a range of set topics. For the AWS participants, these procedures were completed pre- and post-attendance at either the Naturalness Intensive Programme in Christchurch, New Zealand (NZ), or the Intensive Stuttering Clinic (Blomgren, 2009) in Salt Lake City, USA (US). All conversational samples were analysed using both conventional and SFL-based analyses. Specifically, the quantity and complexity of verbal output, as well as the frequency of use of transitivity, modality, appraisal, and thematic resources, were examined. To identify group differences on all measures between AWNS and AWS at both pre- and post-treatment, two-tailed independent samples t-tests and Mann-Whitney U-tests were conducted. To compare the performance of AWS between pre- and post-treatment, two-tailed paired t-tests and Wilcoxon matched pairs signed ranks tests were used. Group comparisons were conducted for the full participant group, as well as separately for the NZ and US subgroups. Pearson correlation matrices were also constructed, to identify linear relationships between measures. Correlations between conventional and SFL analyses of linguistic behaviour were of particular interest. Results: Group differences for each subgroup were generally consistent with those for the full participant group. (a) AWS demonstrated higher social anxiety than AWNS at pre-treatment, but self-reported anxiety levels and stuttering impact decreased following treatment. (b) No differences were found across comparisons for confrontation naming performance on the UC Picture ID task. (c) In conversation, AWS produced consistently less language than AWNS, and produced less complex language than AWNS at pre-treatment, as shown by conventional and SFL indices. Specific SFL measures revealed fewer politeness-marking modal operators, more frequent comment adjuncts, and reduced expression of appraisal in the spontaneous language of AWS. Improvements in most of these areas were seen following treatment. The results of the correlational analyses showed that self-report scale outcomes were not linearly correlated to actual performance on any linguistic measures. However, positive correlations were observed between basic linguistic indices (i.e., language productivity and complexity) from the conventional and SFL approaches. An interesting negative correlation between language productivity and frequency of use of comment adjuncts was also seen. Conclusions: The current study extends available preliminary evidence on language use in AWS. Linguistic patterns identified in the conversational language of AWS suggest a reduced openness to interpersonal engagement within communication exchanges, which may restrict the experience of such exchanges. The data indicate that conventional and SFL analyses are interchangeable at a basic level, but also exemplify the unique utility of the SFL framework for examining specific aspects of language functionality within social context. Although AWS and AWNS were not found to differ in performance on the UC Picture ID task, the observations provide insight into the conditions under which verbal avoidance behaviours may be prone to occurring. Finally, the lack of straightforward correlations between self-reported anxiety and avoidance on the one hand, and various linguistic-behavioural indicators on the other, highlights the importance of a multidimensional, holistic approach to clinical stuttering evaluation.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis concerns the intersection of social semiotic theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA), applying systemic-functional (SF) theory to verbal-visual news media texts. The aim of the thesis is to develop social semiotic descriptions of visual meaning in order to facilitate analyses of evaluative stance in visual-verbal text. The texts studied are ‘factual’ daily broadsheet news photos and prominent visual-verbal ‘displays’ that incorporate these photos alongside headlines and captions. Such displays introduce investigative stories on the front page of broadsheet weekly news reviews and are referred to in the thesis as ‘standout’ texts. They are significant because they may also be read as independent texts and play a critical role in positioning a wide readership on the issues investigated in the story. The SF system of verbal appraisal was used in this thesis to develop a corresponding system of visual appraisal. The process involved applying general appraisal options to a corpus of news photos and proceeding to further delicacy in a repeated cycle of analysis and system-building. Once refined in this way the system was applied alongside the verbal appraisal system to account for evaluation in verbal-visual standouts. In the thesis four Australian and four Greek standouts introducing stories on asylum seekers were analysed in order to explore the potential for variation and the impact of context on evaluative meaning choices. The thesis contributes insights into SF theory, media discourse and CDA. The visual systems developed allow appraisal analysis to be extended to images and to verbalvisual texts. Visual appraisal analysis in the thesis provides new evidence for the ideological and evaluative power of news photos. Verbal-visual appraisal analysis shows how each semiotic contributes to evaluative meaning, and to its accumulation and spread across a text. In respect to media discourse, the thesis also provides evidence for the ‘standout’ as an orbital verbal-visual news genre. The comparison of evaluative stance in two sets of standouts demonstrates consistent editorial choices in texts within each context and contrasts across the two sites. The Australian texts display more evaluative complexity, greater emphasis on entertainment and offer two different stances, aligning a diverse target audience. The Greek texts are more straightforward and construct a single stance, aligning a narrower audience. By identifying the semiotic choices involved in the evaluative positioning of readers by visual-verbal texts, the thesis can contribute to more informed and reflective practice. Thus, as well as making theoretical advances, the findings have relevance for journalism and education at a time when the impact of images is changing our conception of literacy.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / The distinctive objects designed by Dr Maria Montessori as the centrepiece of her approach to pedagogy are the topic of this study. The Montessori approach to pedagogy, celebrating its centenary in 2007, continues to be used in classrooms throughout the world. Despite such widespread and enduring use, there has been little analysis of the Montessori objects to evaluate or understand their pedagogic impact. This study begins by outlining the provenance of the Montessori objects, reaching the conclusion that the tendency to interpret them from the perspective of the progressive education movement of the early twentieth century fails to provide insights into the developmental potential embodied in the objects. In order to appreciate that potential more fully, the study explores the design of the objects, specifically, the way in which the semiotic qualities embodied in their design orient children to the meanings of educational knowledge. A meta-analytic framework comprising three components is used to analyse the semiotic potential of the Montessori objects as educational artefacts. First, Vygotsky’s model of development is used to analyse the objects as external mediational means and to recognise the objects as complexes of signs materialising educational knowledge. In order to understand how the objects capture, in the form of concrete analogues, the linguistic meanings which construe educational knowledge, systemic functional linguistics, the second component of the framework, is used to achieve a rich and detailed social semiotic analysis of these relations, in particular, material and linguistic representations of abstract educational meanings. Finally, the pedagogic device, a central feature of Bernstein’s sociology of pedagogy, is used to analyse how the Montessori objects re-contextualise educational knowledge as developmental pedagogy. Particular attention is paid to the Montessori literacy pedagogy, in which the study of grammar plays a central role. The study reveals a central design principle which distinguishes the Montessori objects. This principle is the redundant representation of educational knowledge across multiple semiotic modes. Each representation holds constant the underlying meaning relations which construe quanta of educational knowledge, giving children the freedom to engage with this knowledge playfully, independently and successfully. The conclusion drawn from this study is that the design of the Montessori objects represents valuable educational potential which deserves continued investigation, as well as wider recognition and application. To initiate this process, the findings in this study may provide insights which can be used to develop tools for evaluating and enhancing the implementation of Montessori pedagogy in Montessori schools. The findings may also be used to adapt Montessori design principles for the benefit of educators working in non-Montessori contexts, in particular, those educators concerned with developing pedagogies which promote equitable access to educational knowledge.

Doctor of Philosophy (PhD) / This thesis concerns the intersection of social semiotic theory and critical discourse analysis (CDA), applying systemic-functional (SF) theory to verbal-visual news media texts. The aim of the thesis is to develop social semiotic descriptions of visual meaning in order to facilitate analyses of evaluative stance in visual-verbal text. The texts studied are ‘factual’ daily broadsheet news photos and prominent visual-verbal ‘displays’ that incorporate these photos alongside headlines and captions. Such displays introduce investigative stories on the front page of broadsheet weekly news reviews and are referred to in the thesis as ‘standout’ texts. They are significant because they may also be read as independent texts and play a critical role in positioning a wide readership on the issues investigated in the story. The SF system of verbal appraisal was used in this thesis to develop a corresponding system of visual appraisal. The process involved applying general appraisal options to a corpus of news photos and proceeding to further delicacy in a repeated cycle of analysis and system-building. Once refined in this way the system was applied alongside the verbal appraisal system to account for evaluation in verbal-visual standouts. In the thesis four Australian and four Greek standouts introducing stories on asylum seekers were analysed in order to explore the potential for variation and the impact of context on evaluative meaning choices. The thesis contributes insights into SF theory, media discourse and CDA. The visual systems developed allow appraisal analysis to be extended to images and to verbalvisual texts. Visual appraisal analysis in the thesis provides new evidence for the ideological and evaluative power of news photos. Verbal-visual appraisal analysis shows how each semiotic contributes to evaluative meaning, and to its accumulation and spread across a text. In respect to media discourse, the thesis also provides evidence for the ‘standout’ as an orbital verbal-visual news genre. The comparison of evaluative stance in two sets of standouts demonstrates consistent editorial choices in texts within each context and contrasts across the two sites. The Australian texts display more evaluative complexity, greater emphasis on entertainment and offer two different stances, aligning a diverse target audience. The Greek texts are more straightforward and construct a single stance, aligning a narrower audience. By identifying the semiotic choices involved in the evaluative positioning of readers by visual-verbal texts, the thesis can contribute to more informed and reflective practice. Thus, as well as making theoretical advances, the findings have relevance for journalism and education at a time when the impact of images is changing our conception of literacy.

O contexto econômico e social deste início de milênio impactado pela globalização dos mercados, emergência de novas potências, por conflitos sociais, desafios de sustentabilidade do planeta e uma das maiores crises do capitalismo no hemisfério ocidental indica a carência e a necessidade de novas lideranças para conduzir pessoas em países e organizações por esses ambientes turbulentos. Diante deste contexto, este estudo busca avançar na fronteira de estudos da liderança, associando as abordagens e discussões mais recentes neste campo com a expressão e manifestação de significado por executivos sobre suas próprias carreiras. Para tanto, aplicou-se a abordagem da gramática sistêmico-funcional como ferramenta de análise de redações autobiográficas de executivos, alunos de oito turmas de um curso de pós graduação - MBA Executivo Internacional - interpretando a expressão de significado em suas carreiras. Com base nestas informações sobre a expressão do significado e na classificação das características de liderança expressas por esses executivos, sendo estas inatas ou agênticas; transacionais ou transformacionais, propõem-se uma nova tipologia relacionando características de liderança com o significado. / The economic and social context of this new millennium has been impacted by the marketing globalization, emergence of new powers, social conflicts, challenges in sustainability and one of the deepest crises of financial capitalism in the Western Hemisphere in many years. It all suggests the lack and needing for new leadership to lead countries and organizations for these turbulent environments. In this context, this study seeks to advance the leadership studies frontier, combining the latest approaches and discussions in leadership\'s field, discussing the expression and manifestation of meaning by executives in their own careers. We apply the approach of systemicfunctional grammar to study executive\'s autobiographical essays, as a tool to construing the experience through meaning. Students from eight classes from a graduate course - Executive MBA - wrote their own autobiographical essays and by construing the expression of meaning in their careers, we analyzed the frequency of verbal processes. Based on that information, on the expression of the meaning, and sorting all verbs used in four categories, two by two, taken-for-granted or agentic; and transactional or transformational traits, we propose a new typology of leadership characteristics relating to the meaning expressed.

Philosophiae Doctor - PhD / This research is in the area of child language acquisition, especially, acquisition of figurative language. It investigates how native Cicewa speaking children learn to interpret Cicewa idioms. This is done through examination of sociocultural contexts in which idioms are produced and consumed. It involves the identification of factors influencing children’s acquisition of idioms and strategies employed by children to interpret idioms. The study also investigates how children rerank language constraints in the process of acquiring Cicewa idiomatic meanings. The study is informed by two theories: Systemic Functional Linguistics (SFL) and Optimality Theory (OT). SFL is used to explore the sociocultural contexts within which Cicewa idioms are acquired, produced and consumed. It also helps to explain the social cultural factors influencing children’s choices of meaning options and idiom acquisition strategies. OT is used to establish how children rerank language constraints in the process of acquiring idioms in Cicewa with an aim to identify the developmental stages in idiomatic meaning acquisition. The study adopted cross-sectional and experimental designs. Experiments were conducted on 20 typically developing native Cicewa speaking children with ages 4, 6, 9, 12 and 14 drawn from Mpalume Village, in Chinamawali Township, Zomba Malawi. Deliberately developed stories, sentences containing idioms and idiom lists were used to collect data in five experiments. The data were analysed both qualitatively and quantitatively. Qualitative analysis involved identification of types of responses given by children, strategies employed by children to interpret idioms and factors that influence children’s interpretation and acquisition of idioms. Quantitative analysis was done using Statistical Package for Social Sciences (SPSS) to determine how often a response was given, differences in the responses given by children of different age groups and to establish if there was a relationship between idiom interpretation and the tested factors. The research finds that children produce more idiomatic interpretations when the idioms are presented in stories than when the idioms are presented in sentences and out of context. It also finds that idiom acquisition starts with idiom recognition at around 4 years and interpretation starts at around 6 years with a child interpreting idiomatic expressions involving daily activities of human experience. It also finds that 14 years is the age at which the child’s idiomatic knowledge starts to resemble adult’s knowledge although at this age acquisition of idiomatic meaning is still taking place. In addition, it identifies a number of strategies that children employ to interpret and acquire idiomatic expressions. Among the identified strategies ‘inferring from sociocultural context’ is the only successful strategy. Additionally, the thesis establishes that children learn first idioms that involve daily activities of human experience then idioms with clear cultural frames reference and finally idioms with obsolete cultural frames of reference. It also establishes that knowledge of the sociocultural context in which idioms are consumed is critical in idiomatic meaning acquisition. A child can have skills to use the contextual cues and have knowledge of the grammar but if s/he lacks the sociocultural knowledge cannot correctly interpret an idiom nor acquire it. It also establishes that the language constraints Full Interpretation and CONSISTENT are highly ranked dominating Relevance Principle at the initial stage in idiomatic meaning acquisition and that the two constraints are demoted as the child acquires idiomatic meaning. The thesis also identifies five developmental stages that children go through in idiom acquisition. These are Stage 1: 4 – 5 years, an initial stage in which a child is able to recognize an idiomatic expression as an instance of use; Stage 2: 6 – 8 years, a stage in which a child is able to interpret idioms of daily activities involving human experience when presented in supportive context; Stage 3: 9 – 11 years, a transitional stage in the development of idiomatic meaning in which a child is able to interpret idioms involving daily activities of human experience when presented without supportive context; Stage 4: 12 – 13 years, a stage in which a child is able to interpret idioms with clear cultural frames of reference when presented without supportive context and Stage 5: 14 years and above, a stage in which the child’s idiomatic knowledge is close to adults’ knowledge and a child is able to interpret idioms with absolete cultural frames of reference when presented without supportive context. The study makes a contribution to the idiom acquisition debate by pointing out that sociocultural knowledge is crucial in the acquisition of idioms thereby clarifying what goes on in the process of idiom acquisition. It has also identified and described developmental stages in idiom acquisition. The study is the first not only to use SFL, but more so in conjunction with OT to account for idiomatic meaning acquisition and interpretation. This eclectic mix of theoretical frameworks is novel and thus offers a new perspective of theorizing never done before. Thus, the thesis contributes to the development of linguistic theory, from both SFL and OT perspectives. Overall, the thesis concludes that children come to know an idiomatic expression as a text before they even understand the sociocultural context in which it is consumed. It argues that idioms are acquired as texts and they are acquired together with the sociocultural context in which they are acquired, consumed and produced, and therefore the sociocultural context forms part of the idioms.

This study addresses the question of whether or not pre-service teachers are ready and prepared to use and teach the highly-specialized language of each discipline. The disciplinary languages present teaching and learning challenges due to their lack of parallels in the daily language (Shanahan & Shanahan, 2008). Additionally, the languages of the disciplines are rarely taught and are commonly acquired through an isolated representation of words without a situated meaning within the theory (Gee, 2002). The knowledge of the particular ways of reading, writing, listening to, and talking in the content areas provides opportunities for students’ apprenticeship within the disciplines required for success in higher education contexts (Dobbs, Ippolito, and Charner, 2017). Moreover, this study addresses the question of how future teachers develop disciplinary knowledge and skills. The purpose of this case study was to investigate how mathematical literacy is shaped and defined by the experiences, language, and disciplinary practices of pre-service teachers and experts in mathematics. This overall aim was unfolded by three guiding research questions: 1) What do the Experiences of Pre-Service Teachers and Experts in Mathematics Reveal about their Understanding of Mathematical Literacy? 2) RQ 2. How do pre-service teachers and experts in mathematics use language when solving mathematical problems? and 3) What literacy practices do pre-service teachers and experts in mathematics utilize when presented with modules that require mathematics problem-solving? To structure the elements of analysis for the participants’ responses, I adopted the theoretical support from the emerging disciplinary literacy framework, the novice-expert paradigm, and the tenets of M. K. Halliday’s functional linguistic theory (i.e., Systemic Functional Linguistics; [SFL]). Four faculty in the Department of Mathematics and four pre-service teachers in the Department of Curriculum and Instruction at a large Midwest university agreed to participate in this case study. For the data collection, I asked the participants to participate in two sessions. In the first sessions, the participants responded to a semi-structured interview. Afterward, in a second session, the participants solved modules of mathematical problems following three protocols: a think-aloud, a silent-solving, and an oral-explanatory. The results of the participants’ responses to the semi-structured interview and the three protocols indicated that their experiences as learners and teachers of mathematics are tied to their definitions of literacy and disciplinary literacy. The SFL analysis showed that for the experts of mathematics, mathematical problem-solving is a more abstract and cognitive practice. The pre-service teachers’ registers indicated that mathematical problem-solving is experienced as more concrete and real practice. The unique literacy practices that these participants displayed showed the strong connection between language, literacy, and mathematical thought.The implications of this study are discussed in terms of the importance of language and disciplinary literacy in preparation for future teachers as they progress in their course of study within their teaching education programs.

There are many debates in the field of interpreting the book of James and there is no consensus among scholars. Some propose that this book is a paraenesis, whereas others argue for its inner coherence. On the basis of these disagreements, however, different scholars propose diverse themes for this book. This work attempts to view the book of Jams has a linguistic approach to identify its cohesion and its discourse theme. After providing a brief introduction to the understanding of cohesion based on the model of Systemic Functional Linguistics, this thesis represents a model of discourse analysis, seeking for the cohesion in this book and arguing that wisdom is the discourse theme of James through an analysis of the cohesive ties between James 3:13-18 and the rest of the discourses. / Thesis / Master of Arts (MA)