Welsh-born harpist and composer John Thomas performed for audiences throughout Europe serving as the harpist to Queen Victoria of England. He was trained in London at the Royal Academy of Music, yet remained loyal to his Welsh heritage throughout his life. He began composing at the age of 16 while still a student at the Academy and continued arranging and composing repertoire for harp well into the Twentieth Century.This document will show that John Thomas was instrumental in the development of virtuosic harp literature and the recognition of the double-action pedal harp as a concert instrument while maintaining a strong sense of Welsh Nationalism as demonstrated in his original compositions. Like the Welsh harpists and composers before him, Thomas collected and preserved Welsh Airs. In addition, Thomas participated at numerous Eisteddfoddau, lectured on the history of the Welsh Harp, and wrote the "Welsh Music History" article in the first edition of the Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. However, unlike his predecessors, Thomas composed for the modern pedal harp and employed virtuosic techniques heretofore unexplored in Welsh harp music.Though this harpist, composer, and music historian produced a prolific output of virtuosic works and historical writings, very little has been documented on his life and career. There are no complete works lists in print. Many of Thomas' manuscripts and published works remain out of print in the National Library of Wales. The Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians contains only a brief article on this composer's life and career.Thomas is internationally recognized as a leading composer and performer among harpists of the Nineteenth Century. His works are still performed by harpists in recitals at international conferences and competitions including the World Harp Congresses. Further, Thomas' students became touring performers and made a significant mark on the performing arena throughout much of the Twentieth Century.

No description available.

Thesis advisor: Michael J. Connolly / The Insular Celtic languages, such as Irish and Welsh, distinctively feature a morphophonemic process known as initial consonant mutation. Essentially the initial sound of a word changes due to certain grammatical contexts. Thus the word for 'car' may appear as carr, charr and gcarr in Irish and as car, gar, char and nghar in Welsh. Originally these mutations result from assimilatory phonological processes which have become grammaticalized and can convey morphological, semantic and syntactic information. This paper looks at the primary mutations in Irish and Welsh, showing the phonological changes involved and exemplifying their basic triggers with forms from the modern languages. Then it explores various topics related to initial consonant mutations including their historical development and impact on the grammatical structure of the Celtic languages. This examination helps to clarify the existence and operations of the initial mutations and displays how small sound changes can have a profound impact upon a language over time. / Thesis (BA) — Boston College, 2008. / Submitted to: Boston College. College of Arts and Sciences. / Discipline: Slavic and Eastern Languages. / Discipline: College Honors Program.

Contemporary media audiences expect to be able to interact with content, but in a minority language context, audience participation presents challenges related to audiences’ linguistic confidence. This thesis focuses on Wales, where media producers have suggested that audiences are often reluctant to interact with broadcast and online content in Welsh. To begin to understand this unwillingness, and how it might be overcome, the concept of willingness to participate (WTP) is coined as an extension of willingness to communicate (McCroskey & Baer 1985). First, interviews with producers are analysed qualitatively to identify potential influences on audiences’ WTP. The analysis aims to assess the relative importance of various factors: audiences’ feelings of apprehension, self‐perceived competence, language background and Welsh language ability, as well as the modality of participation (oral/written) and the level of demand placed on the audience. Second, a questionnaire is designed and administered to 358 Welsh speakers, to examine audiences’ perceptions of different opportunities to participate in media content. A path model of WTP is proposed and tested using quantitative data from the survey. The results support the hypothesis that audiences’ apprehension and self‐perceived competence predict WTP and that audience response varies according to the media context. While audiences’ Welsh language skills are important in explaining their WTP, other aspects of language background, such as Welsh language acquisition context, are found to be less important. Third, the survey sample is grouped according to common patterns of WTP, to test whether the above effects are consistent across the population or whether different ‘types’ of audience exist. Using a combination of cluster analysis and thematic analysis of audience comments, four types of audience are proposed and described in detail. Finally, implications for sociolinguistic theory, language maintenance and media production practice are considered and recommendations made.

Taking the case study of the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show, the largest event of its kind in Europe, this thesis examines the role that agricultural shows have in the modern-day countryside. Agricultural shows are a key fixture in the rural calendar. In recent years these events have changed from being a social and competition space, purely aimed at rural residents, to today displaying the finest livestock, mechanical, technological, and skills innovations serving a wide number of economic, social, cultural and environmental features targeted at the wider population. Despite their significance to rural society, agricultural shows remain largely unexplored in geography. Taking a mixed methods approach, and by undertaking an in-depth study of the Royal Welsh Agricultural Show, this thesis investigates the role that agricultural shows have in (re)imagining and (re)presenting their host communities. The thesis continues by examining the manner in which large-scale rural events can be seen as a nexus for knowledge exchange and innovation, before considering how large scale rural events influence the politics and governance of rural areas. This thesis suggests that agricultural shows are an important means of collective identity for rural people, and that these events reimagine their host communities. It also finds that agricultural shows are vital sites for the development of social capital in rural areas, have significant roles in knowledge exchange, and the development of rural buzz. Finally, it is concluded that agricultural shows inhabit a powerful, but extraordinary location within the political landscape of their host communities, having an influence on their politics and governance.

Since the initial stages of 1980s, the global world faced the huge shift. Many security scholars try to challenge and review the mainstream security studies that derived from a combination of Anglo-American, statist, militarized, masculinized, methodologically positivist, and philosophically realist thinking. ¡§The Welsh School¡¨ of Critical Security Studies is one of the most important approach. The Welsh School thinks about security as developing in the light of the Frankfurt School, and brings the tradition of ¡§critical¡¨, ¡§epistemology position¡¨, and ¡§emancipation¡¨ to the security studies. The Welsh School separate the core of critical security studies(CSS) into three concepts: security, emancipation, and community, therefore, this study try to explain and review these concepts. Firstly, CSS tried to ¡§deepen¡¨ the concepts of ¡§security¡¨, deconstruct statism and bring the referent to individual, and then ¡§broaden¡¨ the agenda of security to discuss the traditional and non-traditional issues in the globalization world. Secondly, CSS emphasize the relationship of theory and practice, and expect to achieve their goal-¡§emancipatory politics¡¨. Via the construction of emancipatory community, people could released from contingent and structural oppressions, and create a free and equal environment. Despite the states still the major referent in international institution and security environment, and the main concept of The Welsh School still not practice in contemporary politics, but the first task of CSS is to bring a revision of the world, and then create a comprehensive and humanity security thinking.

This thesis is an attempt to document and explain the manifest changes that have been taking place in Welsh identity since 1979, and the political consequences thereof. It is presupposed that before any autonomist outbursts and other, related political changes take place in a sub-national region such as Wales, some sort of identive change has to occur. This 'identive change' is posited to take place in two stages - identity transformation followed by identity mobilisation. Central chapters deal with this process in two, non-exclusive, dimensions - institutions and individual agents. Alongside institution-building, certain policy areas are deemed to be of crucial importance in relation to the maintenance and dissemination of Welsh identity, namely education and broadcasting. In addition, the relationship between endogenous and exogenous forces affecting Welsh identity is considered in the context of civil society, political praxis, the economy and the European Union. These events are charted and analysed by means of primarily qualitative techniques which emphasise the importance of the positional and strategic confluence of individual 'gatekeepers', who are able to influence policy and, perhaps more importantly, affect the perception and reception of new ideologies and institutional exigencies.

In this dissertation I discuss the phenomenon of initial consonantal mutation in modern Welsh, and explore the syntactic structure of this language: I will concentrate on the syntax of Colloquial rather than Literary Welsh. It transpires that mutation phenomena can frequently be cited as evidence for or against certain syntactic analyses. In chapter 1 I present a critical survey of previous treatments of mutation, and show that mutation in Welsh conforms to a modified version of the Trigger Constraint proposed by Lieber and by Zwicky. It is argued that adjacency of the mutation trigger is the criterial property in Welsh. Chapter 2 presents a comprehensive description of the productive environments for mutation in modern Welsh. In chapter 3 I give a short account of Government and Binding theory, the framework used for several recent analyses of Celtic languages. I also discuss proposals that have been made concerning the underlying word order of Welsh, a surface VSO language. Although I reject SVO underlying order, I conclude that there is nonetheless a VP constituent in Welsh. Chapters 4 and 5 concern the role of NPs as triggers for Soft Mutation: both overt and empty category NPs are considered. In chapter 5, which centres on wh-traces, it is shown that the variable appears in a wider variety of construction types in Welsh than had previously been suggested. A pre-head relativization site for extractions from VP and NP is posited. Chapter 6 develops the theme of the role of wh-traces in unbounded dependencies, and it is argued that all relative clauses in Welsh are formed by wh-movement. The final chapter, chapter 7, looks at the wider variety of relative clause types found in Colloquial Welsh, and presents an analysis of the patterns of mutation and pronoun retention in the light of the NP Accessibility Hierarchy.

Er ei fod yn lletchwith a hirwyntog ar brydiau defnyddir yr enw llawn John Gwilym Jones trwy gydol y drafodaeth. Buasai defnyddio John neu John Gwilym yn awgymru agwedd bersonol anghymwys; buasai Mr neu Dr Jones neu J Gwilym Jones yn orffurfiol; a hyfdra dibarch fuasai defnyddio JGJ (ond feli defnyddir yn y nodiadau). Hepgorir teitlau (Mr, Dr, Yr Athro, Syr) yn gyfan gwbi. Er mwyn gwahaniaethu rhwng defnydd John Gwilym Jones a llenorion eraill o goll geiriau ( ... ) yn eu testunau alm toriadau fy hun defnyddiais goll geiriau rhwng bachau petryal i ddynodi fy nhoriadau fy hun fel rheol. Cedwais ddyfyniadau o'r Saesneg yn yr iaith wreiddiol a chyfieithiadau o ieithoedd eraill ilr Gymraeg neulr Saesneg yn iaith y cyfieithiad.

This thesis undertakes to refine our understanding of the syntactic properties of sentential negation. The proposed analyses operate at the juncture of recent innovations to Case, Agreement, and X-bar theories, within a Government and Binding framework. Case is checked in a Specifier/Head configuration whenever possible, and agreement is analyzed as the reflex of a Case-checking operation at S-structure. The proposal that the inventory of functional categories available in Universal Grammar includes a Negation Phrase (NegP) is adopted as a point of departure. / In the context of this investigation, certain syntactic properties are attributed to the head and specifier of NegP. It is proposed that the specifier of NegP provides an A-position in which NPs may be Case-checked. S-structure Case-checking is reflected in agreement marking on the negative head. Evidence for LF Case-checking in this position is derived from the Case-licensing of direct objects in negated clauses in Colloquial Welsh and Russian. Definiteness effects are analyzed as due to constraints on an additional Case-licensing option required if negation blocks Case assignment under government. Variations in agreement patterns in affirmative and negative relative clauses in Literary and Colloquial Welsh are attributed to the barrier status of the head of NegP.