Taiwan¡¦s yacht manufacturing driven by overseas buyers has brought Kaohsiung so far from the local, but so close to the world, in a unique relation between the global production networks (GPN) and the local cluster. In accordance with the commodity flow in the economic geography, it formulates the embeddedness within the yacht cluster, connects to the global market, in terms of recognition of ¡§yacht culture¡¨. The method applied in the study is one-to-one interview. The interview records are to be validated by cross-checking with the publicised written documents, and personal experience to the UK boat shows. Firstly, the specialised cluster of Kaohsiung yacht industry is analysed by members, organisations and business trends. Then, the yacht market is explained globally, such as the characteristics of the transnational corporations (TNCs), the commodity chains, and especially, the dealers/brokers, who act as key controller at the sales channel. In addition, the recognition on yacht industry invisibly dominates the aspects of manufacture and business nature, from local to global, which incubates its importance from yacht culture. Finally, the role played by the state for the past years, as supporter and destroyer, is to be evaluated accordingly. Is yacht implied simply as a product, or a life-style? In fact, Taiwan¡¦s yacht manufacturers grouped in a specialised cluster have been benefiting from job flexibility by producing quality items with fast income. However, the business model of Kaohsiung yacht cluster is to be reshaped, due to the demand of branding and creativity, reinforcement of market access, and inevitable global flows of manpower and resources.

Univ., Diss.--Utrecht.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Hong Kong, 2001. / Includes bibliographical references (leaves 224-232).

Thesis (M.A.)--University of Queensland, 2002. / Includes bibliographical references.

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)

Thèse--Paris. / Published also as Brazil. Departamento Administrativo do Serviço Publico. Serviço de Documentação. Publicação avulsa. n.488. Bibliography: p. [245]-249.

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.

Much research on requests has been carried out among L1 Chinese adults, L1 Chinese children, L1 children, L2 adults, and L2 children, but no studies to date have simultaneously examined Chinese children's requests in Chinese (L1) and English (L2). The aim of this study is to investigate how Taiwanese elementary school children vary requests according to situation, language, age, and hearer variables, and the level of consistency between the child interview results and the validation results. Semi-structured individual interviews with child participants were used as the major method for data collection. Naturalistic school and home observations, interviews with parents and teachers of the children, audio and video recordings, and field notes were also included to validate and triangulate the child interview data, which were coded and analyzed using a modified version of the CCSARP coding scheme and an excellent level of intercoder reliability was reached.Results indicate that overall: (1) requests made under rights-protecting situations seem to be more direct and reasonableness-based than those made under favor-asking situations, (2) Chinese requests appear to be more direct and elaborate than English requests, (3) older children are more likely than younger children to frame direct, brief, and tactful requests, (4) child hearers are more likely than adult hearers to receive direct requests, and (5) for an individual child, the child interview and validation findings appear to be compatible, except that consistency is low regarding requests given to classmates. The results lend strong support to the claim that language use can be highly context-specific as can the request performance of children. This study may bring new insights into understanding the complexity of Chinese children's requests, thus sensitizing educators and parents to the significance of pragmatic competence in Chinese children's earlier development of language, whether Chinese or English, and helping them provide instructions that better suit children's pragmatic development and ability.

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