Includes bibliographical references and index. / Although John Bardwell Ebden was actively involved in almost every branch of colonial life during the period 1806 - 1849, this is the first detailed study of his role in and contribution to the development of the Cape Colony during that long period. In addition to a wide range of secondary sources which gave a general indication of Ebden's activities, primary sources in the Cape Archives Depot, Cape Town, such as the archives of the Governor, Colonial Office,Legislative Council, Wine Taster, Notarial Deeds and papers of the Cape Town Commercial Exchange and Chamber of Commerce and of the Anti-Convict Association, supplied the necessary details which enabled a full-scale reconstruction to be made of his contributions in a variety of fields. All archival sources mentioned in this thesis are housed in the Cape Archives Depot except where otherwise indicated.

Includes bibliography.

This thesis investigates some aspects of spatial language of isiXhosa. It identifies the elements of isiXhosa used in the spatial domain and analyses their use and distribution across the language. Six isiXhosa-speaking language consultants were interviewed, all males between the ages of eighteen and twenty-two years. They have all grown up in the Eastern Cape province of South Africa and are currently attending tertiary institutions within the Western Cape. The methodological framework adopted for this research was developed by the 'Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics' (MPI) in Nijmegen, Netherlands. Their research tools "Man & Tree" and "Space Games" were employed to gather the language data on spatial language of isiXhosa. A particular focus in this study was placed on investigating the underlying spatial models employed in the deictic axis, i.e. the face to face model or the single file model. The data reveals that both models seem to be employed by the young male isiXhosa-speakers of the study. Furthermore, the thesis also analyses what frames of reference these particular isiXhosa speakers utilize. The survey revealed variation in the use of models among these young speakers. This variation can be explained as language contact phenomena since all language consultants are in an English speaking environment at least for several years.

Includes bibliographical references. / This ethnographic, sociolinguistic study describes the writing practices of teachers and students in a Portuguese-language primary school in Mozambique. In the classroom, teachers and students engage in a text-chain ritual in which the teacher copies a text from the textbook onto the chalkboard, which is then copied by the students into their notebooks. Using the theoretical framework of social semiotics, this study situates classroom writing within a range of multimodal practices which scaffold the written texts. This study employs the notion of resemiotization in order to describe the ways in which signs are transformed as they move between different sites of display. This resemiotization is framed by educational ritual with the language of instruction, Portuguese, being a second language (hereafter ‘L2’) to most of the students. Because of the linguistic constraints of the L2, rote- copying practices predominate in the classroom. Copying allows lessons to move forward despite the comprehension difficulties of the students. The text-chain is shown to be simultaneously reductive and expansive. Subsequent links tend to be reduced representations of their originating signs even while these signs serve as the basis for expansive multimodal ensembles which include speech, drawing and gesture, as well as the use of the students’ home language. This study employ s the notion of mimesis in order to account for the ways in which the resemiotization observed in the classroom is both imitative and creative. Each instance of writing imitates a previous link in the text-chain but also shows evidence of teachers and students creatively shaping their texts. In order to study these writing practices, more than 40 classroom lessons were observed during two research trips to Tete, Mozambique. This study used observation and photographic data-records to trace the movement of texts over the course of a lesson. Photographs of the chalkboard were taken as the chalkboard text grew and changed. In each classroom, six students were selected and their notebook writing photographed. The photographing of the chalkboard and notebooks allowed for the comparison of these texts as they were produced in the classroom. Additionally, teachers and educators were interviewed to provide insight on classroom writing practices. During these interviews, teachers were asked to describe their schooling experience and compare it with schooling today. Teachers and educators also provided background information on bilingual education and their use of a technique known as currículo local , ‘local curriculum’ , in which teachers use local language and culture to create connections between classroom knowledge and students’ existing knowledge. This thesis draws attention to the complexity of writing practices in L2 classrooms. Writing is shown to be a term that covers a wide range of practices including rote copying, drawing, doodling, and pseudo-writing. These writing practices take place in an environment marked by linguistic and semiotic diversity. This thesis expands the use of the term resemiotization by looking in detail at the material and social processes that occur in the classroom. Additionally, this thesis draws attention to ritual as an organizing principle for resemiotizing processes in which institutional forces and authorized language influence and shape local practices. The use of the notion of mimesis allows this analysis to account for the ways in which resemiotization involves both imitation and creativity in a text-chain that exhibits signs of semiotic reduction while simultaneously facilitating instances of profuse multimodal communication.

Bibliography: leaves 139-142. / This study deals with aspects of the grammatical structure of nominal expressions in Spanish, examined within the broad frame of notions, principles and assumptions constituting the Minimalist Program (MP). A central concern of the study is the major theoretical reconceptualization of nominal structure known as the DP Hypothesis, an analysis of nominal expressions as being headed by D, rather than by N, as in the traditional analysis. The most important proposals in support of this hypothesis are set out and critically reviewed, and then reinterpreted in minimalist terms where necessary.

Includes bibliographical references. / An attitude study which made use of a cross-sectional survey design, and which obtained the responses of 60 coloured respondents living in the Kensington-Factreton area, Western Cape, is reported on. The probability stratified random sample was equally representative in terms of class (working- and middle class), home language (Afrikaans and English), and gender. The study attempted to record recent language attitudes towards the varieties of Afrikaans and English, plus Xhosa, the influence of societal changes on language attitudes and how they, in turn, influence the use and role of these languages. In addition, the significance of identity formation, home language, class, and gender was investigated. The contextual and theoretical background to this study include: (a) the presentation of the language situation in South Africa in general; that of the English and Afrikaans languages in particular; and the language situation in the Western Cape; (b) a review of previous language attitude studies conducted in the Western Cape; (c) the presentation of a social psychological framework which allows for the evaluation of language attitudes along the two dimensions of social status and group solidarity; and (d) an explanation of the formation of a coloured political identity by means of a theoretical framework which was combined with historical facts.

Includes bibliography. / In a series of lectures delivered in the early 1950s and later compiled and released in print as How to do things with Words , J.L. Austin elaborated on the idea that the capacity of language to describe the world was, despite the pre-eminence habitually granted to it by philosophy, really just one among several capacities and that, more generally, language endows its users with the tool to perform certain kinds of acts, called illocutionary acts or, later, speech acts . Speaking, Austin argued, was really a form of action; to say something is always just as much to do something. In the course of the lectures, Austin introduced some relatively well-known theoretical ideas, such as the category of performative utterances. The final lecture describes a taxonomy of utterances according to their illocutionary force. This taxonomy has for most thinkers proven less interesting than some of the moves he makes to get there. Comparatively few thinkers (Searle is the obvious exception, and there are a few others) have shown any interest developing, applying or criticising Austin’s taxonomy. The initial isolation of the class of performative utterances, on the other hand, despite the fact that it turns out to be for Austin essentially no more than a piece of intellectual scaffolding, has provoked an ongoing debate and numerous elaborations in fields as diverse as sociology, literary criticism and gender theory, as well as analytic philosophy. This paper has three chapters. Chapter One comprises a summary of How to do things with Words, followed by a brief discussion of some issues arising from it. The summary is expository, although rather than being comprehensive it focusses on matters relevant to the following chapters. The brief discussion that closes the chapter looks at a question in analytic philosophy (whether someone who makes a promise simultaneously states that they are promising), raises the question of the precise sense in which illocutionary acts are acts at all, and how illocutionary acts are related to the existence of conventions. Chapter Two describes the work or several writers who have been influenced by Austin, and How to do things with Words in particular. John Searle was a student of Austin's and the first writer to produce a substantial critique of Austin and an elaborate the theory of speech acts. Searle's most enduring contribution is probably his taxonomy of speech acts, which became a more or less standard point of reference, in contrast to Austin's, which faded into 4 obscurity. The lack of interest in Austin's taxonomy since Searle published his is not especially surprising, since the latter is presented with a great deal more confidence. It has not been without its critics, however: anthropologist Michelle Rosaldo, for example published an influential critique of it in which she argued that it presented features of contemporary American culture as if they were universals, when in fact other cultures have completely different ways of organising speech acts (Rosaldo 1982). In this chapter I also look at Jacques Derrida's reading of Austin (Derrida 1988), which picks up on the aspects of language that Austin and Searle excluded from their theories and raises some important problems in the relationship of speech acts and personal agency to which Austin and particularly Searle seem to be committed. I then look at what the sociologist Pierre Bourdieu (Bourdieu 1992) made of certain Austinian ideas in his explorations of language and power, and end with a brief outline of one way in which speech acts have been analysed by empirical researchers (Blum-Kulka & Olshtain 1984), to illustrate that a very different breakdown of the speech act may be appropriate for different purposes. Apart from Searle, the volume of whose output on the topic makes his inclusion in this chapter uncontroversial, the selection of writers presented in Chapter Two probably seems eclectic, not to mention uneven. Where for example are Kent Bach and Robert Harnish? Though Bach and Harnish are no doubt significant scholars in the field, their interest seemed to me too narrowly philosophical. I have chosen theorists who have raised questions about speech act theory at an arguably more fundamental level, pointed out gaps in its coverage or brought in insights from other disciplines. The reason for this is that Chapter Three presents a new classification of speech acts, partly as a way of re-examining the foundations of speech act theory, and partly with the aim of modifying it to extend its coverage to a greater range of communication phenomena. It is a model of illocutionary forces, instead of illocutionary acts, that aims to meet some (if not all) of the challenges to the classification of speech acts presented by the theorists covered in Chapter Two. This is done, principally, through an integration of Searle's taxonomy, modified in several important ways, with Roman Jakobson's model of the functions of language (Jakobson 1960, 1980).

Bibliography: leaves 87-91.

Includes bibliographical references (leaves 120-127). / This is a sociolinguistic study that investigates whether style is associated with the varying use of allophones [I] and [r] in the environment of normative [r] in Chichewa. Normative [r] here refers to the traditional realisation of III after front vowels in contrast with the traditional [I] elsewhere. Labov's sociolinguistic theory and Bell's audience design theory form the basis of this study. Fifteen participants whose speech was recorded for analysis are news readers of both genders, belonging to the young and middle age groups, and are either first or second language users of Chichewa. Data was collected from three radio stations in both formal and informal settings. Each radio station has different types of audience, from top government officials, to businessmen, and to the youth. The formal setting is news bulletin reading, while interviews made up a more informal setting where open-ended questions pertaining to the newsreaders' biography were asked. The dependent variables are [r] and [I] which are allophones in Chichewa, while the independent variables include: type of radio station, setting, gender, age and type of acquisition. In every normative [r] environment, tokens were assigned to represent both dependent and independent variables. A total of 820 tokens were analysed using the GoldVarb software, a 2001 version of Varbrul, which is used to analyse multivariate data. GoldVarb validates the data and generates percentages and ratios that are readily available for evaluation.

Vocabulary is an essential part of language acquisition. However, heritage speakers and L2 learners learn vocabulary and languages in different environments. A heritage speaker is someone who grows up in a household where a minority language is spoken, and switches to the majority language. Because of this, a heritage speaker learns by hearing words and mapping that word directly onto a concept. L2 learners, however, learn that language in the classroom where they hear the words and learn to read and write them. This raises the question: if bilinguals learn languages in different environments, what is the nature of the lexical and semantic connections in the mind? This dissertation investigated the lexical and semantic connections in the mind of heritage speakers and L2 learners to see what connections were the strongest, within the framework of the Revised Hierarchical Model (RHM) (Kroll & Stewart, 1994). Heritage speakers and L2 learners were tested aurally and visually with semantically related and form related distracters in a translation recognition task in both directions. The groups were matched on proficiency and language dominance. The results showed that all participants were slower but more accurate in the aural condition and that the semantically related distracters caused more interference in terms of reaction times, but were less accurate. Heritage speakers, however, had a larger magnitude of interference with the related semantic distracters than the L2 participants. Heritage speakers map one word onto one concept when learning in their first language. When that word becomes active, semantically related words in the network also become activated through spreading activation. Because the heritage speakers had a larger magnitude of interference than L2 learners, it can be assumed that heritage speakers have stronger spreading activation, possibly due to the manner the lexical items were acquired. This dissertation also provides implications for the Revised Hierarchical Model (Kroll & Stewart, 1994) and for teaching. These are discussed in the discussion chapter. Keywords: heritage speaker, bilingual, lexical, semantic / A Dissertation submitted to the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. / 2019 / November 7, 2019. / bilingual, heritage speaker, lexical, semantic / Includes bibliographical references. / Gretchen Sunderman, Professor Directing Dissertation; Michael Kaschak, University Representative; Antje Muntendam, Committee Member; Michael Leeser, Committee Member; Carolina González, Committee Member.