Following a decline over the twentieth century, Breton has seen an increase in revival efforts, including Breton-medium education. This study investigates the effect of the language transmission gap on the morphosyntax of verbs. Fieldwork was undertaken with three distinct age groups: older native speakers (aged over 65), and two groups which make up a younger generation of speakers: children in Breton-medium education, and young adults who have been schooled in Breton. The question of word order and the placement of verbs in Breton has been controversial, largely because it is complex and variable, making the identification of basic word order difficult. The data show that usage across the older generation is fairly consistent, with V2 word order in matrix clauses. Verbal mutation is also maintained. Despite the transmission gap, younger adults from French-speaking homes do not systematically replace Breton patterns with French SVO. Rather, they avoid SVO in some contexts, and indeed use it less than the senior adults. The amount of input speakers receive is crucial: children in bilingual schooling, with only half of their classes in Breton, tend to oversimplify word order patterns and show French influence. In contrast, those with additional Breton input from a family member are more proficient. Children have difficulty acquiring mutation rules, and do not seem to have grasped the system of verbal mutation, but young adults use mutation proficiently, like the older speakers. Consequently, despite strong French influence, Breton word order has remained consistent. The fact that verbal mutation is variable in children reflects late acquisition, since the young adults rarely diverge from the expected usage. Thus, the changes in Breton morphosyntax are subtler than expected in light of the unusual transmission pattern and close proximity to French. The crucial factor appears to be sustained input in the language.

No description available.

By taking learning as the axis of scholarship, personal and social epistemologies have a common ground: experience and reflective action. I am not considering learning as a vehicle whose success is measured to the extent that a portion of the external world is appropriated, but as a qualitatively different way to see, understand and handle experience. A scholarship of learning is tightly bound to the experiential roots of objects of study that keep on changing in individual and collective histories. Therefore, a scholarship of learning is not a set of context-free skills but a complex process of transformation of its practitioners’ identity and agency over themselves and their object of study. Such two-fold construction orientates a discipline no less than the ways of knowing, acting and being of those engaged in its investigation. I propose that the object of study of Modern Languages and Cultures should be literacy in the multilayered symbolic codes (some of which are tacit) that make intercultural interchanges intelligible and effective. The scope of this dissertation, however, is restricted to the investigation of deep learning in literacy. My thesis is that Modern Languages and Cultures should not be limited to objects of study, such as language, discourse, texts, films, etc. but has to include the processes of agentification of the learner and making sense of his or her experience in a foreign language and culture. I advocate the investigation of the experiential roots of language and culture in a scholarship of learning which seeks to integrate research and education, on the one hand, and language and content, on the other. Experience and learning are subjective-objective processes, and so I advise the epistemological revaluation of subjectivity. I propose that subjectification (i.e. the construction of the subject) is not only relevant for human development and social well-being, but is a source of knowledge in the Humanities.

The aim of this study has been the examination of the form, structure, metre, language and style of that body of verse written in Middle Scots which is characterized by long lines whose metre is accentual and marked by alliteration in certain consecutive stressed syllables. Most of the Middle Scots works which merit this description are composed in alliterative stanzas of thirteen rhyming lines: nine long lines followed by a wheel of four short lines. The method followed has been to first submit one long poem to detailed examination and to apply the data and comparisons thus assembled, and a tailored version of the method, to an examination of the other works.

The thesis, The Bagpipe: perceptions of a national instrument, is a work offered to the University of Edinburgh for the degree of PhD by research publications, and includes a portfolio of published items and research papers, amounting in total to approximately 63,600 words, with a critical review and a CD. Research papers: 1. ‘Making a national collection of a national instrument.’ Lecture to the American Musical Instrument Society and Galpin Society Conference, 3-9 August 2003. 2. ‘The Early History of the Scottish Bagpipe’, in Ellen Hickmann, Arnd Adje Both and Ricardo Eichmann eds., Studien zur Musikarchäologie V (Papers from the 4th Symposium of the International Study Group on Music Archaeology, 19-26 September 2004) Rahden/Westf.: VML 2006, 447-461. 3. ‘Musician and Milieu: piping, politics and patronage through three centuries.’ The John Macfadyen Memorial Trust Annual Lecture, 19 March 2004. 4. ‘Traditional origins of the piping dynasties.’ RSAMD Research Seminar 31 May 2007 (publication forthcoming). 5. ‘The Pastoral or New Bagpipe: piping in the Neo-baroque’, in The Galpin Society Journal, 2007-2008 (forthcoming). 6. ‘Taste and Humour: the Union Pipe of Britain and Ireland’, in Seán Reid Society Journal Volume 3 (2007) [electronic format]. 7. ‘Donald MacDonald, Bagpipe Maker’, in Proceedings of the Piobaireachd Society Conference Volume XXXIII (2006), 10-18. These papers are discussed in a critical review whose thesis and structure is explained in the Prospectus. The critical review amounts to approximately 24,200 words and is divided into seven Sections (as listed on the Contents page) which relate specifically to their respective research papers and summarise their findings. There is some imbalance of wording between the Sections, for example there are more words in sections ‘Piping Dynasties’ and ‘the Maestros’, and this reflects a perceived need to strengthen the statements in these areas in order to deliver the arguments of the thesis more effectively.

The teachers' use of motivational strategies is generally believed to enhance student motivation, yet there is scant empirical evidence to support this claim. This classroom-oriented investigation focused on how the motivational practices of EFL teachers in South Korea related to students' L2 motivation and motivated classroom behavior. In a first phase, the motivation of over 1,300 students was measured by a self-report questionnaire, and the use of motivational strategies by 27 teachers in 20 different schools was examined with a classroom observation instrument specifically developed for this investigation, the Motivation Orientation of Language Teaching (MOLT). The MOLT scheme, along with a post hoc rating scale completed by the observer, was used to assess the teachers' use of motivational strategies. The MOLT follows the real-time coding principle of Spada and Frohlich's (1995) Communication Orientation of Language Teaching (COLT) scheme but uses categories of observable teacher behaviors derived from Dornyei's (2001) motivational strategies framework for foreign language classrooms. The results indicate that the language teachers' motivational practice is directly linked to increased levels of the learners' motivated learning behavior and their motivational state. In a second phase, three high- and three low-motivation learner groups (selected from the initial sample) were compared in order to uncover the students' interpretations and understandings of the quality of their L2 instructional contexts in relation to their motivation and motivated classroom behavior. Results based on quantitative and qualitative data (which were obtained using three new instruments specifically designed for this study) indicated that the motivational practices coexisting with different levels of motivation were woven into the contents and processes of L2 instruction and instruction in general. These contents and processes seemed to stem from teachers' and students' beliefs about what counts as learning in the L2 classroom and what is the best way to learn an L2.

This PhD dissertation investigates the construction of identities in the early Middle Ages, focusing on three key texts conventionally dated to the ninth and tenth centuries: Historia Brittonum, Asser's Life of King Alfred, and Armes Prydein Vawr. I examine the way these writers constructed ideas of Welsh identity in the wider context of their perception of peoples more broadly. Particular attention is paid to the texts that may have influenced the three sources, investigating, for example, Historia Brittonum's use of the works of writers such as Orosius, Jerome, and Prosper. This thesis also examines the possibility of wider trends through placing the Welsh material alongside evidence from across Europe. I compare, for example, the construction of a Trojan origin legend for the Britons in Historia Brittonum with similar accounts of the Trojan origins of the Franks. In Chapter 1 I investigate the names used for Wales and the Welsh, and suggest that, whilst these texts continued to view the Welsh as Britons, the rightful inhabitants of all Britain, there is nevertheless an indication of the construction of a specifically Welsh identity, focused on the geographical unit roughly equivalent to modern-day Wales. Chapter 2 discusses the relationship between language and identity, considering the use of Welsh place- and river-names in the Life of King Alfred, and the use of English loan-words in both Historia Brittonum and Armes Prydein Vawr. Contrary to the tendency in scholarship to downplay the role of language, I argue that it is a crucial component in the construction of identity. Chapter 3 focuses on the presentation of origin legends in Historia Brittonum and Armes Prydein Vawr. I compare the origins of the Saxons as presented in the two sources to illustrate the recycling and adaptation of material to suit varying agendas, and place Historia Brittonum's origin legend of the Britons in a wider context, examining both the sources used in its construction and its relationship with the origin legends of the Franks. Chapter 4 investigates the writing of history more broadly in Historia Brittonum and Asser's Life of King Alfred, examining the adaptation of material to create a past which suited the construction of a specific group identity. Particular attention is paid to Asser's depiction of the vikings as pagans, in contrast to the Christian Anglo-Saxons. These chapters combine into a coherent whole, offering significant new insights into the construction of identities in early medieval Wales.

Celtic art contains mysterious and fascinating aesthetic elements including complex knot work motifs. The problem is that creating and exploring these motifs require substantial human effort. One solution to this problem is to create a process that collaboratively uses interactive and procedural methods within a computer graphic environment. Spline models of Celtic knot work can be interactively modeled and used as input into procedural shaders. Procedural shaders are computer programs that describe surface, light, and volumetric appearances to a renderer. The control points of spline models can be used to drive shading procedures such as the coloring and displacement of surface meshes. The result of this thesis provides both an automated and interactive process that is capable of producing complex interlaced structures such as Celtic knot work within a three-dimensional environment.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Chicago, Dept. of Linguistics, June 2001. / Includes bibliographical references. Also available on the Internet.

Celtic art contains mysterious and fascinating aesthetic elements including complex knot work motifs. The problem is that creating and exploring these motifs require substantial human effort. One solution to this problem is to create a process that collaboratively uses interactive and procedural methods within a computer graphic environment. Spline models of Celtic knot work can be interactively modeled and used as input into procedural shaders. Procedural shaders are computer programs that describe surface, light, and volumetric appearances to a renderer. The control points of spline models can be used to drive shading procedures such as the coloring and displacement of surface meshes. The result of this thesis provides both an automated and interactive process that is capable of producing complex interlaced structures such as Celtic knot work within a three-dimensional environment.