This study aims to critically analyse and explore how social workers (operating in the adult social work practice domain) draw on wider social (and social work) discourses in accounting for the work that they do. Utilising purposeful samples of students and qualified social work practitioners, this exploratory study of discourses analyses the implications this has on the construction of the social work identity, role and practice (action). Driven by a series of research questions, the objectives of this research were: 1) To critically analyse and explore the discourses on which students and social work practitioners draw on in their accounts of social work practice; 2) To identify and critically analyse the subject positions and discursive practices (collective ways of speaking) of social workers in respect of these discourses; 3) To critically analyse how and in what way social workers at different stages of the career trajectory draw differently upon these discourses; 4) To critically analyse and evaluate the implications for practice and service users of the respondents’ subject positioning and the discursive practices that they employ; 5) Develop a critically reflexive method (model) for social work education and research in order to make recommendations for research, education and critical social work practice (in the context of self-awareness). As this study involves several people in the exploration of adult social work (Community Care policy context), it will contribute to knowledge of the meaning given to contemporary social work. It does so by expanding the concept of discourse analysis to the wider social context in which the overall narrative (story) is ‘told’. This research aims to understand how respondents draw on discourses in particular ways and includes an analysis of the contradictions and gaps within the overall narrative of social work. Stemming from wider pre-determined narratives that are available in social work cultures, this study not only analyses the words themselves by utilising discourse analytic tools, but demonstrates new ways in which to apply critical discourse analysis in the exploration of accounts of social work. In this examination, this research critically analyses and evaluates the implications these discourses can have on identity construction (personal and professional self), as well as on those social work intends to benefit (service users).

This study set out to explore the ways in which non-STEM academics, working within UK universities that had positioned themselves publicly as ‘entrepreneurial’ institutions, interpret and negotiate the related concepts of the entrepreneurial academic and university. The entrepreneurial university concept has become a ubiquitous theme in higher education and policy literatures in recent decades, having been described variously as an ‘idea for its time’ (Shattock, 2010) and the ‘end-point of the evolution of the idea of the university’ (Barnett, 2010, p.i). This research set out to interrogate some of the key ways in which this institutional form, and the corresponding concept of the entrepreneurial academic, have been discursively constructed by advocates in the UK and beyond. Further to this, the study aimed to collect narratives of experience from non-STEM academics employed by self-described ‘entrepreneurial’ universities, both to enquire into how they interpreted the ‘entrepreneurial paradigm’, and to invite them to report on how they felt that their university’s assumption of an enterprise mission had, or had not, influenced its organisational ‘culture’ and their subjectively experienced academic work-lives. The researcher’s interest in the relationship between enterprise discourse and the organisational ‘culture’ of universities stemmed from the apparent consensus within the scholarly and policy literature about the need for universities to develop an integrated ‘entrepreneurial culture’ (Clark, 1998, p.7)(Gibb, 2006b, p.2)(Rae, Gee and Moon, 2009) by pursuing a policy of ‘organisational culture change’, with culture here denoting ‘the realm of ideas, beliefs, and asserted values’ (Kwiek, 2008, p.115) which inhere within institutions. To this end, a series of semi-structured, interpretive interviews were carried out with participants from a range of non-STEM disciplines, working in a variety of university types in the UK. The researcher then employed a discourse-analytic method to delineate some of the ‘discursive repertoires’ that participants used to account for their professional practices, and report on their experiences in - and understandings of - the entrepreneurial university. What emerged from this analysis was a complex picture of ‘enterprise discourse’ within the contemporary university setting, as well as a general tendency amongst participants to adopt a position of ontological scepticism where the issue of ‘university culture’ was concerned. Further to this, it was determined that the ‘inclusive’ interpretation of entrepreneurialism typically employed by advocates for the paradigm had not generally been taken up by participants, for whom it was, for the most part, a phenomenon associated variously with ‘managerialism’, ‘market values’, ‘the business agenda’, ‘income generation’, ‘money making’, and the figure of the ‘individual, lone, romantic, heroic capitalist’. Additionally, where subjects were conversant in broader, more ‘social’ conceptions of academic entrepreneurialism, they typically reported that it was rarely articulated in the internal communications of their respective universities.

The subject of the thesis is the Czech Republic parliamentary debate about a national referendum spanning from 1989 to 2014. It is mapping the evolution of the debates on the base of stenographic protocols from the proceedings concerning national referendum bill, as discussed by Chamber of deputies of the Czech Republic. The theoretical part of the thesis is based on current debates about direct democracy. The metodological part of the thesis is using concepts and terminology of the discoursive approach of R. Wodak. Based on this approach, the analysis of the debates is focusing on the main discoursive elements, those are, context framing, inter - discoursive relations, the main issues of the debates, reasoning and identification of the participants. The second level analysis is putting the debates about national referendum into the the context with contemporary debates about direct democracy. In the last part of the thesis the results of the analysis are discussed.

This study explored the discursive subject positions that 18 parents, teachers and administrators involved with children identified as experiencing learning difficulties in a Queensland regional primary school between September 2003 and August 2004 drew upon to explain the causes of those children’s learning difficulties. The study used a post-structuralist adaptation of positioning theory and social constructionism and a discourse analytic method to analyse relevant policy documents and participants’ semi-structured interview transcripts to interrogate what models were being used to explain a student's inability to access the curriculum. Despite the existence of alternative explanatory frameworks that functioned as relatively undeveloped resistant counternarratives, the study demonstrated the medical model’s overwhelming dominance in both Education Queensland policy statements and the participants’ subject positions. This dominance shapes and informs the adult stakeholders’ subjectivities and renders the child docile and potentially irrational.

The aim of this study is to analyze the transformation of the official discourse and perception of the Kurdish issue and Kurds through its representations in Turkish media since 1990. Ottoman period and the Republican period till 1990s are studied in the first phase, in order to provide the historical backgroud of the Kurdish question and state&rsquo / s perception of the issue. In the second phase, representations of state&rsquo / s perception of the Kurdish issue in H&uuml / rriyet and Cumhuriyet newspapers are analyzed by using Critical Discourse Analysis techniques. The transformation of the official discourse of the Kurdish issue is examined through eight cases: the Gulf War I in 1991, events occurred during the Parliamentary Oath Ceremony in 1991, Nevruz of 1992, HADEP congress in 1996, capture of Semdin Sakik in 1998 and Abdullah &Ouml / calan in 1999, the Gulf War II in 2003, Nevruz of 2005, Semdinli incident and debates on identity in 2005 and 2006. In this study, it is claimed that state&rsquo / s perception and discourse of the Kurdish issue has transformed since 1990s without a total detachment from its traditional perception and discourse of the issue.

Thesis is based on the views of authors of sociology of knowledge (Berger, Luckman, Bourdieu) and authors of discourse analysis (Foucault, Fairclough). The central assumption is that knowledge is socially constructed and that this construction has its strong ideological and hierarchic aspects. Author is analyzing books and texts of Vaclav Klaus using the critical discourse analysis. Author is convinced that Vaclav Klaus has a substantive influence on public opinion in Czech Republic. Also author is convinced the struggle in the discussion over environmental topics is based in different basic assupmtions of discussion participant. Thus author decided to analyse the Vaclav Klaus's basic assumptions for the notions of nature and environment.

This dissertation brings two recent strands of research together and attempts to contribute to two areas of study: (1) apocalyptic Paul studies and (2) the discipline of intertextuality. When apocalyptic Paul is concerned, many works utilize comparative literature approaches. The present study, however, is different in two respects. First, this study sees intertextuality and apocalyptic as a cultural semiotic that is a meaning potential in culture. Whereas many intertextual studies focus on how later texts employ earlier texts for literary and theological purposes, the present study views culture as a matrix of intertextuality. In addition, this study deems apocalyptic as a cultural discourse that society and culture share to understand transcendent phenomena and events. The second distinctiveness of this study is its analytic method. Instead of word-to-word comparison, we investigate whether Paul’s letters present similar patterns of semantic relations between apocalyptic thematic items. After identifying recurrent thematic formations throughout multiple texts, this study explores Paul’s heteroglossia (different voices) in the thematic formations. As such, the meaning of Paul’s apocalyptic can be construed, when we scrutinize, first, how the apocalyptic languages or themes are used in culture, and second, how Paul differently employs them from others. To paraphrase, the meaning of Paul’s apocalyptic language can be vivid when the same apocalyptic thematic formations in Paul’s letters present different linguistic features from other writings. Through this procedure, the present study argues that though Paul shares similar thematic formations with other texts in the Greco-Roman world, the apostle’s apocalyptic thought is significantly distinctive from others. In Paul’s apocalyptic discourse, Jesus is the primary participant that interacts with other thematic items. Also, the apostle’s peculiar linguistic features in the shared apocalyptic formations converge around one figure that is Christ. In other words, Christ takes the central role in his apocalyptic discourse. Christ, therefore, is the apocalyptic lens for Paul to shape his understandings of transcendent phenomena (i.e., otherworldly journey, resurrection, sin and evil, and the two-age apocalyptic eschatology) through Christ.

A text is a linguistic structure that is more than a random collection of sentences. A text is cohesive (Halliday &amp / Hasan, 1976) and coherent (Mann &amp / Thompson, 1987, 1988). Mainly ignored in the field of linguistics until recently, the text and the discourse structure have been inquired from various points of view (Asher, 1993 / Asher &amp / Lascarides, 1998 / Grosz &amp / Sidner, 1986 / Mann &amp / Thompson, 1987, 1988 / Webber, 2004). D-LTAG is a discourse grammar work that extends a lexicalized sentence level grammar LTAG (Joshi, 1987) to low-level discourse (Webber, 2004 / Webber &amp / Joshi, 1998). In this framework, discourse connectives such as coordinating conjunctions, subordinating conjunctions, parallel connectives and discourse adverbials are predicates of discourse structure that take text spans that can be interpreted as abstract objects (Asher, 1993). Turkish has a flexible word order in comparison to languages like English. In English, the discourse adverbials are noted for their ability to occupy positions unavailable to other discourse connectives. In Turkish, word order of other discourse connectives, coordinators and subordinators are not expected to be as restricted. This thesis examines the connective position, argument order and the information structure of five Turkish discourse connectives in their eleven uses. The analyses show that the examined features of discourse connectives are related to the syntactic group the connective belongs to. Discourse connectives of the same syntactic groups exploit similar connective position and argument order possibilities, and they tend to be included in similar information units.

In the TDB[1]-like corpora annotation efforts, which are constructed by the intuitions of the annotators, the reliability of the corpus can only be determined via correct interannotator agreement measurement methodology (Artstein, &amp / Poesio, 2008). In this thesis, a methodology was defined to measure the inter-annotator agreement among the TDB annotators. The statistical tests and the agreement coefficients that are widely used in scientific communities, including Cochran&rsquo / s Q test (1950), Fleiss&rsquo / Kappa (1971), and Krippendorff&rsquo / s Alpha (1995), were examined in detail. The inter-annotator agreement measurement approaches of the various corpus annotation efforts were scrutinized in terms of the reported statistical results. It was seen that none of the reported interannotator agreement approaches were statistically appropriate for the TDB. Therefore, a comprehensive inter-annotator agreement measurement methodology was designed from scratch. A computer program, the Rater Agreement Tool (RAT), was developed in order to perform statistical measurements on the TDB with different corpus parameters and data handling approaches. It was concluded that Krippendorff&rsquo / s Alpha is the most appropriate statistical method for the TDB. It was seen that the measurements are affected with data handling approach preferences, as well as the used agreement statistic methods. It was also seen that there is not only one correct approach but several approaches valid for different research considerations. For the TDB, the major data handling suggestions that emerged are: (1) considering the words as building blocks of the annotations and (2) using the interval approach when it is preferred to weigh the partial disagreements, and using the boundary approach when it is preferred to evaluate all disagreements in same way.

Marcela Navrátilová, The Transformation of the Heroism of Labour in the Era of Socialism Abstract: The term of heroism of labour, purpose of which, originally, was to praise the value of labour to the country, became over the time a mere phrase of political manipulation. The aim of this thesis is to analyze the discourse of the term as presented to the wide public by the daily newspaper Rude Pravo during the era of socialism. The framework of the study is based on comparison of four stages significant to the development of the socialism in Czechoslovakia: first of all, the early years of 1950's - the era of Stalinism and initial years of building the state-socialism, the second half of 1960's - also known as the period of the Thaw, thirdly, the normalization years of the 1970's and lastly, the second half of 1980's - the final years of the Communist era in Czechoslovakia. These four periods were used as a platform for comparing the change and the development of heroism of labour. The thesis constitutes of methodological preface introducing the method used in my research and a theoretical introduction explaining the key terms of labour and the discourse of socialism, and also, explaining the role of Rude Pravo in Czechoslovakia between the years 1948 - 1989. These two parts are followed by the analytical...