This thesis addresses the question of whether the participants of Britain and Ireland’s Next Top Model act as cultural intermediaries. There is a gap in the literature surrounding the role of participants in reality television programs. Through this analysis, I found the ability of the participant-models to act as cultural intermediaries on BINTM is limited because of their lack of experience, knowledge, and skills. Although they develop their skills throughout the program, they are unable to move up the entrenched hierarchy that exists in the program and that is actively maintained by the judges and other program participants. The participant-models’ positions are constantly challenged as they struggle to prove themselves as models. Methodologically, I undertake a discourse analysis of series eight of BINTM and include two other data sources to give my research greater context and validity. By drawing on the work of Bourdieu and more contemporary scholars of cultural intermediaries, I examine how the participant-models struggle to gain cultural capital and briefly act as cultural intermediaries before the authority and status of the judges is reasserted. In order to address issues related to gender, I also draw on the work of feminist scholars who have expanded on the work of Bourdieu. The hierarchy of the program brings to the surface how the ability to act as a cultural intermediary can best be understood in terms of a continuum, and an individual’s position on the continuum is constantly shifting depending on their ability to frame goods, their level of expertise, and their impact on others. In other words, the ability to act as a cultural intermediary changes depending on the level of acquired cultural capital. Based on my findings, I argue that all models are not cultural intermediaries; rather, only the models that have a high status, acknowledged expertise and level of legitimacy are able to act as cultural intermediaries.

Many cognitive processes influence how we encode, store, and retrieve what we read. Two processes are considered to affect retrieval from memory: recollection and familiarity. Recollection is the explicit retrieval of the context; whereas familiarity is a vaguer feeling of remembering without knowing the exact context. Many factors influence how both recollection and familiarity function. In my M.A. thesis, participants read two-sentence passages, in which the second sentence either stated an action or implied it, and the first sentence either supported or contradicted the event of the second sentence. The participants received one of three types on instructions and made recognition judgments about test sentences in the context of the prior passages. Stating an action, and moreover making it distinct due to contradiction, would lead to more accurate recall of the same test sentence due to a high influence of recollection. Implying an action would result in inference generation of the stated action. This would indicate a high influence of familiarity on recognition judgments. A multinomial model was implemented in order to estimate the relative contributions of these distinct memory processes.

Colombia holds one of the most unequal sex ratios at government level in Latin America. The research therefore attempts to examine how the minority of women who have a seat in government are being reflected and reproduced in the media based on the representation of gender. In this qualitative study, the aim is to investigate, analyze and illustrate how women in high political office in Colombia are portrayed in Colombian newspapers. The study examines how gender affects the discourse of these female politicians. In the study a critical discourse analysis is used from a feminist perspective on material from Colombian newspapers, concerning four different female Colombian top politicians. The focus of the analysis is to examine how the image of these women are being produced and reproduced in the media and if the reproduction of the discourse of these women stand out or differ significantly because of their gender. The study contributes to gain a broader understanding and overview of what the situation of women in the political world in Colombia looks like, how it is shaped by the media and the social and cultural context, and finally how this affects women in politics.

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This thesis attempts to investigate the structure of Arabic argumentative discourse in general and 'editorials' as an argumentative text-form in particular and the problems this discourse raises for translators. This investigation includes the identification of editorials' main constituents, the types of clause relations typical of this form of argumentation and their contribution to meaning continuity of such discourse, and certain textual phenomena, i.e repetition, parallelism, thematization, paragraphing, etc., and their unequivocal significance in translation. To this effect, random samples were taken from three different Arabic newspapers, i.e Al-Ahräm, Al-Ra'y, Al-Iqatan, to show how the structure of these texts gives rise to ambiguity when translated (literally) into English. To achieve these objectives, this study uses a semantic, structural, and pragma-semio-textual approach to analyze and then translate the texts chosen, as language in this study is considered to be a form of behaviour (Halliday 1973) that cannot be studied in isolation from its social, cultural, and contextual contexts in which it is used. Our textual analyses have shown some interesting results. First, editorials have their own generic structure, and such structure is presented in specific stages. Second, editorials as well as other argumentative texts are dominated by semantic causal relations; these relations tend to have a psychological impact on text-readers and should be accounted for in translation. Third, editorials favour the cohesive type of lexical repetition not only for cohesion purposes but also for persuasive functions as well. Fourth, editorials use many parallel constructions for conviction and persuasive functions. Fifth, editorials have semantic structures and stylistic features that cause problems for the English reader. These features require attention during the process of translation. All these issues tend to reflect the nature of editorials within argumentation and their unequivocal significance within the study of discourse.

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