<p>The aim of this degree project has been to examine, analyze and describe which intra-linguistic factors influence how relative clauses are formed in Old English.</p><p>The key to successfully performing the task of identifying which factors influences the relative causes is to examine how these factors are distributed among the relative clauses in the text. The main focus of this investigation thus was to investigate how the grammatical features of the antecedents of the relative clauses in Old English were distributed. By analyzing a text sample of the work of the Old English writer Ælfric, taken from the Dictionary of Old English Corpus at the University of Toronto, also known as the Toronto Corpus, several features of the antecedent will ideally become evident as influencing factors.</p><p>The relative clauses that are found to be relevant for this investigation in the Ælfric text sample have been categorized and analyzed in order to identify any grammatical pattern that could indicate which factors influence how relative clauses in Old English are formed. The findings have been analyzed according to quantitative and statistical principles, and the chi-square test has been employed to verify the statistical significance of these findings. By doing this some linguistic factors have been verified as influencing factors.</p>

<p>In this essay, Kate Chopin's portraits of women in three short stories, 'The Story of an Hour', 'A Respectable Woman', Athénaïse and the novel <em>The Awakening</em> are studied. It is argued that the outcomes depicted can be seen as increasingly provocative and extreme and that the main conflict and ending of <em>The Awakening </em>is a development and combination of the conflicts and resolutions in the three short stories.</p> / <p>I uppsatsen studeras Kate Chopins kvinnoporträtt i tre noveller, 'The Story of an Hour', 'A Respectable Woman', Athénaïse och i romanen <em>The Awakening.</em> Syftet är att visa att huvudhandlingen och slutet på <em>The Awakening</em> är en utveckling och kombination av de alltmer provokativa och extrema handlingarna och upplösningarna i novellerna.</p>

<p>The aim of this essay is to investigate what English teachers’ attitudes are towards British English, American English and Mid-Atlantic English. What variety of English do teachers use in Swedish upper secondary schools today and what are their reasons for using that variety? Do upper secondary school teachers think it is important to expose students to several varieties of English and do they teach differences (e.g. vocabulary and spelling) between varieties? The material is based on a questionnaire, which 20 participating teachers from five different upper secondary schools in Gävleborg answered. The study showed that there is an even distribution between the varieties used and taught. British English was preferred by teachers working the longest time while both AmE and MAE seemed to be growing in popularity among the younger teachers. Of the 20 teachers, 18 considered teaching differences to students since it gives them a chance to communicate effectively with people from other English speaking countries.</p>

No description available.

<p>Pat Barker’s fictional account of the Great War, The Regeneration Trilogy, completed in 1995, is considered to be her most important work to date and has captured the imagination of the reading public as well as attracting considerable scholarly attention. Although the trilogy appears to be written in the realistic style of the traditional historical novel, Barker approaches the past with certain preoccupations from 1990s Britain and rewrites the past as seen through these contemporary lenses. Consequently, the trilogy illustrates not only how the past returns to haunt the present, but also how the present reciprocally haunts perceptions of the past. The haunting quality of the trilogy is developed through an extensive, intricate pattern of intertextuality. This reciprocal haunting at times breaks the realistic framework of the narrative, giving rise to anachronisms.</p><p>This study offers a reading of trauma, class, gender and psychology as thematic areas where intertexts are activated, allowing Barker to revise and re-accentuate stories of the past. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s concept of discourse and Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of dialogue, it focuses on the trilogy as an interactive link in an intertextual chain of communication about the Great War. Received versions of history are confirmed, expanded on and sometimes questioned. What is innovative about the trilogy is how Barker incorporates discursive formations not only from the Great War period, but from the whole twentieth century. The Great War is regenerated and transformed as it passes from one dialogic context to another. My reading shows that the trilogy presents social structures from different historical epochs through dialogism and diachronicity, making the present-day matrices of power and knowledge that continue to surround, determine and limit people’s lives highly visible. The Regeneration Trilogy regenerates the past, simultaneously confirming Barker’s claim that the historical novel can also be “a backdoor into the present”.</p>

<p>The present study examines the effects of immersion education on the English of two groups of advanced Swedish learners at upper secondary school. In immersion education, or CLIL, subject content is taught through a second language as a means of enhancing target language competence. In this study, language proficiency was measured in terms of the ratio of low frequency vocabulary (LFV) and the ratio of motivated tense shift (MTSh) in the learners’ free written production in English. An additional aim was to see whether the results were related to the students’ motivation as reported in a questionnaire.</p><p>This longitudinal study was based on three sets of narratives, written by 86 students, half of them enrolled at the International Baccalaureate Diploma Programme (IB) where English is the medium of instruction, and the other half at national programmes (NP), where English is studied as a foreign language. At the outset, the IB and NP groups had similar results on a general diagnostic test, which was the basis for the formation of three subgroups: I, II and III, with above average, average and below average scores respectively. Mean LFV and MTSh ratios as well as different kinds of motivation were compared, both overall and in the subgroups.</p><p>The IB students overall, and those in subgroup III in particular, showed the best results. As to the overall results, the IB students used significantly higher mean ratios of LFV and MTSh than the NP students in the final set of compositions. There were also a number of motivational factors that were stronger in the IB students.</p><p>As to the subgroups, the most interesting results were found in subgroups I and III. While the IB students in subgroup I had high mean ratios already in the first composition, and retained them over time, their use of MTSh tended to grow subtler. The NP students had lower mean results initially, and while their mean MTSh ratio increased and ended up on a level similar to that of the IB students, their mean LFV ratio remained low.</p><p>In subgroup III the results of the IB and NP students diverged over time. While the IB students progressed as reflected in their mean LFV and MTSh ratios, the NP students tended to regress. The difference in mean LFV ratios was statistically significant. The IB students were also better motivated than their NP peers. In all, this study suggests that immersion education has positive target language effects, especially on less proficient but motivated students.</p>

<p>Abstract</p><p>During the last decade many female writers of British decent have focused on identity construction and coming of age. These writers have been especially interested in exploring how people living in the diaspora are trying to cope with their ambivalent feelings towards their mixed cultural heritage. Helen Oyeyemi's <em>The Icarus Girl</em> is one of these novels. The novel depicts a young girl's struggle with the dualism within her, being both British and Nigerian, that threatens to dissolve her self-identity. This essay will explore how <em>The Icarus Girl</em> deals with the theme “double consciousness” (imposed binaries) and how the narrative's structure and stylistic devices enable the story to be read (interpreted) from two different perspectives, thus the narrative's structure offers an ambiguous double reading that corresponds to Jessamy's unresolved doubleness. The first reading suggests that the traumatic experience of “double consciousness“ is left in a status quo, or even being fatal, which in the essay is called the Western reading. The second reading suggests a recovery, i.e. that the young protagonist comes to terms with her mixed cultural heritage, the so-called West-African reading. In pursuing this aim I discuss how “double consciousness” in this novel is a traumatic state of mind transferred from mother to daughter, but also how stylistic devices, belonging to the genre of the fantastic, are used to emphasize the theme and make possible the two different readings.</p>

<p>This dissertation focuses on gender-related terms as well as adjectives and demonstratives in connection with these terms used in texts from the period 1670–1720. The material in the study has been drawn from both English and American sources and comes from three text categories: depositions, examinations and journals. Two of these text categories represent authentic and speech-related language use (depositions and examinations), whereas the third (journals) is representative of a non-speech-related, non-fictional text category. While previous studies of gender-related terms have primarily investigated fictional material, this study focuses on text categories which have received little attention so far. </p><p>The overarching research question addressed in this study concerns the use and distribution of gender-related terms, especially with regard to referent gender. Data analyses are both quantitative and qualitative, and several linguistic and extra-linguistic factors are taken into account, such as the semantic domain to which the individual gender-related term belongs, region of origin and referent gender. Adjectives and demonstratives collocating with the gender-related terms are also investigated, as previous research has shown that referent gender has an impact on the use of adjectives as well.</p><p>The results show that the use of gender-related terms is influenced by both region of origin and referent gender. It is suggested that this is due in part to the difference in nature between Early Modern English society and the early American colonies, and in part due to the social roles which men and women had. Referent gender also has an impact on the type of adjectives used in connection with gender-related terms: adjectives collocating with gender-related terms denoting men have positive connotations to a larger extent than do adjectives collocating with their female counterparts; meanwhile, gender-related terms denoting women tend to collocate with negative adjectives. </p>

This thesis examines usage of English colour terms in context, based on an extensive computerised text corpus, the Bank of English. It describes the ways in which English colour terms may be used to refer to nuances outside their normal area of designation and to attributes outside the colour domain. Usage patterns are analysed on three different levels: with regard to the overall frequency of occurrences, nominal domains and individual tokens, respectively. Cognitive linguistics supplies the theoretical framework employed in the analyses of the observed patterns. The study identifies three types of usage where colour terms refer to peripheral colour nuances or to concepts outside the colour domain: classifying, figurative and marked usage. When a colour term has a classifying function, it can be used outside the normal area of designation. This usage is analysed as a type of reference-point construction where a term referring to a salient point in the colour domain is used to subcategorise an entity whose actual colour may be only a peripheral member of the category named by the colour term. An analysis of the OED and the Bank of English shows that this type of usage is primarily restricted to a few of the most salient basic terms. This study points to the close affinities between classifying and figurative usage. Figurative expressions of colour terms frequently have a classifying function. I argue that figurative meanings are derived through two types of metonymy: +SALIENT ATTRIBUTE FOR OBJECT+ and +SALIENT CONCRETE ATTRIBUTE FOR SALIENT ABSTRACT ATTRIBUTE+. Marked usage arises when specific colour terms are used in nominal domains where the specificity is not expected. This phenomenon is consequently confined to non-basic colour terms. On the basis of the established patterns of usage and the frequency of occurrences, this thesis suggests that the colour category may be analysed as a radial category, with the basic colour terms forming the centre.

Language-play can briefly be described as the wilful manipulation of the peculiarities of a linguistic system in a way that draws attention to these peculiarities themselves, thereby causing a communicative and cognitive effect that goes beyond the conveyance of propositional meaning. Among the various phenomena answering this description are the different kinds of puns, but also more strictly form-based manipulations such as rhymes and alliteration, in addition to a host of other, sometimes even fuzzier, subcategories. Due to its unusual nature, and especially its frequently strong dependence on the idiosyncrasies of a particular language, language-play can generally be assumed to constitute a significant challenge in a translation context. Furthermore, given its non-negligible effects, the translator is not free to simply ignore the language-play (provided it has been recognized as such in the first place) without having taken an active stance on its treatment. However, the difficulties in finding a suitable target-language solution are possibly exacerbated if the source text is a complex multimedia product such as a film, the translation of which, normally in the form of dubbing or subtitling, is subject to additional constraints. In view of these intricacies, it has been the aim of this study to analyze and measure how language-play in film has actually been treated in authentic dubbing and subtitle versions. As a prerequisite, the concept of language-play has been elaborated on, and more than a dozen subcategories have been described, developed, and employed. For the purpose of carrying out a meaningful analysis of the dubbing and subtitling of language-play, a corpus has been compiled, comprising 18 family films and 99 of their various target versions, most on DVD, and yielding nearly 800 source-text instances of language-play and thousands of translation solutions. The results indicate that especially two sets of factors, among the many that are likely to influence a translation, play a prominent role: the type of the language-play, and the identity and working conditions of the translator. By contrast, the mode of translation (dubbing vs. subtitling), the target language, or the general properties of the films, could not be shown to have a sizeable impact.