Bibliography: leaves 65-66. / This dissertation analyses a selection of Ruth Miller's poetry collected in Floating Island (1965), Selected Poems (1968) and previously uncollected poems included in the posthumous collection, Ruth Miller: Poems, Prose, Plays (1990) edited by Lionel Abrahams. It extends and argues against the most recent readings of Ruth Miller proposed by Joan Metelerkamp (1991 and 1992). Metelerkamp suggests that previous criticisms of Miller, focusing exclusively on her modernist intent, ignore Miller's role as a woman living in a society dominated by patriarchal authority; an authority that is informed by the Judeo-Christian tradition. This dissertation extends Metelerkamp's observation, showing how the existential crisis that is made manifest in Miller's poetry is generated by both her compliance with and denial of this patriarchal Judeo-Christian meaning-making system. It also registers a changing development in Miller 's poetic trajectory from her earlier to her later poems. Metelerkamp's criticism of Miller's poetry has not recorded this development, allowing for the overall pronouncement that her poetry registers only loss and shows no conscious signs of negotiating the patriarchal system in which she is entrapped. In contrast, the conclusion of this dissertation points to elements in Miller's later poetry that suggest the development of Miller's voice as well as indicating Miller's recognition of her own compliance and desire to break with patriarchal authority.

Bibliography: leaves 95-100. / The main inspiration for a revisit to the topic of homosexuality is not only its noticeable absence from the UCT English curricula, but also the publication of the first Fundamentalist Christian text with a South African slant: The Pink Agenda: Sexool revolution in South Africa (McCafferty and Hammond 2001). Forms of opposing this homophobic view were needed for the gay community. This required an investigation into the academic debates aoout homosexuality: mainly the social constructionist versus the essentialist debate.

Bibliography: leaves 62-64. / In this dissertation, a socio-historical approach is taken towards the development of the English literary fairy tale as a genre during the 19th Century, particularly in the realm of Children's Literature. For the purposes of examination, the fairy tale of the 19th Century is divided into two sections, fairy tales of the early Victorian period and those of the middle and late Victorian period. It is argued that the fairy tales present in England during the first time period were mostly imported translations from other European countries while the fairy tales of the second time period were the original products of British writers. The tales examined under the first division are those by German brothers, Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, (as well as later retellings of their tales) and translations of the tales written by Dutch writer, Hans Christian Andersen. The tales examined under the second division are those written by John Ruskin, Charles Dickens, George MacDonald, Mary de Morgan, Juliana Ewing, Evelyn Sharp and Edith Nesbit. Through the analysis of selected fairy tales, the thesis sets out to show how the development of the English literary fairy tale, during its transition from the one defined period (early Victorian) to the next (middle and late Victorian), reflects the developments that took place within Victorian society at that time. Of particular interest is the changing perception of appropriate gender roles, especially that of the ideal Victorian female. Other contextual and societal elements that are dealt with include developments in the world of science and technology, the changing approach towards the family and the domestic sphere, and Victorian attitudes towards children and children's literature. Critical approaches include feminist readings, sociological approaches (Jack Zipes) and various accounts of Victorian Society.

This study investigates informal conversations between native English speakers and international students living and studying in the UK. 10 NNS participants recorded themselves during conversations with native speakers. The audio-recordings were transcribed and a fine-grained, qualitative analysis was employed to examine how the participants jointly achieved both coherence and understanding in the conversations, and more specifically how the NNSs contributed to this achievement. The key areas of investigation focused on features of topic management, such as topic initiations, changes and transitions, and on the impact which any communicative difficulties may have on the topical continuity of the conversations. The data suggested that these conversations flowed freely and coherently, and were marked by a relative scarcity of the communicative difficulties often associated with NS-NNS interactions. Moreover, language difficulties were found to have minimal impact on the topic development of the conversations. Unlike most previous research in the field, the data further indicated that the NNSs were able to make active contributions to the initiation and change of topics, and to employ a range of strategies to manage these effectively and coherently. The study considers the implications which the findings may have for teaching and learning, for second language acquisition research, and for non-native speakers everywhere.

This is a case study of a program of native speaker part-time EFL (English as a Foreign Language) teachers in a junior college in Japan. It has grown out of a curiosity to ascertain how the teachers have formed and continue to maintain a coordinated program in what would seem to be a disadvantageous national context where as part-time foreign teachers they are expected to do little more than just teach a few classes of mainly oral English. This study investigates the organizational culture the teachers have formed for themselves within their staffroom, and looks at the implications of this for part-time teachers in such an environment. More specifically, the study highlights that central to the program is an interactive decision-making function engaged in by all the teachers which has not only created but also continually enables an identifiable staffroom culture. This organizational culture is contingent on college and staffroom conditions, program affordances such as shared class logs and curriculum sharing, and on the interactive decision-making itself. It is postulated that the contingencies formed in this created and continually creating shared world not only offer the teachers a proficient way to work in their severely time-constricted environment, but also provide them with fertile ground for the self-regulation of a thus created zone of covert staffroom ‘on-the-job’ teacher development.

A key feature of ‘TESOL Quarterly’, a leading journal in the world of TESOL/applied linguistics, is its ‘Forum’ section which invites ‘responses and rebuttals’ from readers to any of its articles. These ‘responses or rebuttals’ form the focus of this research. In the interchanges between readers reacting to earlier research articles in TESOL Quarterly and authors responding to the said reaction I – examine the texts for evidence of genre-driven structure, whether shared between both ‘reaction’ and ‘response’ sections, or peculiar to each section, and attempt to determine the precise nature of the intended communicative purpose in particular and the implications for academic debate in general. The intended contribution of this thesis is to provide an analysis of how authors of research articles and their critics pursue their efforts beyond the research article which precipitated these exchanges in order to be recognized by their discourse community as, in the terminology of Swales (1981:51), ‘Primary Knowers’. Awareness of any principled generic process identified in this thesis may be of significance to practitioners in the applied linguistics community in their quest to establish academic reputation and in their pursuit of professional development. These findings may also be of use in triggering productive community discussion as a result of the questions they raise concerning the present nature of academic debate. Looking beyond the construction and status of the texts themselves, I inquire into the kind of ideational and social organization such exchanges keep in place and examine an alternative view of interaction. This study breaks new ground in two major ways. To the best of my knowledge, it is the first exploration of a bipartite, intertextual structure laying claim to genre status. Secondly, in its recourse to the comments of the writers’ themselves rather than relying exclusively on the evidence of their texts, as is the case with most studies of genre, this thesis offers an expanded opportunity to discuss perhaps the most interesting aspects of genre analysis – the light it throws on social ends and the role of genre in determining the nature of current academic debate as it here emerges.

University students encounter difficulties with academic English because of its vocabulary, phraseology, and variability, and also because academic English differs in many respects from general English, the language which they have experienced before starting their university studies. Although students have been provided with many dictionaries that contain some helpful information on words used in academic English, these dictionaries remain focused on the uses of words in general English. There is therefore a gap in the dictionary market for a dictionary for university students, and this thesis provides a proposal for such a dictionary (called the Dictionary of Academic English; DOAE) in the form of a model which depicts how the dictionary should be designed, compiled, and offered to students. The model draws on state-of-the-art techniques in lexicography, dictionary-use research, and corpus linguistics. The model demanded the creation of a completely new corpus of academic language (Corpus of Academic Journal Articles; CAJA). The main advantages of the corpus are its large size (83.5 million words) and balance. Having access to a large corpus of academic language was essential for a corpus-driven approach to data analysis. A good corpus balance in terms of domains enabled a detailed domain-labelling of senses, patterns, collocates, etc. in the dictionary database, which was then used to tailor the output according to the needs of different types of student. The model proposes an online dictionary that is designed as an online dictionary from the outset. The proposed dictionary is revolutionary in the way it addresses the needs of different types of student. It presents students with a dynamic dictionary whose contents can be customised according to the user's native language, subject of study, variant spelling preferences, and/or visual preferences (e.g. black and white).

The present investigation is based on a linguistic analysis of the 'Housing Act 1980' and attempts to examine the role of qualifications in the structuring of the legislative statement. The introductory chapter isolates legislative writing as a "sub-variety “of legal language and provides an overview of the controversies surrounding the way it is written and the problems it poses to its readers. Chapter two emphasizes the limitations of the available work on the description of language-varieties for the analysis of legislative writing and outlines the approach adopted for the present analysis. This chapter also gives some idea of the information-structuring of legislative provisions and establishes qualification as a key element in their textualisation. The next three chapters offer a detailed account of the ten major qualification-types identified in the corpus, concentrating on the surface form they take, the features of legislative statements they textualize and the syntactic positions to which they are generally assigned in the statement of legislative provisions. The emerging hypotheses in these chapters have often been verified through a specialist reaction from a Parliamentary Counsel, largely responsible for the writing of the ‘Housing Act 1980’• The findings suggest useful correlations between a number of qualificational initiators and the various aspects of the legislative statement. They also reveal that many of these qualifications typically occur in those clause-medial syntactic positions which are sparingly used in other specialist discourse, thus creating syntactic discontinuity in the legislative sentence. Such syntactic discontinuities, on the evidence from psycholinguistic experiments reported in chapter six, create special problems in the processing and comprehension of legislative statements. The final chapter converts the main linguistic findings into a series of pedagogical generalizations, offers indications of how this may be applied in EALP situations and concludes with other considerations of possible applications.

One of the main advantages of cognitive linguistics (and in particular Cognitive Grammar) over other approaches to the study of language structure is the fact that every descriptive construct is defined in psychological terms. This means, ideally, that any cognitive linguistic description of a word or grammatical construction constitutes a hypothesis about the mental representation of that structure. It should thus be possible to verify such descriptions, or to decide between competing analyses of a phenomenon, by experimentally testing the hypotheses that they entail. Such tests have been rare, however, due to the difficulty of operationalising many of the semantic notions used in Cognitive Grammar. The present thesis reports on attempts to operationalise and test (using questionnaires, production tasks, and reaction time measurements) four descriptive claims formulated in the framework of Cognitive Grammar: that finite complementation constructions are headed by the complement-taking predicate; that the first object in a three-argument clause is more “figure-like” than the second object; that impersonal there in an existential clause refers to the locative scene as a whole; and that non-finite clauses encourage the hearer to imagine the described event as a single gestalt, whereas finite clauses encourage them to imagine it unfolding over time. These grammatical analyses crucially involve the notions of “profiling”, “focal prominence”, and “mode of scanning”, which are central to Cognitive Grammar. None of the experiments conducted produced conclusive results, leaving open the question of whether the descriptive constructs used in the analyses are really necessary. Accordingly, the second part of the thesis presents an attempt to reconceptualise Cognitive Grammar using only descriptive constructs that are known to be easily operationalisable; in particular, giving prominence to notions from discourse pragmatics and prosodic phonology.

This thesis explores the influence of Henri Bergson’s philosophy on middlebrow literature between 1899 and 1939. In doing so it engages with the work of Joseph Conrad, Algernon Blackwood and John Buchan as well as critics John Mullarkey, Suzanne Guerlac, Michael Vaughan and Michael Kolkman who, over the past three decades, have instigated a significant interdisciplinary revival and reassessment of Bergson’s work. Specifically, this study builds on, yet also extends, the work of literary critics like Paul Douglass, Hillary Fink, Mary Ann Gillies and S.E. Gontarski who since the 1990s have produced extensive studies exploring the impact of Bergson’s philosophy on modernism. While each of these studies confirm the considerable impact Bergson wrought on the culture and literature of this period, each limit their focus to canonical ‘highbrow’ modernist writers. Given the pervasive popularity of Bergson at this juncture, and following the spirit of recent calls in modernist studies for more inclusive, ‘flexible and perspicuous’ interpretations of the period’s literature, this project aims to extend the parameters of existing research to encompass early twentieth century ‘middlebrow’ fiction in the belief that Bergson represents a significant cultural and ideological bridge between these, too often, polarised literary streams. As such, this study expands on the work of scholars like Nicola Humble, Kate Macdonald, Erica Brown and Mary Grover who, to borrow Humble’s term, have sought to ‘rehabilitate’ and reassess critical perceptions of the early twentieth century’s ‘middlebrow’ writing. Following a detailed explanation of Bergson’s philosophy, its place in early twentieth century British culture and its pertinence to literary studies today, I will move on to discuss key works by Joseph Conrad, Algernon Blackwood, Arthur Machen and John Buchan in relation to Bergson’s philosophy, placing particular focus on their more mystical aspects and thematic, structural applications. Such an investigation does not aim to negate the unique contribution Bergson made to inspiring, elucidating and supporting the formal innovations of modernism but hopes to emphasise the fact that his ideas resounded far beyond this context, capturing the attention of an unexpectedly broad spectrum of society in often unexpected, unconventional and as yet, under-explored ways.