Question Time is a distinctive daily parliamentary routine. Its aim is to hold Ministers of the State accountable for the actions and decisions of the Government. However, in many Parliaments, including the New Zealand and Australian Federal Houses of Representatives, it is more of a theatrical performance where parties try their best to score political points. As any performance, Question Time is governed by certain rules and regulations outlined in an official document Standing Orders. As there is not much action, Standing Orders mainly describe language norms and specify „unparliamentary language‟. This research looks at and analyses the use of formulaic vocabulary used by MPs in the year preceding general elections in New Zealand and Australia. The formulaic language includes phrasal lexical items and formulae for asking / answering questions, for raising points of order and the Speakers‟ idiolectal phrasal vocabulary for quelling disorder in the Chambers and regulating the work of the House. The framework developed for this research consisted of the following steps: an ethnographic study of Question Time as a communicative performance which included the development of a database containing all the empirical material; a xii linguistic study of Question Time including genrelect study, parliamentary formulae study and disorder analysis before the elections. As a result this research has shown that Question Time is a communicative performance event in New Zealand and Australia with significant cultural, historic and linguistic differences in spite of the common origins of the two Parliaments. It has identified 60 Question Time genre-specific phrasal lexical items that MPs use in the two Parliaments, studied their structure and meaning (where necessary). It has also looked at the strategies the MPs employ for creating disorder in the House, and the ways of quelling disorder by the Speakers of the two Parliaments.

Šiame darbe analizuojamos trijų autorių Skype žinučių idiolektinės ypatybės. Darbo tema aktuali, nes elektroninis bendravimas tampa vis populiaresnis, todėl įvairiakrypčiai elektroninio diskurso tyrimai padeda pažinti šios kalbos atmainos ypatybes, be to, Skype susirašinėjimai idiolekto aspektu Lietuvoje dar netyrinėti. Šio darbo tikslas - remiantis tekstyno analize, nustatyti, kokios Skype žinučių kalbos ypatybės gali atskleisti autoriaus idiolekto požymių. Siekiant šio tikslo buvo iškelti tokie darbo uždaviniai: 1) surinkti atskirus, trijų autorių Skype žinučių tekstynus, kurių apimtis yra maždaug po 10 000 žodžių; 2) naudojantis specialia Antconc 3.2.4. programa ir programos Word komanda rasti, iš tekstynų sudaryti žodžių, skyrybos ženklų ir jausmaženklių dažnio sąrašus; 3) iš gautų žodžių, skyrybos ženklų ir jausmaženklių dažnio sąrašų rankiniu būdu atrinkti kalbos vienetus, tinkančius tolesnei analizei; 4) išanalizuoti bei aprašyti tyrimui atrinktų kalbos vienetų vartoseną ir apibendrinti, kokios Skype žinučių kalbos ypatybės gali reikšti autorių idiolekto požymius. Darbas atliekamas remiantis gretinamuoju, deskriptyviniu analitiniu, tekstynų lingvistikos, kiekybiniu ir kokybiniu tyrimo metodais. Atlikus trijų autorių Skype žinučių leksikos ir grafikos tyrimą buvo patvirtinta darbo įvade keliama hipotezė, kad Skype susirašinėjimuose atsiskleidžia bendraujančiųjų idiolektai. Tyrimo rezultatai rodo, kad daugiausia idiolekto požymių galima rasti analizuojant dažniausiai iš... [toliau žr. visą tekstą] / This study analyzes idiolectic features of three authors Skype messages. The theme of study is relevant, because electronic communication is becoming more popular, so different directions studies of electronic discourse can help find out the features of this language technique, moreover, idiolectic aspect of Skype communication has not yet been researched in Lithuania. The aim of this study is to determine with reference to corpus analysis which language features of Skype messages may reveal the author’s idiolectic signs. In order to achieve this goal, the following tasks were set: 1) to collect separately Skype text messages corpus of the three authors with a volume of approximately 10 000 words; 2) using special Antconc 3.2.4 program and command to find of Word program to create the frequency lists of words, punctuation and emoticons from corpus; 3) from received frequency lists of words, punctuation and emoticons manually to select language units, which are suitable for further analysis; 4) to analyze and describe the usage of selected for the study language units and summarize which language features of Skype messages can indicate author idiolect. Study is performed on the basis of comparative, descriptive analytical, corpus linguistics, quantitative and qualitative research methods. After performed study of Skype messaging, written by three authors, vocabulary and graphics, the hypothesis set in the introduction was approved, Skype messaging reveal the idiolects of... [to full text]

My idiolect, a Xin’an idiolect, belongs to the Wuxi dialect, which is the northern Wu dialect. It carries most of the characteristics of the Wuxi dialect, such as the tripartite division of the manner of articulation of initial stop consonants. However, with the special geographic position, on the bounty of Wuxi dialect from the northwest area to southeast area and connected with Suzhou city, my idiolect shows its unique features, such as the condition of the retroflex. This study analyzes the phonological system of the idiolect and discusses the features. Since the dialect of the suburban area of the Wuxi is rare, it was only documented in the local chronicles; therefore the study is a good supplemental material to the Wuxi dialect. Moreover, using the idiolect is like to use the phonological material with the specific area and social identity. It is well known that the variation of the language is related to the area, to the speaker’s social identity and to the situation, therefore the specific idiolect definitely will benefit researchers to analyze the dialect. Furthermore, idiolect is also a good sample to study the language diversity among the different social classes, which need to get more attention from scholars. With the influence of the Mandarin and the surrounding dialects, some phonological features of my idiolect are in the variation, such as the sharp and rounded sounds. In the thesis, the theory of the language contact is applied to explain my idiolect.

- EN The thesis analyzes the idiolect of the then-presidential candidate Barack Obama in the specific speech situation of the televized debates on the background of the utterances of other candidates in the years 2000, 2004 and 2008. The analysis uses corpus-driven methods to compare the Obama corpus with the reference corpus. The comparison is largely based on the analysis of keywords and their use in context, supplemented by the discussion of their collocations and associated clusters. The results of the analysis, i.e. the principal features Obama's idiolect, are presented in a structured summary, divided into specific areas. Keywords: Idiolect, individual textual profile, Obama, keywords, corpus, corpus-driven

The aim of this essay is to examine why Swedish-English code-switching occurs, focusing on one person. The idiolect examined is Simon Davies, hosting the TV-show Design: Simon & Tomas where Simon Davies and his colleague Tomas Cederlund travel around Sweden helping Swedes with interior design. Season three of the show was transcribed into written data and theories were later used when analyzing the data transcribed from the TV-show. The data was analyzed from a qualitative and a quantitative aspect as well as mixed and unmixed utterances. This was done in order to see if there is a pattern in the way Davies switches as well as further understand what kind of items are switched. As this is done, the essay analyses the possible reasons for why Davies switches using the theories displayed earlier. The results show that Davies’ idiolect does not fully follow any specific pattern, however most of the words switched are nouns and the least common word class is prepositions. However, theories applied show that Davies’ switching could be a way for him to create an identity and connect with Swedes. The use of Swedish could help him seem friendlier and less like a stranger.

<p>The aim of this essay is to examine why Swedish-English code-switching occurs, focusing on one person. The <em>idiolect</em> examined is Simon Davies, hosting the TV-show <em>Design: Simon & Tomas</em> where Simon Davies and his colleague Tomas Cederlund travel around Sweden helping Swedes with interior design. Season three of the show was transcribed into written data and theories were later used when analyzing the data transcribed from the TV-show. The data was analyzed from a <em>qualitative</em> and a <em>quantitative</em> aspect as well as <em>mixed</em> and <em>unmixed</em> utterances. This was done in order to see if there is a pattern in the way Davies switches as well as further understand what kind of items are switched. As this is done, the essay analyses the possible reasons for why Davies switches using the theories displayed earlier. The results show that Davies’ idiolect does not fully follow any specific pattern, however most of the words switched are nouns and the least common word class is prepositions. However, theories applied show that Davies’ switching could be a way for him to create an identity and connect with Swedes. The use of Swedish could help him seem friendlier and less like a stranger.</p>

The objective of this thesis is to identify those specific aspects of written style which native speakers of English modify when attempting to anonymize their texts. The conclusions are based on the analysis of 20 texts by 10 authors, all of whom are native speakers of English. Two texts dealing with the same topic were produced by each participant; one was written as an official letter of complaint, and the other was written as an anonymous letter. The bulk of the results are grounded on a qualitative stylistic analysis of the individual texts, with merely a brief survey of quantitative methods.The purpose of the introductory chapter is to familiarize the reader with the subject of forensic authorship analysis, to provide a brief summary of the current state of research, and to introduce a series of empirical studies. The practical part of the thesis presents the qualitative stylistic analysis, provides a shorter summary of the quantitative analysis, and finally ventures to draw meaningful conclusions from the results. The results showed that the majority of authors manipulated with the style/register of the texts and with the specific lexical choices, whereas none of the 10 authors made alterations to spelling and only 2 authors chose to change the punctuation in the anonymous text. However,...

A part of Charles Dickens's genius with character is his deftness at creating an appropriate idiolect for each character. Through their discourse, characters reveal not only themselves, but also Dickens's comment on social features that shape their communication style. Three specific idiolects are discussed in this study. First, Dickens demonstrates the pressures that an occupation exerts on Alfred Jingle from Pickwick Papers. Second, Mr. Gradgrind from Hard Times is robbed of his ability to communicate as Dickens highlights the errors of Utilitarianism. Finally, four characters from three novels demonstrate together the principle that social institutions can silence their defenseless constituents. Linguistic evaluation of speech habits illuminates Dickens's message that social structures can injure individuals. In addition, this study reveals the consistent and intuitive narrative art of Dickens.

Speaker verification is the process of verifying or disputing the claimed identity of a speaker based on a recorded sample of their speech. Automatic speaker verification technology can be applied to a variety of person authentication and identification applications including forensics, surveillance, national security measures for combating terrorism, credit card and transaction verification, automation and indexing of speakers in audio data, voice based signatures, and over-the-phone security access. The ubiquitous nature of modern telephony systems allows for the easy acquisition and delivery of speech signals for processing by an automated speaker recognition system. Traditionally, approaches to automatic speaker verification have involved holistic modelling of low-level acoustic-based features in order to characterise physiological aspects of a speaker such as the length and shape of the vocal tract. Although the use of these low-level features has proved highly successful, there are numerous other sources of speaker specific information in the speech signal that have largely been ignored. In spontaneous and conversational speech, perceptually higher levels of in- formation such as the linguistic content, pronunciation idiosyncrasies, idiolectal word usage, speaking rates and prosody, can also provide useful cues as to identify of a speaker. The main aim of this work is to explore the incorporation of higher levels of information into the verification process. Specifically, linguistic constructs such as words, syllables and phones are examined for their usefulness as features for text-independent speaker verification. Two main approaches to incorporating these linguistic features are explored. Firstly, the direct modelling of linguistic feature sequences is examined. Stochastic language models are used to model word and phonetic sequences obtained from automatically obtained transcripts. Experimentation indicates that significant speaker characterising information is indeed contained in both word and phone-level transcripts. It is shown, however, that model estimation issues arise when limited speech is available for training. This speaker model estimation problem is addressed by employing an adaptive model training strategy that significantly improves the performance and extended the usefulness of both lexical and phonetic techniques to short training length situations. An alternate approach to incorporating linguistic information is also examined. Rather than modelling the high-level features independently of acoustic information, linguistic information is instead used to constrain and aid acoustic- based speaker verification techniques. It is hypothesised that a ext-constrained" approach provides direct benefits by facilitating more detailed modelling, as well as providing useful insight into which articulatory events provide the most useful speaker-characterising information. A novel framework for text-constrained speaker verification is developed. This technique is presented as a generalised framework capable of using di®erent feature sets and modelling paradigms, and is based upon the use of a newly defined pseudo-syllabic segmentation unit. A detailed exploration of the speaker characterising power of both broad phonetic and syllabic events is performed and used to optimise the system configuration. An evaluation of the proposed text- constrained framework using cepstral features demonstrates the benefits of such an approach over holistic approaches, particularly in extended training length scenarios. Finally, a complete evaluation of the developed techniques on the NIST2005 speaker recognition evaluation database is presented. The benefit of including high-level linguistic information is demonstrated when a fusion of both high- and low-level techniques is performed.

A translator works as a mediator between an original work that has been written in one language, a source text, and those who will be the audience of the translation, or, in other words, the target text. Translating a text is often a challenging task, as the translator must keep in mind both the source text and its author’s intentions with the text, and also its intended audience, but also keep in mind the target audience of the target text. Translating can become even more challenging with children’s literature, as they, among other things, often can contain very creative, imaginative and playful use of language. In this study, The BFG, a popular children’s book from 1982 written by the British author Roald Dahl, is analyzed – both the English source text and the Japanese translation by Taeko Nakamura. The research question to be answered is the following: When looking at the speech style, or idiolect, of the character "the BFG" of Roald Dahl’s The BFG, with a focus on neologisms, wordplay and allusions, what difficulties exist in the source text and what efforts have been made by the translator in attempts to achieve an equivalent effect in the target text? The results of this study display several difficulties that can arise when attempting to translate the idiolect of the BFG, especially due to its vast amount of expressive language. Replacement with standard language and deletion were two of the main translation strategies, and the number of identified cases of neologisms, wordplay and allusions in the source text was over double the amount identified in the target text. However, it is also shown how the translator has used different means to compensate for the source text features that may have gotten lost in translation.