The aim of this essay was to demonstrate whether the descriptions of Donald Trump’s inauguration 2017 differed from Joe Biden’s inauguration 2021 in three of the biggest British newspapers: The Guardian, The Independent and The Telegraph. One article from each newspaper concerning the inaugurations 2017 and 2021 was investigated. Different linguistic tools such as path strategy, the inverted pyramid, whether passive or active voice was used, polysemy, quantitative iconicity, denotation or connotation, binary oppositions, metaphors and newsworthiness were focused on. The results have shown that the British newspapers reported in favor of Biden. Trump was often described with words of negative connotations such as dark, fears, anxious, grim, uncertain and testy, while Biden was often described with words of positive connotations such as rejoin, repeal, unity and fulfill. Further, Trump was often actor in sentences making him a bad guy, while Biden was often actor in sentences making him a good guy. Since Trump was often connected with negativity, news about him was considered to be of higher newsworthiness, and he was mentioned considerably more in the articles about Biden’s inauguration than the former President Obama was mentioned in the articles about Trump. Furthermore, Trump was described more than Biden, as for instance his high age was referred to, but not Biden’s age, which is higher than Trump’s. The metaphors ARGUMENT IS WAR and POLITICS IS WAR are used in articles about both presidents.

South African indigenous language teaching and learning materials do not provide sufficient information to help additional language learners learn the target languages effectively. While there are institutions that are tasked with developing and sharpening the skills of students in speaking South African indigenous languages, such students hardly, if at all master the art of speaking them eloquently. Students who study these languages in order to converse proficiently with their mother-tongue speakers experience insurmountable difficulties, in spite of various efforts made by the teachers who train them to read books on their own. Passing their examinations does not mean that the students’ ability to communicate with mother-tongue speakers will improve to the extent of eliminating the prevailing misunderstanding between the two groups. The persistence of this problem reveals a discrepancy between the studies of indigenous languages in South Africa and the way of speaking them, whereby important linguistic elements that make communication more authentic are excluded in language materials. This study analyses the use and significance of CIFWs in daily interactions by investigating the two Xhosa CIFWs words wethu and bethu. The overall aim of this study is to explore the use of a corpus in the examination of CIFWs in general, and wethu and bethu in particular. Both a quantitative approach based on the Gothenburg-Unisa spoken corpus and a qualitative approach based on Allwoods’ ACA theoretical framework were used in the analysis and description of the functions and significances of wethu and bethu as communicative and interactive function words. / Linguistics and Modern Languages / M.A. (Applied Linguistics)

本論文は第二言語話者の発話を高精度で認識するための音素セットの構成方法に関する研究結果を述べている．本論文では，第二言語話者の発話をネイティブ話者の発話とは異なる音響特徴量の頻度分布を持つ情報源とみなし，これを表現する適切な音素セットを構築する手法を提案している．具体的には，対象とする第二言語と母語との調音位置や調音様式などの類似性に加え，同音異義語の発生による単語識別性能の低下を総合した基準に基づき，最適な音素セットを決定する．提案手法を日本人学生の英語発話の音声認識に適用し，種々の条件下で認識精度の向上を検証した． / This dissertation focuses on the problem caused by confused mispronunciation to improve the recognition performance of second language speech. A novel method considering integrated acoustic and linguistic features is proposed to derive a reduced phoneme set for L2 speech recognition. The customized phoneme set is created with a phonetic decision tree (PDT)-based top-down sequential splitting method that utilizes the phonological knowledge between L1 and L2. The dissertation verifies the efficacy of the proposed method for Japanese English and shows that the feasibility of building a speech recognizer with the proposed method is able to alleviate the problem caused by confused mispronunciation by second language speakers. / 博士(工学) / Doctor of Philosophy in Engineering / 同志社大学 / Doshisha University