Not available / text

published_or_final_version / Chinese / Master / Master of Philosophy

Objectives: This research explored the experiences of francophones and Acadians who received primary healthcare in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Approach: Semi-structured interviews were completed with 15 self-identified francophones or Acadians. Participants provided feedback on the preliminary phenomenological analysis and final results were determined based on the analysis and participant feedback. Results: Language, culture and community were central in participants’ experiences but despite the high importance placed on receiving French language health care services, participants often had to compromise and access services in English. Other influences included the strategies they developed to utilise English services and their perception of health care professionals’ sensitivity for their linguistic barriers and needs. Conclusion: Though it was not always easy or straightforward participants in the study were able to utilise health services but not always in French. Creating situations that may require them to relinquish their language and, to some extent, their cultural identity.

Low levels of productivity and recent evolutions in technology and practices are pushing the construction industry to collaborate on a higher level. A key component of effective collaboration is trust. Research also suggests that increased trust levels can lead to improved productivity in team performance. Trust appears to be valued by industry practitioners at the executive level but it also appears that active management of trust is minimal. With Design Science Research methodology as a framework, this project uses a mixed methods approach to develop and test a tool designed to assist in the management of trust levels between construction project participants. This project lays the groundwork for additional research into trust-building in construction by testing whether or not trust can be actively built and managed by rigorous analysis of current and upcoming relationships. In addition to supporting data from case studies, this was accomplished by introducing specific trust-building techniques into student group interactions and comparing changes in interpersonal trust levels to a control group of students. Results from the case studies and student experiment show some support for the idea that interpersonal trust levels, as perceived by the person making the attempts to build trust within the group, can be increased through use of a tool such as the one developed. Further testing and development is needed prior to wider industry application.

The linguistic intergroup bias is a phenomenon where people use more abstract language to talk positively about in-groups and negatively about out-groups (Maass, Salvi, Arcuri, & Semin, 1989). This has been established for many in-groups, but has not been extended to age-related stereotypes. This study extended the linguistic intergroup bias to attitudes towards older adults. It was predicted that statements about what participants liked about their peers and disliked about older adults would be more abstract than statements about what participants disliked about their peers and liked about older adults. Results supported these predictions. Also, a new measure of linguistic abstractness was tested, but was found not to be useful in this context. / Department of Psychological Science

The analysis of advertising English reveals the function of language in the communicative process and shows how language can be used as a means of manipulation. Only an explicit formulation of how the advertiser uses language, and a reflection about its effect, can protect the individual from being manipulated through language and make him less susceptible to the appeals that advertising has.It is the purpose of this paper to analyse a selected group of advertisements from magazines published currently in the United States in order to determine how language and other persuasive devices operate in those dimensions of advertisements which are set up by the model of communication. While in the first three chapters advertising in general is stressed with respect to linguistic and non-linguistic means, the fourth chapter on the aesthetic function describes explicitly the morphological and syntactical levels of the linguistic means involved. A purely morphological and syntactical analysis is not possible, as there is no clear-cut distinction between these levels and the semantic dimension.

No description available.

No description available.

This thesis is concerned with the semantic function of linguistic elements which do not seem to contribute to the truth conditions of an utterance, that is, with 'non-truth-conditional' linguistic devices. The first part of the thesis is devoted to theoretical considerations, while the second part concentrates on 'concessive' linguistic devices, which form a sub-class of 'non-truth-conditional' expressions. The first chapter outlines the way in which traditional semantic theories have employed the notion of truth conditions to capture linguistic meaning and a series of problems with this approach are pointed out. The chapter ends with an overview of 'non-truth-conditional' linguistic devices. Chapter 2 is concerned with ways in which fundamentally truth-conditional theories of linguistic semantics have attempted to accommodate such expressions in their frameworks. In chapter 3, the discussion focuses on Argumentation Theory, which does not just accommodate non-truth-conditional meaning but, ultimately, treats all linguistic meaning in non-truth-conditional terms and leads to the untenable conclusion that the general intuition that utterances can give information about the world is an illusion. This is followed by a chapter devoted to Sperber & Wilson's cognitive Relevance Theory. It is argued that this theory offers an ideal framework for a semantic analysis of 'truth-conditional' and 'non-truth-conditional' expressions alike, while avoiding the problems encountered by other theories. The next three chapters investigate the nature of linguistic 'concessivity' and provide a critical survey of existing analyses of three specific 'concessive' devices: but, although, and even if. In each case, an original relevance-theoretic analysis in procedural terms is proposed. In the last chapter, the possibility of purely pragmatic (that is, unencoded) 'concessive' interpretations is explored, and, finally, the role of the concept of 'truth-conditional content' in a theory of utterance interpretation is reassessed.

Within contemporary Scotland there are two distinct language systems which may be considered to be threatened with extinction. These are the Germanic system of Scots, decended from the Northumbrian dialect of Old English, and the Celtic system of Gaelic, one of the languages of the Goidelic branch of Celtic. Both systems are dominated by English, in the written form and through the spoken forms of Received Pronunciation and Standard Scottish English. The common ancestry of Scots and English, both being derived from dialects of Old English, suggests that the form of domination in this relationship could be distinguised from the influence of English on Gaelic. This is paralleled in the distinction made between the processes of 'language suicide' (ie the gradual assimilation towards a similar system) and 'language murder' (ie the displacement of one language by another). This is considered in terms of register and domain. Interference is analysed within various registers and domains in terms of phonology, morphology, syntax, lexis and orthography. Further studies assess the extent of usage for Gaelic in the Isle of Lewis and Scots in Banffshire. The main conclusion that is drawn from the study is that the broad distinction between language suicide and language murder has some validity, but the process of language death, as evidenced by Scots and Gaelic, is more complex than that. In both languages there is evidence of assimilation towards English through interference in the system, and of displacement in terms of the number of speakers and the domains in which the languages are used. Assessment of the state of Gaelic reveals that, despite an apparent increase in the number of speakers, there is evidence of greater English dominance amongst present day speakers, who use English in more situations and include more English features in their Gaelic. A similar picture is found for Scots.