This socio-linguistic study investigates attitudes of French speakers of English to using English for academic purposes. The study is situated within the post-Fioraso Law period (2013), which sees France joining the process described as the ‘internationalisation' of Higher Education in Europe. This study confirms that rather than encouraging multiple languages in academia, the term ‘internationalisation' implies ‘Englishisation' in Europe by contributing to studies which show how English is instrumental to academic identity in Europe. Through the use of complementary qualitative methods (questionnaires, interviews, visual methods and classroom observations), the narratives of 164 academics working at the science faculties of Nantes University were analysed for how they positioned their professional identities in relation to the use of English for professional purposes (such as writing research papers, presenting at conferences, and teaching in English as a medium of instruction, EMI). The major divisions regarding the attitudes towards English as a medium of academic identity in France are to be found in the issues relating to the legitimacy and authority of French speakers of English within the wider international academic community. The principal arguments are based on beliefs concerning the ownership of the English language and whether it is possible for L2 speakers of English to ever identify themselves as being anything other than ‘learners of English', despite repeated proof of their language expertise. The study concludes that within French Higher Education in 2016, English is a strategic medium through which to access research and teaching communities. Ownership of the English language as an identifying feature comes second to the emerging bilingual identities of the participants who are competing in the global market of Higher Education.

No description available.

Thesis (M.A.) in English--University of Maine, 2004. / Includes vita.

<P> No evaluation of the Renaissance-its culture and texts-is complete without understanding early modem imagination. Yet many modem critics have understated or misunderstood the imagination's importance to the English Renaissance. Misconceptions arise, in part, because our current understanding of imagination has been influenced by Romantic theorists, whose definitions of imagination differ radically from early modem beliefs about the functions and capabilities of the faculty. A comprehensive study of early modem imagination is therefore essential. This thesis undertakes the timely task of analyzing the significance of Renaissance definitions and characteristics of imagination as they are posited in early modem philosophical and medical texts. To early modem English theorists such as Francis Bacon, Robert Burton, and Margaret Cavendish, the physical location of imagination determines its function and significance, its potentially dangerous autonomy is a constant threat, the imagination can disastrously or advantageously influence the body, and it can justify textual novelty and creativity. Studying imagination is incomplete without understanding its expansion in literary texts, for in poetry, drama, and fictional narratives, authors self-consciously employ and debate the characteristics of imagination philosophers, physicians, and theologians were earnestly debating. In The Temple, George Herbert crafts his poetry and his text to metaphorically display and debate the physical position of imagination in the brain. Richard Brome's play, The Antipodes, questions the autonomy of imagination. Can the imagination be controlled, Brome asks, and by what? The Unfortunate Traveller, Thomas Nashe's prose narrative, fleshes out early modem considerations of the imagination's impact on the body of the imaginant and others. Francis Quarles's Emblemes illustrates-literallyRenaissance debates about imagination's influence on originality and creativity. For, in their literary texts, early modem authors use their contemporaries' theories of imagination to justify and test their relationship with, and responsibility to, God, their readers, and themselves. </p> / Thesis / Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)

This thesis investigates the history of preposition stranding in the Modern English period from 1500 to 1900, in close relation with the prescriptive movement in the tradition of English grammatical thought. The aim is to assess, or rather re-assess, thee ffect and effectiveness of the (late) eighteenth-century normative tradition on actual language usage. The methodology lies in the comparison of a precept corpus, i.e.meta-linguistic comments, with a usage corpus, i.e. actual language practice. On the one hand, this study will provide insightful observations into the attitudes towards and conceptualisation of end-placed prepositions in the course of the eighteenth century, the age of prescriptivism. Evidence comes from a self-compiled corpus of observations made on this peculiar usage as gathered from a miscellany of precept works (1700-1800). On the other hand, this thesis will trace the diachronic evolution of the use of preposition stranding before, during and after the age of prescriptivism,as collected in two renowned historical corpora, namely the Early Modern English section of the diachronic part of the Helsinki Corpus (1500-1710) and the British part of A Representative Corpus of Historical English Registers (1650-1899). The evaluation of the evidence from precept and the evidence from usage will shed new light on (a) the origin of the stigmatisation of preposition stranding (micro-level), and(b) the role of the normative tradition on language variation and change(macro-level). First, contrary to what has been taken for granted in the literature hitherto, I will demonstrate that the proscription against ending sentences with prepositions does not go back directly to the late eighteenth-century heyday of publication of precept works (e.g. Robert Lowth's grammar) but to the mid/late seventeenth-century incipient stages of the prescriptive tradition embraced with ideals of correctness and politeness; especially, to the grammarian and rhetorician Joshua Poole and to the literary writer John Dryden. Language change can thus be observed as early as the early eighteenth century. Secondly, I will provide evidence to show that late eighteenth-century precepts did exert an influence on the use of preposition stranding. The effect is manifest in contemporaneous writings and the effectiveness extends into the early nineteenth century. Nonetheless, it is only a temporary one, as the trends reverse in the late nineteenth century when prescriptivism was fading away. It will be argued that the eighteenth-century normative tradition did not trigger linguistic change but rather reinforced an existing trend.

English women writers of the eighteenth century manifested enthusiasm for a form best described as a framed-novelle sequence, that is, a form in which conversations between characters/narrators are interspersed with embedded narratives. This thesis argues that the framed-novelle, with its distinctive juxtaposition of narrative and critical conversation facilitated feminine intervention in the period’s political, social, and literary debates. It demonstrates that Delarivier Manley, Jane Barker, Eliza Haywood, Sarah Scott, Sarah Fielding and Jane Collier used the framed-novelle sequence to develop a feminine but nonetheless authoritative socio-critical voice which allowed them not only to intervene in contemporary literary debates about the risks and rewards of reading fictions (especially with regards to the wider significance of the feminocentric and apparently trivial matter of amatory, romantic tales)but also to construct timely argument about the effect of fictional exemplarity on readers. Consideration of the literary and cultural contexts of the framed-novelle’s production, specifically its relation to other forms of narrative sequences such as the oriental tale and the fairy tale collection and to the period’s ideals of sociable conversation and critical practice also allows this thesis to identify the framed-novelle’s importance within the larger field of eighteenth-century literary development. Through close readings in each main chapter of an earlier and later framed-novelle by each author, this thesis explores the distinctiveness and internal cohesion of the framed-novelle as a subgenre, while also recognizing the particularity of each writer’s protofeminist perspective on their accumulation of feminocentric tales.

A notorious challenge in the study of the diachrony of English is to determine whether developments in syntax, including changing frequencies of a particular construction, or word-order changes as suggested by perceived patterns in extant texts, represent genuine linguistic changes or are due to changes in conventions of writing. What is intuitively clear, however, even to a casual eye, is that a piece of English prose from, say, the 16th-century differs markedly from texts from the 18th-century. Yet such judgements cannot be based on syntactic changes alone, since essential grammatical features of Present-Day English are in place already by the end of the Late Middle English period. As a result, these differences are often simply ascribed to the notoriously elusive domain of style. The current study attempts to come to grips with the issue of period-specific conventions of writing by focusing on features of discourse structure and textual organisation as of the Early Modern English period. It can be positioned at the meso-level between large-scale quantitative approaches of sentence-level linguistic features and detailed, small-scale discourse-analytic studies of individual texts. Texts selected for the current purpose, manuals for equine care, derive from a sub-domain of instructional writing with a long history in the vernacular. As these texts share similar communicative purposes and deal with the same "global" topics of feeding and looking after a horse, any differences between them cannot be attributed to different genres or differences in subject matter. This permits us to zoom in on 'agnates', different ways of expressing the same meanings, and allows us to see how the stylistic options selected by authors achieve the various communicative goals that have to be negotiated, such as discourse coherence or the transition to new topics. The three main sections in this dissertation offer different ways to identifying developments in discourse organisation. The first section explores the traditional corpus-based approach that is frequently used to measure the parameter of "personal involvement", an indicator of periodic style. Initially, this approach restricts itself to measuring the contribution of frequencies of individual lexical items like first and second person pronouns. Next, this section will focus on the presence and linguistic realisation of the interlocutors of these instructional texts, i.e. the writer and the reader. The second main section will try to diagnose such varying styles by employing a completely data-driven, quantitative methodology which offers a linguistically unbiased and theory-independent perspective on the data in the corpus. This second approach offers cues as to how `subliminal' patterns of grammar may affect perceptions of style, and how quantitative measures may aid in assessing whether the texts in our corpus cluster in expected or unexpected ways. The third section draws on theories of referential coherence and textual progression. By charting the variation with which texts from different periods in the history of English apply conventions for discourse organisation, it offers an insight into developments of hierarchical discourse structures (i.e., coordinated versus subordinated discourse relations) and practices of co-reference. Taken together, these three independent measures offer a novel, multi-angled approach to stylistic developments in prose writing. Combining features `above the sentence' level which involve discourse and information structural changes, this dissertation affords a glimpse into the emergence of written textual conventions, or 'grammars of prose', in the history of English.

Thesis (M.A. (English)) - Rhodes University, 2009.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of Wisconsin--Madison, 1970. / Typescript. Vita. eContent provider-neutral record in process. Description based on print version record. Includes bibliographical references.

京都大学 / 0048 / 新制・課程博士 / 博士(人間・環境学) / 甲第22515号 / 人博第918号 / 新制||人||220(附属図書館) / 2019||人博||918(吉田南総合図書館) / 京都大学大学院人間・環境学研究科共生人間学専攻 / (主査)准教授 桒山 智成, 教授 廣野 由美子, 准教授 池田 寛子 / 学位規則第4条第1項該当 / Doctor of Human and Environmental Studies / Kyoto University / DGAM