The Best PhD Thesis in the Faculties of Architecture, Arts, Business & Economics, Education, Law and Social Sciences (University of Hong Kong), Li Ka Shing Prize, 2009-2010. / published_or_final_version / Comparative Literature / Doctoral / Doctor of Philosophy

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This dissertation is about the acquisition of temporality in the Chinese language by adult native English speakers. The major objective is to chart the course of development of temporality by adult English-speaking learners of Chinese and explore the universals in the acquisition of temporality. The dataset used for this dissertation study consists of the Pear Story narratives produced by twenty native speakers of Chinese and the Pear Story narratives produced by twenty-one English-speaking adult second language learners of Chinese, grouped into three different proficiency levels--the low, the intermediate and the high level. It is found that both native speakers of Chinese and adult learners have available at their disposal a repertoire of explicit and implicit encoding devices in which grammatical means is among the least often used. However, in comparison with native speakers, learners' repertoire is smaller and contains less varied items. Regarding the use of a particular aspectual particle, perfective le, it is found that both native speakers and learners are constrained by multiple factors. However, some factors affecting native speakers have not been acquired by learners yet and even the same type of factors affecting both native speakers and learners have different constraining strengths for the two groups. Clear developmental patterns are found in learners' acquisition of temporality in narrative discourse. As learners gain proficiency in the target language, they grow from preferring implicit encoding to preferring explicit encoding, their use of grammatical means increases against lexical means, and their reliance on the discourse context decreases. These universal developmental patterns are observed in both the foreground and the background clauses. What is found in this analysis highlights the role of input, as most of the development tendencies reflect the grammar and language use by the native speakers. However, there is evidence that L1 transfer could additionally play a role in learners' acquisition of some temporal properties of the target language. The implications of the findings of this study for the teaching of Chinese as a second language and for the acquisition study of aspectual particles in Chinese will also be discussed.

Esta investigacion se centra en la conformacion de nuevas identidades femeninas y nacionales en el cine de Maria Novaro, a partir del papel preponderante de la madre, la reconfiguracion de la familia mexicana y el desplazamiento del padre en los procesos de identidad. Se enfoca en un cine de mujer EN EL NOMBRE DE LA MADRE, un cine que reacciona contra la cultura patriarcal y el nacionalismo oficial del Estado mexicano. Este examen expone que las historias privadas de las peliculas de Novaro revelan simbolicamente el "inconsciente nacional", desplazan al Estado patriarcal y realzan a la nacion de la sociedad civil, en el marco de un cine de autora y de un cine de mujeres. En el examen, se entrevera historia y cultura, ideologia y estetica, contexto y texto, para explorar cuatro areas basicas: (1) los discursos hegemonicos de occidente en torno a la mujer; (2) las identidades hegemonicas en el cine mexicano; (3) el contexto social, politico, cultural y cinematografico de Mexico durante los ochenta y los noventa; (4) la narrativa e imagen visual de los tres primeros largometrajes industriales de la directora mexicana: Lola (1989), Danzon (1991) y El jardin del Eden (1993). La base teorica del examen son el analisis textual feminista y los conceptos de inconsciente politico, mediacion y alegoria nacional de Fredric Jameson. Asimismo, se utilizan las definiciones de meganarrador y de relato cinematografico de Francois Jost y Andre Gaudreault, para analizar las peliculas.

In picaresque fiction, subversive humor is related to genre, thematic unity, narrator/protagonists' points of view, and it illustrates fictionalized reality that is linked to contemporaneous culture and society. In this dissertation, I employ theories on humor---superiority, incongruity, release, and entropic---to study humorous episodes in Lazarillo de Tormes (1554), Guzman de Alfarache (1599, 1604) and El buscon (1626). Chapter one provides an overview of theories on humor, beginning with Plato and Aristotle and including modern theorists such as Victor Raskin, Marvin Koller and Patrick O'Neill. The superiority theory begins with Plato and Aristotle and acquires popularity in the seventeenth century with the philosophers Thomas Hobbes and Rene Descartes. The incongruity theory, which treats playful humor, originates in the eighteenth century with philosophers such as Francis Hutcheson, James Beattie and Emmanuel Kant. This theory is also associated with black humor that combines violent extremes of horror and humor and causes people to become both horrified and amused. The release theory, which emanates from Freud's ideas on psychoanalysis relates to an individual's release of forbidden thoughts, inhibitions and anxieties. O'Neill's entropic humor theory, which is related to satire, irony and parody, erodes truths and certainty and exposes the disruption of ordered systems. Henri Bergson's study of laughter functions as a social corrective while Mikhail Bakhtin's view of carnivalesque laughter signifies the symbolic destruction of authority and official culture. Chapter two studies the entropic narrator in Lazarillo de Tormes and the ways in which humor reflects a breakdown of traditional perceptions of reality, the crumbling of ordered systems and the erosion of truth and certainty related to sixteenth-century Spain. Chapter three analyzes four types of humor in Guzman de Alfarache that deal with social and moral dishonesty, horror and humor and literary vengeance. Chapter four treats grotesque black humor in the Buscon that relates to death, gallows humor (galgenhumour), cannibalism and the mutilation of a human corpse (reductio ad absurdum). Subversive humor in picaresque fiction conceptualizes reality that is linked to thematic unity, points of view and the poetics of culture and environment of Spanish society during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.

Fray Luis de Leon was incarcerated for nearly five years by the Spanish Inquisition, on the basis of charges brought against him by antagonistic colleagues who disagreed with his scholarly approach. Through a systematic consideration of his writings in light of the sociohistorical climate that gave rise to disputes between him and his detractors, it is evident that a number of themes run through Fray Luis' prose production which can be related directly to his experience as an inmate in the Inquisition's cells. These topoi, found throughout the Salmantine friar's prose, are present also in his poetry. Therefore, by analyzing those prose passages that have a direct bearing on his trial before the Inquisition and by relating those passages to his poetry, we shall gain access to unique avenues of interpretation. The results will offer new insights into Fray Luis' poetry that are not readily apparent through other methods of analysis. This study will afford us an opportunity to see Fray Luis and his works in great detail from a perspective that has not yet been explored.

This study examines whether grammar instruction treatment, input processing, facilitates in learners of English as a Second Language (ESL) a distinction among sets of phrasal verbs containing prepositions. Input processing emphasizes difficult grammatical forms and provides a model for the behavior of the varying roles of phrasal verb prepositions. Such instruction follows three steps: (i) explaining the relation between a grammatical form and its meaning, (ii) informing learners of language processes that adversely influence the form-meaning relation, and (iii) implementing "structured input" activities that target the form in linguistic input, facilitating form-meaning relations. Prepositions in phrasal verbs perform specific roles for exclusive purposes, for instance in verb-particle constructions eat up, clean out, send on where prepositions mark aspectual properties for "completion-of-activity" (telicity) as well as "affectedness" of phrasal verb objects. ESL students were selected for the control and treatment groups. Each group participated in a pretest and posttest. Each test included three tasks: one comprehension (yes/no multiple choice) and two production (sentence completion and written narration). Time (pretest/posttest) and instruction (informal IP/formal explanation) were independent variables. Scores were the dependent variable. Preposition use is difficult for ESL learners, yet no generalizations explain learning difficulty nor has instruction addressed this difficulty. Input Processing furnishes needed instruction and is consonant with current linguistic theory (Minimalism): Word-order phenomena obey "frame alternations" that shift meaning by varying syntactic configuration (movement to alternate sites in phrase structure). Language acquisition centers on mapping functions linking semantics with syntax; thus, pedagogical practice and linguistic theory are united. Structured input activities are likened to natural input that children are exposed to when they acquire language. Acquisition processes link meaningful items in a mental lexicon to grammatical patterns constructed by a mental computer. Second language learners create links between meaning and form because they make decisions about meaning in input structured to highlight the form in which meaning is conveyed. Statistical analyses show treatment effect for input processing instruction on the comprehension task, so subjects' ability is improved through attention to mapping. Production task data were inconclusive yet revealed significance of frequency of prepositions' functions.

The distribution and reference of Chinese anaphors are not predetermined by their inherent binding features or by a set of rules from one particular module; rather they are determined by the discourse context in which the anaphor in question occurs. The two most important parameters of discourse context are the discourse topic NP and discourse relations. The discourse topic NP is a unique discourse entity in that it is the only accessible antecedent for such anaphors as exempt reflexives, null subjects and null objects. A discourse topic NP derives its discourse dynamics (i.e., its ability to bind an anaphor beyond its syntactic binding domain) from the structural prominence accorded to it by its syntactic position. The relevance of discourse relations is two-fold. On one hand, the status of an NP as discourse topic is determined relative to the discourse relation underlying the discourse context in which this NP occurs. On the other, discourse relations are a decisive factor in defining the domain of discourse binding. More specifically, a discourse topic NP alpha is accessible to an anaphor beta only when alpha and beta are within a discourse of Continuation. The dynamics of the discourse topic NP and the effect of discourse relations on binding can be satisfactorily treated by Dynamic Montague Grammar with its two formal features: dynamic conjunction and the state switcher. The application of dynamic conjunction to the constituent sentences of a discourse of Continuation reveals associative nature of such a discourse while the state switcher provides a formal means of making a discourse topic NP an available antecedent for the appropriate anaphors within the desired domain of dynamic binding.

The importance of 'deixis' is that it is anchored to the immediate interactive context and resists a pre-given formulation of truth-value without taking into account such factors as when, where, to whom and even how it is said. This fact serves as an acute reminder for linguists that language use fundamentally concerns face-to-face communication and is not solely based upon the biological construals of the linguistic faculty. In this study, I will exclusively focus on spatial deixis and also closely examine spatial expressions such as coordinate terms, locative phrases, and (deictic) motion verbs. The selection of these elements largely depends on the current interest among cognitive linguists/anthropologists in preferred 'lexicalization' patterns and spatial motions/configurations, which promote image-schematic projection of the source concept. These phenomenological extensions of space will most palpably be embodied in stretches of discourse which particularly incorporate somatic descriptions and mental imageries. The novelty of the research is thus characterized by exclusive attention to 'vertical' space realized in 'on-going discourse' about spatial experience. The data types are mainly audio-(and occasionally video-)taped conversation and narration. I look at the utterance by the people who are experientially familiar with the concepts of verticality, rock climbers. They routinely and intensively exploit spatial notions for various purposes such as body-movement instructions, negotiation of geographic locations, and narration of 'danger-of-death' experience. There, multiple frames of reference and coordinate systems emerge and compete for the most suitable perspective which the speaker prefers to assume in accordance with cognitive, linguistic, and experiential constraints. I specifically ask the following questions: (1) is the vertical dimension conceptualized as the source or target domain for the image-schematic projection of the horizontal plane?, (2) are the orders of spatial descriptions constrained by language-specific 'lexicalization' patterns and/or habitualized cognitive styles?, (3) how are experientially salient portions in 'danger-of-death' narratives (e.g., Climax/Peak) related to particular modes of perspective-taking (e.g., intrinsic or extrinsic)?, and finally, (4) what is the role of 'experience' in achieving spatial coherence in the 'way-finding' negotiation? I conclude that verticality may be a more complex concept than has been previously conceptualized and has covert but influential consequences on cognitive processes and linguistic representations.