Previously, research on multinational teamwork with various nationalities and cultures involved, which looked at the aspect of communication, was largely based on the examination of specific facilitators and barriers to its communication (i.e. Watson, et al., 1993; Hofner Saphiere, 1996). There it was found that multinational teams might have specific communication facilitators dependent upon the cultures involved. This is reflected in the theoretical development in the field of intercultural management, which gives guidance for culturally complex team settings (i.e. Trompenaars, 1993). The complexity managers’ face is increasing further through China’s involvement in the implementation of globalization strategies (Podsiadlowski, 2002). Recently, the relevance of China’s involvement has been increasing for Germany, in particular given Chinese companies’ investments in Germany. Therefore, the study of various nationalities in one research project has been reconsidered and currently there is new demand for studies, which seek to understand the complexity of Sino-German teamwork (Podsiadlowski, 2002). However, besides non-research based literature, research focusing solely on Sino-German teamwork occupies a marginal place (i.e. Podsiadlowski, 2002). Additionally, much of the multinational team research (for example, Watson, et al., 1993) looked at outcomes and disregarded the team members’ experience itself by using quantitative methods. It provided an understanding influenced by positivistic perspectives, saying that certain factors are pre-conditions for successful team communication. This study recognized these positions, but questioned the positivist bias demonstrated there. Throughout this research, associated factors were understood as being non-linear and interrelated, representing the complexity managers are experiencing. As a result this study argued that Chinese and Germans working in teams were marginalised in the intercultural management research field until today and their needs were not addressed by much of the existing research. These led to my conclusion that there is a need to conduct research that for the first time is informed by a postmodern theoretical framework that seeks to privilege multiplicity and diversity and that also attends to the silences surrounding this group. Therefore, a postmodern framework provided the theoretical lens through which this research, and its authorial, methodological, and interpretive characteristics were construed and represented. This perspective emphasised local stories about experiences, attended to ‘difference’, was concerned with the multiple nature of ‘reality’, and recognised the importance of language as a medium for the social construction of what may be considered ‘truth’ (Cheek, 2000). Narrative inquiry represented in this thesis the postmodern epistemological framework to understand subjective experiences by exploring the stories of twelve Chinese and German participants and the meanings derived from these. These stories were themselves experiences structured and recalled inside wider cultural and social contexts (Kirkman, 2002; Webster & Mertova, 2007). The socio-cultural contexts were woven into the language used by the participants to explain their experiences and signified the meanings of these experiences. However, Chinese and Germans not only differed with regards to language and language variety, but also with respect to their patterns of usage and how meaning was generated in interactive situations on the basis of socio-cultural knowledge. Therefore, my narrative inquiry took into account both linguistic and sociocultural aspects and addressed the relations between interactive communication strategies and larger social and cultural phenomena. Within the context presented above, the focus and contribution of this study were the descriptions of the intercultural communication experiences of members of Sino- German teams and the analysis of factors relating to interferences in communication to provide a thicker explanation of communication interferences in intercultural communication, where theoretical attempts so far remained rather fragmented, and to contribute findings from different perspectives on what has traditionally been viewed from a positivistic standpoint. Through sharing the participants’ lived experiences of working and communicating with Chinese and Germans and vice versa, a number of linguistic and socio-cultural factors influencing communication behaviour and causing interferences were uncovered. The factors identified from the study resonate with a number of factors previously established in existing multinational teamwork research and whilst others contributed new information that adds to the understandings of the meanings that may be made from such experience of communication interferences. Comparing the experiences related by Chinese participants with those related by German participants showed a substantial consensus with regards to the communication interferences experienced in Sino-German teams and the factors relating to these interferences, as well as observable differences in communication behaviours. The lack of foreign language proficiency on the side of both Chinese and German individuals was stated as being a major factor for communication interferences that was further enhanced through the strong linguistic barrier between these two languages. Good language proficiency minimises the occurrence of misunderstandings and miscommunications. It allows better personal contact between the team members since it better enables people to establish personal contacts and relationships, as well as to use an interlinked communication structure that allows informal communication and therefore compliance with the Chinese cultural ‘rules of the game’. However, foreign language proficiency alone is not a guarantee for successful intercultural communication in Sino-German teams. This study also analysed, in addition to the practical and theoretical significance of language and language skills, the cultural influences on the communication between Chinese and German team members. Many participants were either unaware (especially on the German side) or only partially aware of the fact that differences in communication behaviour are based on different culture-specific communication conventions and strategies. It was found that intercultural awareness on the part of individuals in a team, meaning the knowledge and awareness of culture-specific conventions and norms, had a positive influence on communication within the team. Knowledge of the meaning of the two key terms mianzi and guanxi plays an important role in Sino-German teams. On the other hand, an ethnocentric perspective on either one or both sides inevitably results in mutual negative attributions. This findings added to the understanding how this communication could be improved and, most importantly, as a prerequisite for actions of any kind to achieve improvements, to draw the attention of German team members to the relevance of communication when working with their Chinese colleagues and vice versa. Furthermore, the study functioned as an act of empowerment, a way to give voice to managers and team members who were methodologically not heard.

This thesis attempts to investigate the structure of Libyan Arabic discourse in general and interviews as a text-genre text-form in particular. This investigation includes conjunctions and their influence on the cohesion of interviews and certain other textual phenomena, i.e. repetition, parallelism and their unequivocal significance in text cohesion. To this effect, random samples were taken from two Libyan Arabic interviews, i.e. sample text 1 and sample text 2 to who how the structure of these texts is made up. To achieve these objectives, this study uses a semantic, structural and pragma-semio-textual approach to analyse and then translate the texts chosen, as language in this study is considered to be a form of behaviour (Halliday 1973) that cannot be studied in isolation from its social, cultural and contextual contexts in which it is used. Our textual analysis has shown interesting results. First, interviews have their own generic structure and such structure is presented in specific stages. Second, interviews favour the cohesive type of lexical repetition not only for cohesion purposes but also for persuasive functions as well. Third, interviews use many parallel constructions for conviction and persuasive functions.

Since language is an important means of communication between human beings, it is held that writers or speakers can affect their readers or hearers by using certain linguistic means. The manipulation of semantics and syntax, namely the use of emotive language, is seen as an affective means resorted to by text producers to influence the people's acceptance of the truth. Emotional language aims ultimately at persuading the addressee to accept the facts as they are presented by writers. It is regarded as a necessary condition for persuasion to be successful. This is due to the persuasive force of emotive meaning exerted upon the receiver. In addition, the employment of emotive language may be attributed to ideological considerations. This will be demonstrated in Chapter II. Emotiveness, as a means of persuasion, can be expressed by using certain devices such as repetition, intertextuality, word-order, figures of speech, intensifiers ... etc. These strategies will be discussed in detail with reference to translation in Chapter III. Furthermore, I must say that some of my remarks have been based on the findings of outstanding grammarians and linguists, and therefore, I have been obliged to quote from such works to substantiate my points of view. Before proceeding with the investigation, I must point out that the entire data of my work will be confined only to news reports and editorials both in Arabic and English, and for this end a number of articles have been used from official newspapers in both languages.

The present study was conducted to investigate possible interpretation discourse level effects of processing instruction and re-exposure to processing instruction on the acquisition of a specific feature of the Japanese linguistics system: namely Japanese passive forms. Processing instruction is a type of focus on form which is framed around the input processing theoretical framework. In order to carry out this investigation two separate experimental studies were conducted. All participants were native English speakers and were randomly assigned to two groups. In both experimental studies, one group received processing instruction which involved an explicit instruction component and structured input practice directed at altering the way L2 learners process input; the other group was used as a control group and received no instruction. Interpretation and production sentence level tasks, and discourse level tasks were used to measure performance after a one day instruction. A pre-test/post-test design was adopted to collect data in both studies. In the second experimental study, the processing instruction group received a re-exposure treatment between the post-test and the delayed post-test. Based on previous research carried out on the effectiveness of processing instruction, it was hypothesised that processing instruction would have positive effects on the accuracy with which subjects interpreted and produced sentences containing Japanese passive forms. A further hypothesis was that the effects of re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment (after the first post-test) would further improve subjects ability to interpret and produce sentences containing Japanese passive forms. A set of two hypotheses were formulated on possible interpretation discourse effects for processing instruction. It was hypothesised that the group receiving processing instruction would improve in its ability to interpret discourse (guided recall: dialogue and story version) containing Japanese passive forms, and that learners in this group, receiving re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment would further improve in their ability to interpret discourse containing Japanese passive forms. Overall the statistical analyses carried out on the raw scores of all the measures used supported the four hypotheses of this study. The results obtained in this research provide clear evidence that processing instruction has positive effects on the acquisition of Japanese passive construction. The present study showed that processing instruction was successful in altering the way in which learners processed the input and its effects had also an impact on the way learners produced Japanese passive construction forms. The main findings of the present study also provided new evidence on the effectiveness of processing instruction in improving learners’ performance on interpretation discourse level tasks. In addition to this, it also provides new evidence that learners receiving re-exposure to the processing instruction treatment between a post-test and a delayed post-test can further improve in their ability to interpret and produce the target feature at sentence level and interpret the target feature at discourse level. The results obtained in the two studies have implications at two levels. At the theoretical level this research provides further support for the role that input processing plays in SLA. At the pedagogical level it demonstrates the effectiveness of processing instruction on the acquisition of a different linguistic feature of the Japanese grammar system (passive forms), not only on an interpretation and production sentence level task but also on an interpretation discourse level task. It also demonstrated the important role of a re-exposure instructional treatment.

This is a thesis in variationist sociolinguistics. It attempts to make a contribution to the study of a dialect of Arabic—Palestinian Arabic—spoken in a region where the population is gradually becoming engulfed in a language, which was once quite similar to Arabic, namely Hebrew, but has undergone drastic changes, particularly in its phonological structure, as a result of contact with European languages. Now, Modern Hebrew is acting as a colonizing language vis-à-vis Palestinian Arabic, and in this study we are exploring the effects the contact between the two languages on the phonology of Arabic in the town of Jaffa, where Arabic-speaking Palestinians and Hebrew-speaking Israeli Jews reside, perhaps not in harmony, but nonetheless in the same urban space. Employing quantitative methods for one linguistic variable and a sociohistorical analysis for another, we make the case that the two variables observed in this study are but a fragment of the entire complex. Examples from the data collected are provided and briefly analyzed, some of which are from other domains of the language, and these will be further explored at a later date.

This thesis presents a linguistic ethnographic case study on a large Chinese complementary school (CCS) in Birmingham, England. Guided by Bakhtin’s theory of heteroglossia, the study investigates multilingual practices of adult participants in and around the school, focusing on the changing constructions of language ideology, Chinese teachers’ professional identity and the ethnic identification of Chineseness. It documents the impact of globalisation on the shifting relations among Chinese varieties and English in the Chinese diaspora. The 10-month fieldwork for the study was conducted in 2013/14 academic year, with observations and interviews as dominant methods for data collection. Main findings are: (1) an ideological ecology including ‘separate bilingualism’, ‘translanguaging’, ‘a hegemony of Putonghua’, and ‘a preferred school-wide monolingualism’ is dynamically constructed in the school. ‘Language as pride’ and ‘Language as profit’ are simultaneously in play leading to the dynamic ecology; (2) Chinese teachers’ professional identities are shaped by the changing structure of Chinese diaspora, the shifting power balance among different Chinese varieties and English, and teachers’ own biographical trajectories of settlement into English society; (3) practices in CCS context reflect an evolving ethnic identification of diasporic Chineseness which ‘de-freezes’ from a cultural heritage affiliated purely with the past and the national homeland.

This study presents a corpus-based analysis of the use of “wh” sentences by language learners, in language textbooks and in authentic written discourse. It focuses on the polysemeous nature of “wh” words, which can be usedas interrogatives, declaratives and to introduce subordinate clauses. The analysis of “wh” sentences in EFL textbooks showed that there are more prototypical examples at low proficiency levels. When teaching the interrogative, textbooks focus almost exclusively on grammatical words, particularly at the beginners’ level. The analysis of “wh” sentences elicited from Chinese speaking learners of English and Expert users of English suggested that the prototypical structure is very strong in both sets of data, although native speakers tend to use more prefabricated chunks of language. The analysis of “wh” sentences from native speakers and non-native speakers’ written corpora suggested that subordinate clauses are strongly present in both corpora, except for the word “why” in non-native speakers’ data. The use of different words occurring immediately after “wh” words in the two corpora can be explained by (1) the relatively small vocabulary size of the L2 speakers; (2) non-native speakers’ lack of awareness of restricted collocations; (3) L1 transfer; (4) over/under-generalization of rules and (5) textbooks.

In this thesis, I have examined the screen translation of Japanese politeness into Cantonese dubbing as well as Chinese subtitling at three difference levels: (a) face threatening acts; (b) frequently used politeness markers and (c) discernment aspect of politeness. It is not difficult to find equivalents in the target languages for the politeness strategies exploited in dealing with face threatening acts. However, the indirectness expressed through certain commonly adopted politeness markers (such as negative interrogative) in Japanese cannot be conveyed into our target languages easily. Translators also encounter some difficulties when they deal with the discernment aspect of Japanese politeness (i.e. the distinction between plain, formal and honorific form). Both target languages are able to distinguish politeness of two levels instead of three as observed in the Japanese original. Finally, the screen translation, especially the dubbed version, of the two films that I examined demonstrates the dual role of a translated text as not only a reproduction of the original text but also a text which has its function in the target culture.

This study explores perceptions of Chinese texts by Western audiences while looking into the interrelation between film and literature. This is done by two means: firstly, through a detailed discussion of film adaptations with the focus on Chinese cinema, and secondly, through a practical demonstration of a filmic style in prose fiction in the form of an original book-length piece of fiction. Using Bakhtin’s ‘dialogism’ as the point of departure, the research on adaptations adopts an intertextual approach of adaptation theory as developed by Robert Stam, looking into the intertextual relationship between a hypotext (a source text) and a hypertext (film adaptation). The analysis of Raise the Red Lantern by Zhang Yimou (1991) and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon by Ang Lee (2001) concludes that both films contain elements of familiarity and strangeness for Western audiences, an uneasy mix of intimacy and exoticism which underpins their appeal. However, this phenomenon is unintended by the filmmakers themselves, chiefly because, firstly, the directors’ exposure to Western film art has contributed to the use of techniques that are familiar to Western audiences in the making of their films, and, secondly, the elements of strangeness are related to the natures of the films, the cultural elements involved and the locations in which the films are made, which are unfamiliar to a Western audience. The writing of the novel, Little Hut of Leaping Fishes, reveals the necessity of incorporating cultural elements into a narrative that is set in a time and place where the culture is deeply rooted. My background as a fourth-generation Chinese in Malaysia informs my urge as an artist and critic to explore aspects of my own cultural identity. The main concern, which is the key discovery of this experiment, is that once a writer understands the shared creative mechanism between film and literature, he can place a camera before his pages to capture the scenes he carefully arranged, making the page a screen onto which images as well as words can be projected.

The main purpose of this thesis is to trace the impact of the English Romantic poets, especially Keats, Shelley and Byron, on Arab/Iraqi Romantic poetry and thought, in particular that of Nazik al-Mala'ikah. The thesis is divided into two volumes. The first volume consists of three chapters, each divided into short sections. The first chapter is a detailed introduction to the three other chapters. It discusses the problem of defining the term 'Romanticism'. It studies comparatively the four fundamentals of the English and Arabic Romantic theories. It traces the origin and the development of Arabic/Iraqi Romanticism. It also traces the sources of Nazik's knowledge of world literature: Arabic, English, American, French, German, Greek, Latin and Scandinavian. Nazik's poems and those of other Arabic Romantic poets, such as Iliyya Abu Madi, Ali Mahmud Taha, and Abu 'l-Qasim 'l-Shabbi are compared. The importance of the poems that appear in The Golden Treasury to Arabic poetry in general and to Nazik's poetry in particular is highlighted. A list of English poets, such as Shakespeare, Milton, Gray, Coleridge, Wordsworth, Keats, Shelley and Byron, whose poems and thoughts are influential on Nazik's poetry and critical works, is arranged chronologically with a short introduction to each poet, and his posit ion in Arabic/Iraqi poetry in general and in Nazik's literary works in particular. Abdul-Hai's bibliography of the Arabic versions of English poetry and Jlhan's Ra'uf's bibliography of the Arabic versions of Shelley's poetry are given, in order to indicate the earliest possible date of Arabic translation from English poetry. The second chapter is divided into two parts. These parts are preceded by a short introduction on Arabic translation of English poetry, followed by a section on Nazik's motives in translating English poetry. In the first part, Arabic versions of Gray's Elegy by Andraus, Mahmud, al-Muttalibi and Nazik are analysed comparatively to establish whether Nazik's version is original or dependent on the other earlier Arabic versions. In the final section, the influence of Gray's Elegy on Nazik's themes and imagery is traced. In the second part of this chapter, Nazik's version of Byron's address to the ocean in the fourth canto of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage is fully analysed, preceded by a list of Arabic versions of Byron's poems. Nazik's version is studied independently from other Arabic versions, because most of the versions found are of different parts of Byron's poem. A section is devoted to Nazik's and Byron's relationship with the sea. In the last section, the impact of this passage on Nazik's poetry is traced and compared to that of Gray's Elegy. The third chapter traces the presence of Keats's odes in Nazik's poetry. This chapter is introduced by a definition of the term 'Ode'. The second section traces the impact of the themes and imagery of Keats's odes on Nazik' s poetry. Four sections are devoted to establishing the common contrasting themes in Keats's and Nazik's poetry. The following sections are devoted to the natural elements common to the poetry of Nazik and Keats: the birds, the wind, the river, the sun and the moon. The final sections study comparatively Nazik's and Keats's common literary devices: Personification, Synaesthesia and Compound adjectives. The second volume consists of the fourth chapter, the tables and the bibliography. This chapter studies the allusions in Nazik's poetry, and traces their sources in Keats, Shelley, Byron and Anatole France. A section is devoted to names alluded to in Nazik's poetry. The significance of The Golden Bough in Arabic is highlighted in a separate section, followed by a section on Nazik's mythological themes and symbols. Two sections are devoted to the relations of the Jinniyyah to poetry and to god. The appearance and functions of Nazik's Jinniyyah are compared to those of similar figures in Anatole France and Shelley. Nazik's Jinniyyah is seen as the synthesis of a complex mythological tradition. Many examples are given to discuss her relations to: (1) male and female mythological, religious and cultural characters, such as: Adam, Cain, Abel, Prometheus, Christ, Muhammad, Paphnutius, Midas, Plutus, Eve, Thais, Adonis, Cupid, Narcissus, Nessus, Ares, Magdalen, Thais, Venus, Diana, Rabiah al-Adawiyyah, the Sleeping Beauty, Demeter, Rapunzel and Shahrazad; (2) supernatural creatures, such as: the serpent, the demon, the spider, the sirens, the giant fish, the ghosts and the ghoul; (3) mythological things, such as: the Labyrinth, Lethe, Eldorado, Pactolus and al-Kawthar. A section is devoted to the symbol of Gold in Nazik's and in English poetry. Nine tables are supplied, setting out the common mythological names that occur in Nazik's, Keats's, Shelley's and Byron's poetry. A bibliography of primary and secondary Arabic and English sources is given. This bibliography contains the works cited throughout and other relevant secondary sources. The former are marked with an asterisk.