Bilingualism has been shown to influence a variety of cognitive functions, most notably lexical processing and cognitive control. These effects are both detrimental and advantageous. On the one hand, it has been proposed that bilinguals experience delayed lexical access compared to monolinguals, both in the less-proficient language and in the native language, due to the relatively reduced frequency of use. On the other hand, the constant need to juggle and control two languages enhances cognitive control abilities in bilinguals, such that they outperform monolinguals on tasks of executive processing and conflict resolution. This dissertation explores these cognitive changes associated with bilingualism, primarily through the use of a Stroop task. As it combines lexical processing with cognitive control, the Stroop task is a unique paradigm in which to investigate these abilities in bilinguals. Using behavioural measures, electroencephalography, and functional magnetic resonance imaging, the experiments presented here seek to deepen our understanding of lexical processing and cognitive control in bilingualism, in order to better understand how the now-common use of multiple languages affects the functional brain.

The study of gender as an analytical tool in Translation Studies has highlighted women's position as translators and creators of meaning and has opened the way for questioning established realities, "truths" and norms created by the dominant male voice. The aim of this research is to study four English translations of the Quran by women: The Quran, Arabic text with Corresponding English Meaning (1995) by Umm Muhammad, The Light of Dawn (1999) by Camille Adams Helminski, The Holy Quran: Translation with Commentary (2006) by Taheereh Saffarzadeh and The Sublime Quran (2007) by Laleh Bakhtiar, in order to determing whether these women translators are challenging or reproducing patriarchal gender hierarchies through their renditions of the Sacred Text of Islam. An important second thread is to investigate the assumption that a translator's feminine gender automatically results or leads in/to a woman-centred or feminist reading of the source text. Considering that scholars working on gender and translation have focused on various elements of the translation process, in this study, my research questions revolve around four main areas, namely (1) the role of paratexts, (2) the extent of interventions in the Sacred Text (3) linguistic choices, and finally (4) interpretation of gender-related terms. In order to address these questions, I will adopt a critical and comparative analysis between the four individual English translations of the Quran by women, the original Arabic text, and, occasionally, other English versions translated by men. The main findings reveal that there is a deep divide between translations produced by women translators living in Muslim majority countries and those living in the United States. Finally, this research suggests that the study of women's role as translators of religious texts in different cultural, social and religious settings could help produce a more nuanced and critical view of the impact of the translator's gender on his/her work.

This thesis compares conversations between British tutors and British students, and conversations between British tutors and Japanese students, in English in order to investigate differences and similarities in their listenership behaviour in relation to the use of response tokens in the context of academic supervision sessions. A new method for conversation analysis to synthesise visual data with verbal data on timeline has been established. The concept of leadtime, which is a time scale to measure a distance between a point where a particular response token is uttered to a point where a turn transition occurs, has been introduced to implement the research method. Approaches in conversation analysis, roles of context, and intercultural communication are reviewed in this thesis. In addition, participants' assumptions of framing and turn-taking structure in conversation and self-expressions in listenership with reflection of their cultural values in interlanguage settings have been taken into consideration. The results from the preliminary research are summarised as follows: 1. Similarities in use of strategies for framework shifts, such as increase and decrease of response tokens before floor-taking, and multi-functional nature of hand gestures, such as hand gestures used for speaker change and metaphoric signs, have been recognised between the British-British conversations and the British-Japanese conversation. 2. L1 (first language) transfer has been observed in the Japanese students’use of response tokens, such as their constant use of head nods at a particular pace. These findings highlight areas for further research and application in intercultural communication.

While many comparative studies reveal how a given medium determines narrative in ways distinct from others, I uniquely consider within this thesis the highly variable structure of a single given medium and the resultant implications for storyworlds and their presentations. Focusing upon the production of serial narrative within multiple media, I map the intricate processes by which cultural industries inform narrative diversity. Through the introduction of my dimensions of specificity model, I account for diachronically- and synchronically-variable conditions of narrative design within a given medium, revealing the complex interactions between media and narrative that are frequently overlooked. Via the model, I identify the ways in which narrative design processes are, within a medium, specific to the historically changeable configurations of a particular market. I examine in tum how, within a given market, these narrative design processes are further specific to the particular requirements of an intended audience, the particular technologies of production, distribution and consumption, and the particular economic strategy and production culture of a commissioning media institution. Chapter one historicises the project by exploring the relevance of this model to nineteenth-century British literary-serial fiction; it takes into account the ramifications to narrative of contrasting specificities within markets, audiences, institutions and technologies of the Victorian era. The remaining three chapters each consider in depth a single dimension of specificity in relation to a particular contemporary US media industry. Chapter two analyses the dimension of institutional specificity within the context of US television; it distinguishes between the economic models of network, basic cable and premium cable institutions, gauging the unique implications of each system to the narrative design processes of primetime drama series. Chapter three investigates the contingency of narrative upon the dimension of audience specificity within the US comic-book industry; it examines how publishers' endeavours to court audiences beyond their dedicated niche-readership have impacted upon writing and illustrating practices. Chapter four charts the significance of the dimension of technological specificity to narratives within the videogame home-console market; it explores the connections between an industrially enforced technological-upgrade culture and the ongoing development of story-driven videogame series. Through this tracing of the variable ways by which cultural industries can influence storyworlds and their presentations, I provide with this thesis a necessarily nuanced understanding of the relationship between narrative and media.

This thesis considers the role of language and literacy in supporting the exploration of bilingual identities. Two groups of bilingual girls participated in the study when they were aged between 11 and 13. One group are British-Asian girls, located within an English inner-city; the other group live in North West Wales. Like many bilinguals, the girls in this study experience the daily interaction of different – and sometimes dissonant – realities. These are represented both by their languages and by the varying cultural practices and values of their communities, many of which can be seen reflected in different literacy practices. Early in the study, quantitative analysis of the reading practices of the research participants and their peers in both communities suggested significant differences in the amount and nature of the engagement with text that occurred in English and in minority languages. A series of interviews with the two groups of girls over the next two years allowed further insight into a range of complex factors that affected their engagement with their languages and literacies. The study offers a consideration of these interconnected factors. It is argued that the interaction between languages and literacies experienced by these young bilinguals supports their ongoing negotiation of identities. The girls are shown to actively utilise the repertoire of cultural resources they experience as part of this process, using their languages and literacies as a space where they explore and demonstrate their bilingual identities.

Current methodologies in corpus linguistics have revolutionised the way we look at language. They allow us to make objective observations about written and spoken language in use. However, most corpora are limited in scope because they are unable to capture language and communication beyond the word. This is problematic given that interaction is in fact multi-modal, as meaning is constructed through the interplay of text, gesture and prosody; a combination of verbal and non-verbal characteristics. This thesis outlines, then utilises, a multi-modal approach to corpus linguistics, and examines how such can be used to facilitate our explorations of backchanneling phenomena in conversation, such as gestural and verbal signals of active listenership. Backchannels have been seen as being highly conventionalised, they differ considerably in form, function, interlocutor and location (in context and co-text). Therefore their relevance at any given time in a given conversation is highly conditional. The thesis provides an in-depth investigation of the use of, and the relationship between, spoken and non-verbal forms of this behaviour, focusing on a particular sub-set of gestural forms: head nods. This investigation is undertaken by analysing the patterned use of specific forms and functions of backchannels within and across sentence boundaries, as evidenced in a five-hour sub-corpus of dyadic multi-modal conversational episodes, taken from the Nottingham Multi-Modal Corpus (NMMC). The results from this investigation reveal 22 key findings regarding the collaborative and cooperative nature of backchannels, which function to both support and extend what is already known about such behaviours. Using these findings, the thesis presents an adapted pragmatic-functional linguistic coding matrix for the classification and examination of backchanneling phenomena. This fuses the different, dynamic properties of spoken and non-verbal forms of this behaviour into a single, integrated conceptual model, in order to provide the foundations, a theoretical point-of-entry, for future research of this nature.

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Chapter 1 - Survey of metaphor using both historical and contemporary sources. Chapter 2 - Analysis of figurative transfer in the STUN group of words using data from the Historical Thesaurus of English. Additional analysis of figurative transfer of the adjectives STURDY and STOUT. Examination of the phonaesthetic groupings of words with initial ST - with especial reference to STUN, STURDY and STOUT. Chapter 3 - Analysis of the HOT/COLD metaphor to express EMOTION using data from the Historical Thesaurus of English. Chapter 4 - A phonaesthetic analysis of all words with initial SW - using data taken direct from OED. A diachronic analysis of same and a series of synchronic analyses to ascertain the phonaesthetic/non-phonaesthetic ratio of initial SW - words throughout time. Chapter 5 - Implictions and suggestions for further research on metaphor, phonaestheme and the possible overlap between these two linguistic mechanisms. Chapter 6 - Conclusions.