My dissertation project investigates Paul Feyerabend's later work, focusing on his epistemological and ontological positions. This thesis analyzes Feyerabend's later pluralistic philosophy and his view of historicity of knowledge from examples of the interpretation of the transition from archaic pre-rational epistemological framework to Greek and Western rationalism. The first part outlines Feyerabend's philosophical development along with his continuously changing philosophical views and offers an account of Feyerabend's critical reception among the philosophical community. The second part focuses on Feyerabend's interpretation of archaic Greek thought. Feyerabend presents a pre-rational epistemological framework in his concept of "paratactic aggregate." Feyerabend's idea is based on an analysis of late geometric figurative art and on development of Snell's linguistic research in the scope of Homeric psychology. Feyerabend highlights this original archaic worldview and explains the rise of rationality in classical Greek philosophy and culture primarily as the result of a complex idiosyncratic socio-historical process and not as progress in the development of man's reasoning. The purpose of this part of my thesis is to demonstrate how Snell's and Feyerabend's interpretation of this archaic...

The growth of multicultural and multilingual student populations in community colleges has presented difficulties for instructors who teach academic writing. This study was motivated by the desire to understand the challenges faced by novice writers from diverse ethnolinguistic backgrounds, African-American, Haitian, and Hispanic, in a South Florida community college as they grappled with the register features which defined academic writing. One major challenge has been the tendency to transfer the register feature of clause structure typical of speech into academic texts. An analysis of clause structures using writing samples collected from 45 community-college students, 15 from African-American, Haitian and Hispanic students respectively, showed the degree to which the students relied on their speech by using hypotactic and paratactic clauses instead of the main and embedded clauses characteristic of the written academic register The study has expanded on previous research which had focused on native versus nonnative English speakers (ESL) in English-language programs, by including African American students who are speakers of African American Vernacular English (AAVE) and, therefore, speak English as a second dialect (ESD) as well as Generation 1.5 students (Haitian and Hispanic), who have command of conversational English, come to the U.S. as first or second generation immigrants, and graduated from U.S. high schools, but they lack the written academic skills to perform at the college level. A challenge faced by African American AAVE speakers is that the dialect occurs predominantly in spoken discourse, and students may go to school without any exposure to written discourse in their home language. On the other hand, many Generation 1.5 students such as Haitians and Hispanics speak native languages, which have standardized orthographies, and these students may go to school having been exposed to register features of written discourse in Haitian Creole (or French) and Spanish.

The presented dissertation addresses the issue of expressing temporary relations (the present and the past) in the texts of the authors of the Baroque period. The excerpt includes 44 works of historic literary output. The topic is based on a semantic definition of temporal relationships in the Baroque language and interferes with the paratactic and hypotactic method of expression. Within the scope of paratactic connection of syntactic units, we analyze phrasal connections (the connection of main clauses and the connection of paratactic subclauses), text and phrasal connections, within the scope of hypotactic concentration mainly the relationship of the main and subordinate adverbial clauses of time. The classification according to various paratactic and subordinating conjunctions is led by the effort to obtain a comprehensive overview of the possible ways to express temporal relationships. The aim of the work is to contribute to an analytical examination of the syntactic language level of the Baroque period and to confirm the hypothesis of intact continuity of the language development between the humanistic, Baroque and National Revival periods.