This thesis intends to demonstrate that the idea of the end is a crucial motive of Geoffrey Hill’s poetry. It analyses the verbal and formal means by which Hill attempts to have his poems arrive at ends. The ends are, chiefly, the reconciliation of antagonists in word or thought; and the perfect articulation of the poem. The acknowledgement of failure to achieve such ends provides its own impetus to Hill’s work. The thesis examines in detail Hill’s puns, word-games, rhymes, syntaxes, and genres — their local reconciliations and entrenched contrarieties — and claims for them a significant place in the study of Hill’s poetry, particularly with regard to its sustained concern with ends and endings. Little has been written to date about Hill’s entire poetic corpus as represented in Broken Hierarchies (2013), due to the recentness of the work. This thesis draws from the earliest to the latest of Hill’s poetic writings; and makes extensive use of archival material. It steps beyond the ‘historical drama’ of language depicted in Matthew Sperling’s Visionary Philology (2014) and Alex Pestell’s Geoffrey Hill: The Drama of Reason (2016) and asserts that the drama in Hill’s poetry, seeking to transcend history, is constantly related to its end: not only its termination in time but its consummating purpose.

This thesis aims to set the Engishiki Norito (hereafter Norito), a group of early Japanese liturgical texts, in the context of the broader Old Japanese textual tradition and, in the process, draw attention to their value as literary artefacts. This is achieved by valorizing the role in the texts of rhetoric - defined broadly as meaningful units of repetitive language - and demonstrating that rhetorical structures similar to those found in the Norito exist throughout the corpus of Old Japanese literature, as far as it is extant. There have only been two substantial attempts to engage with the repetitive language in the Norito as a network of structures or systems recognizable as rhetoric (Inamura & Inamura, 1956; Kameyama, 1995). While still valuable, these studies embody the combined legacies of diverse traditional discourses, borrowed Western notions of veracity versus ornament and narratives of continuity poorly applied to early Japan that have affected Norito scholarship generally. In particular, they do not pay close attention to the syntax, morphology and phonology of Old Japanese encoded in the texts, as distinct from later forms of Japanese. Neither do they emphasize the extent of the close intertextual bonds the Norito share with other Old Japanese texts, or the associative potential of logography in a textual tradition as sophisticated as that within which the Norito were recorded in writing. In Western Japanological discourse, the repetitively structured language termed rhetoric in this study has been openly viewed as detrimental to the Norito's literary worth (Sansom 1931, Philippi 1959, 1990); most likely as a result of the problematic status of rhetoric and repetition in Western modernity. This - coupled with disciplinary divisions in Japan - has resulted in the Norito becoming divorced from the mainstream corpus of Old Japanese literature, despite their close relationship to that corpus and despite their high degree of rhetorical sophistication. After addressing some of the reasons for the Norito's alienation in discourse on Japanese literature, and exploring some theoretical dimensions of rhetoric itself, this study proceeds to set the liturgies in the context of Old Japanese oral and textual cultures and to begin to introduce features of their rhetoric - noting that the interrelatedness of rhetorical structures is a major key to understanding them. The last three chapters of the study are concerned with rhyme, a special feature that is both an analogue of, and interconnected with, other rhetorical structures. Together, the three chapters argue that rhyme is an understudied but pervasive feature of Japanese poetry and song and that - in the Old Japanese case - rhyming structures constitute a significant component of the rhetoric of the Norito and other texts. The development of a robust analytical approach to rhetorical features of Old Japanese texts has been hampered by the persistent reluctance to associate Japanese literature with 'rhyme', or 韻 in - two terms with problematic heritages. In attempting to implement such an approach in the case of the Norito, it is hoped that this study will, in small measure, contribute to a better understanding of rhetorical texts in general and, above all, to the repositioning of the Norito within the mainstream corpus of Old Japanese literature, where they belong.

Educators need measurement tools to determine phonological awareness in young children. This study investigated the appropriateness of rhyme cloze tasks, referred to as Finish-a-Rhyme-Story items, which were designed to measure preschool and kindergarten children's early rhyme development. The rhyme cloze tasks required children to verbally complete a sentence by filling in a final rhyming word that matched a rhyme pattern highlighted in a short story that was read aloud to them. The task required rhyme awareness as well as comprehension of the language in the story. Twenty-four items were individually administered to preschool (n = 207) and kindergarten (n = 382) children to determine item performance and discriminative power. Rasch analysis indicated that the difficulty level of the items was well matched for the sample indicating that the items were developmentally appropriate for preschool and kindergarten children. Several analyses of variance (ANOVA) compared the performance of preschool and kindergarten children as well as the performance of monolingual English speaking (ENG) children and English Language Learners (ELL) to determine if there were group differences on the rhyme cloze measure. Results also indicated that the items have the ability to discriminate between children with high and low level rhyming ability based on the Rasch model; kindergarten children were more aware of the rhyme component than preschool children and ENG children were more aware than ELL children.

Of the many aspects of the composition of poetry, the most common component of the form involves emotional response. There is an infinite number of ways to write a poem, and likewise an infinite number of forms which a poem can be structured according to. In writing this collection of poems composing my thesis, I set out to write poetry in as many ways as I could to explore how different forms, devices, voices, points of view, sounds, tones, and as many other variables as I could think of affect poetry as stimulus. The poems in this collection cover a range of classic poetic forms and styles as well as variations of free verse and contemporary forms. My hope is that the readers of these poems will be able to experience a wide range of emotional responses and gain the same insight into the vast abilities inherent in poetry that I gained in writing them.

La recherche d'invariants phonétiques ou phonologiques dans un corpus tel que les nursery rhymes nous a amené à les collecter, à les contraster et à les analyser. La collecte finale se fit grâce au dictionnaire des nursery rhymes, compilé par les folkloristes anglais, Peter et Iona Opie, une anthologie étymologique de référence. Ils passèrent de nombreuses années à répertorier toutes sortes de nursery rhymes, anciennes et récentes, populaires et inconnues. Le but de la collecte de ce corpus était de la faire de façon globale et neutre sans apport initial d'enfants. La deuxième étape fut une réflexion sur leur identité et leur forme ce qui aboutit au constat qu'une comptine n'en était une que si elle continuait à exister. Faisant partie de la tradition orale, la nursery rhyme doit être récitée, scandée régulièrement par un public précis pour qu'elle se transmette et continue son parcours intergénérationnel . Un sondage fut mis en place auprès d'une centaine d'enfants anglophones qui contrastèrent le corpus global en deux entités. Le résultat fit apparaître un corpus de comptine toujours connues et récitables par les sondés et un autre corpus de comptines oubliées. A partir de ces deux nouveaux corpus, une analyse phonétique fut entreprise pour dégager un ou des invariants inhérents à la condition de nursery rhyme. En couplant le premier et le dernier son-consonne accentué de chaque vers de chaque comptine et en prenant la place de l'articulation comme mesure de référence, il se dégage deux mouvements majoritaires dans leur énonciation, un mouvement d'arrière en avant pour les comptines populaires et un mouvement d'avant en arrière pour celles qui sont oubliées. / The search for phonetic or phonological invariants in nursery rhymes made us collect them globally, contrast them through a survey and analyse them. The Opies, British folklorists, published an Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes which became our primary source of material as their precious collection of rhymes had the advantage of being global and objective. Once the corpus established, it became obvious that these nursery rhymes had different statuses as to their popularity among children. The need to contrast them was necessary. A survey was set up and presented to more than a hundred English-speaking children. It resulted in 2 sub-corpuses, popular nursery rhymes (PNR) and forgotten ones (FNR). The question was what made them belong to one or the other? A phonetic analysis was ploughed through the corpuses. By pairing the first and the last stressed consonant-sound of every verse of every nursery rhyme and taking the place of articulation as reference, 2 major opposite enunciative movements arose, a back-to-front movement (B2F) for popular nursery rhymes and a front-to-back movement (F2B) for the forgotten ones.

In the Commedia of Dante, a poem 14,233 lines in length, some 7,500 words occur only once. These are the hapax. Fewer than 2% of these constitute a minute but distinct subset—the hapax for which there are one or more words in the poem whose spelling is identical but whose meaning is different. These are what I call same-spelling hapax. I identify four categories: part-of-speech, homograph, locus, and name. Analysis of the same-spelling hapax illuminates a poetic strategy continuously in use throughout the poem. This is to use the one-word overlap of Rhyme and line number. Not only is it highly probable that a same-spelling hapax will be a rhyme-word, but it is also probable that it will occupy a rhyme-word’s most significant position—the one place—the single word—where the two intertwined formal entities that shape each canto coincide. Every three lines, their tension-resolving this-word-only union intensifies the reader’s attention and understanding alike.

韓國韻書最大的特色在於以韓文標注韓國漢音字，〔東國正韻〕（一四四七）是單以 韓文標注漢字之韓語音讀，而不附華人音讀的一部韻書．除此書之外，其餘的韻書均 係以〔四聲通解〕為基準，而併記中國本土字音的．其中最早標注中國本土字音（〔 四聲通解〕音）與當時韓國漢字音的韓國韻書是〔華東正音通釋韻考〕．〔四聲通解 〕的中國語音是襲用〔洪武正韻譯訓〕的音讀而成的；正如〔華東正音通釋韻考〕序 文中的詮釋云：其用意是欲以中國本土字音為依據，使其符合已有了很大變化的韓國 漢字音． 故倘若將〔洪武正韻〕與〔華東正音通釋韻考〕相與比較的話，就會發現有某種規則 性的對應關係在當中的，本文即以比較此種關係而作． 本文分成五張加以研討，大綱如下： 第一章：緒論．共分二節．敘述筆者的研究目的與方法，以及〔華東正音通釋韻考〕 的概說． 第二章：共分二節．敘述韓國人利用中國韻書與編纂韻書，以及〔華東正音通釋韻考 〕在韓國韻書中所佔的地位． 第三章：共分二節．觀察〔洪武正韻〕的音系與〔華東正音通釋韻考〕的音系，以及 比較分析〔華東正音通釋韻考〕華音是反硬中國哪一個時代的音． 第四章：共分二節．就聲母與韻母兩部份，比較分析〔洪武正韻〕與〔華東正音通釋 韻考〕的對應關係． 第五章：結論．

The diploma thesis focuses on work with poem mostly in lessons concerning reading and literary education and also cross-curricular usage of it in elementary school. The theoretical part is dealing with findings from the field of literary theory and didactics focusing on work with poetic text, its basic terms and poetic tools. There is also a brief development of Czech authorial poetry and reference to folk´s literature. The questionnaires of the research part are focused on usage of poetic texts in teaching in elementary school, the attention is especially put on the way how it can be applied and the degree of its application. The practical part offers a database of activities for work with poem and samples of handouts which were verified by pupils of elementary school. Methodical double-sheet for teachers is attached to the handouts for pupils.

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Recent research in phonological awareness found a strong link between rhyming ability in preschool children and later reading achievement. The use of orthographic analogy, the ability to make inferences from similarities in spelling to similarities in sound, was proposed as the mechanism to explain this relationship (Goswami & Bryant, 1990). Literature was presented that suggested the need for further research. Four research questions were examined. First, can prereaders learn to read unfamiliar words on the basis of orthographic analogy after brief training with rhyming words? The evidence supported the view that they could. Second, will the ability to read words by orthographic analogy be enhanced by phonological training in onset and rime, and by the use of segmented text? The brief phonological training did not increase analogy word reading over the same training without it. However, using text segmented at the onset-rime boundary for training items did increase analogy word reading. Third, will reading by orthographic analogy vary according to the level of prereading skills (rhyming ability, phoneme identity, letter-sound knowledge)? The majority of children with high prereading skills learned to read analogy test words whereas most children with low prereading skills found the task too arduous. Fourth, will rhyming ability make an independent contribution to reading achievement? The results were equivocal. Rhyming ability did make an independent contribution to the number of trials taken to learn the training items. It did not when analogy word reading was the dependent variable. Phoneme identity accounted for most of the variance in analogy word reading. Further analyses found that the ability to identify the final phoneme was the best discriminator between children who learned to read analogy test words and those who did not. A possible explanation was that children used the final phoneme to determine the sound of the rime ending rather than the last two phonemes together.