People all over the world are embracing online shopping and there is a general agreement that trust plays a key role in influencing online shopping frequency. This project seeks to address the increasing need for new studies in this area. This is an empirical project that investigates the moderating effects of culture on the impact of trust on online shopping frequency. The central focus of this project was to examine whether culture affects the decision of the international consumer to trust in online shopping contexts. In an attempt to contribute to both cross-cultural and e-commerce research, the project examined shoppers across 34 countries using two of Hofstede’s six cultural dimensions: Uncertainty avoidance and Individualism. The project took a post-positivist approach to research and adopted a mixed method research design. Thus, data were collected using both quantitative and qualitative research designs, which provided a complimentary triangulation of the results. Both secondary and primary data sources were used, as the project developed a model and tested several hypotheses based on the literature on e-commerce, social psychology, and culture. Seven hypotheses were tested and research results revealed that trust has a positive impact on online shopping frequency in a multicultural context. Interestingly, no moderation effects were found for culture. The importance of this project lies in the fact that it seeks to further research at the intersection of culture, trust, and online shopping. Moreover, unlike most e-commerce projects that gather data from students within a single country, this project examines data from respondents of various demographic and socioeconomic characteristics, across several countries.

The aim of the thesis is to theoretically and empirically describe and explain the phenomenon of place-name adaptation which does not necessarily end with the borrowing or replication of place-names but can continue further. 48 Wendish place-names in Knýtlinga saga, including their attestations and variants in a selection of the saga’s text carriers and corresponding text witnesses, constitute the primary material for the investigation. The thesis seeks to combine place-name research, contact linguistics and philology with the theory of name adaptation in contact onomastics as its overall framework. The most important contribution of the thesis is the proposed demarcation between place-name replication and adaptation. In discussing the factors that can influence adaptation and its results, the focus is on the decisive role of the language user in contact-induced change. It is argued that the choice of adaptation strategy is primarily dependent upon the needs, competence and attitudes of the name user. The resulting form of adaptation is in most cases governed by the linguistic system of the target language, which is reflected in the model employed in the thesis to describe the results of the adaptation process. Two studies, one etymological and one philological, have been undertaken. Phonological, morphological, lexical, onomastic and semantic adaptations with and without epexegetic additions can be discerned in the toponymic material, which comprises 29 names of Slavic origin. Phonological adaptation dominates, which confirms the observations on place-name adaptation in previous research. Further adaptation of the replicated names in the post-medieval copies of Knýtlinga saga is admittedly insignificant; nevertheless scribes here make greatest use of lexical and onomastic adaptation in copying. The lack of transparency, which has been pointed out as the trigger for these types of adaptation, seems to create only the possibility of adaptation, but it is the name user who determines whether adaptation will occur and which strategy should then be employed.