This thesis reports a study into aspects of the discourse concerning the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) triple vaccine. The aim of the thesis is to contribute to knowledge about the ways in which debates about science are enacted in the public sphere. The study uses a corpus-a…
"147" Result
Sort By:
This thesis presents the results of a classroom experiment designed to investigate the possible transfer-of-training effects of two types of instruction on the acquisition of the past imperfective aspect, subjunctive mood, and causative constructions in French. An input-based pr…
This is the second of three modules concerned with narrative and identity in English language teaching. In Module 1, I introduced conversational narrative and examined ways in which descriptions of conversational narrative might be applicable to the development of pedagogic mode…
This thesis is the third of three modules, and explores narrative identity in interviews with English language teachers. It offers an analysis of how speakers used linguistic resources to construct identities for themselves during life story interviews. Both interviewer (the aut…
This is a study exploring the feasibility of a fully automated analysis of linguistic data. It identifies a requirement for large-scale investigations, which cannot be done manually by a human researcher. Instead, methods from natural language processing are suggested as a way t…
This study investigates the interaction between adults with learning disabilities and their care staff. Many people with severe learning disabilities have little or no speech; for these individuals, augmentative and alternative communication (AAC) may enhance their communication…
Field-names in Scotland are part of the oral tradition, passed down from generation to generation of farmers. Despite the valuable holdings at the Scottish Field Name Survey (University of Edinburgh), work to collect these names has been patchy and many areas of Scotland remain …
Pragmatic competence, the ability to use language effectively in a contextually appropriate fashion, has been a central concern in pragmatic studies for more than four decades. A large number of pragmatic competence studies have examined the pragmatics of native and non-native s…
The major focus of the thesis is to investigate the complex dynamism of L2 demotivation. It is an attempt to reform previous thinking of demotivation and move the L2 demotivation mainstream research into a new phase that focuses on the complexity of its process and its developme…
Nonword repetition has received great attention in the last three decades due to its ability to distinguish between the performance of children with language impairment and their typically developing peers and due to its correlation with variety of language abilities, especially…
This doctoral thesis is an investigation into the process of translation performed by “natural” translators in comparison to MA Translation Studies students, hereon after will be termed trainee translators. “natural” translators were defined following Harris and Sherwood underst…
Polysemy is a challenge for L2 learners because it confounds the mapping of form to meaning. We can therefore consider learners' capacity to manage polysemous words as an indication of their L2 lexical and conceptual knowledge. To investigate what factors affect L2 learners' kno…
The thesis investigates the phenomenon of multilingualism from a Bourdieusian-derived perspective with a focus on the conditions enabling second-generation immigrant agents to produce, reproduce, and negotiate linguistic practices with non-autochthonous minority languages in the…
The lack of norms for speech sound acquisition and phonological error patterns in the Syrian variety of Arabic is one of the challenging aspects of diagnosing and treating speech disorders in speakers of this language. Although there are normative data which speech language ther…
This corpus-based, exploratory study attempts to fill a gap in the realm of knowledge on writer’s self-representation in academic writing. It aims to examine the writer’s discoursal self manifested by the utilisation of first person pronouns, focusing on the functional roles the…
The main purpose of this study is to investigate language practices in the linguistic landscape (LL) of Jordanian cities. There have been few research studies that examine the LL of Jordanian cities, and none has investigated multilingualism. This study is intended to fill this …
Code switching involves the interplay of two languages and as well as serving linguistic functions, it has social and psychological implications. In the context of English language teaching, these psychological implications reveal themselves as teachers’ thought processes. While…
This study analyses the ways in which gender relations are expressed and articulated through the use of folk proverbs amongst Pashto-speaking people of Pakistan. Previous work on Pashto proverbs have romanticised proverbs as a cultural asset and a source of Pashtun pride and eth…
This thesis has two aims: developing resources for Arabic dialects and improving the speech recognition of Arabic dialects. Two important components are considered: Pronunciation Dictionary (PD) and Language Model (LM). Six parts are involved, which relate to building and evalua…