Library: Language, Literature, and Linguistic

The present study investigated differences on the knowledge and use of collocations between French and Japanese learners with regard to: 1) L1 influence; and 2) combinability and transparency influence. The test materials included four categories of the lexical collocations: 1) verb + noun; 2) delexicalised verb + noun; 3) adjective + noun; and 4) adverb + adjective. The two types of tasks, Multiple Choice Question Tasks and Translation Tasks, were performed, and the learner corpora were also investigated in order to examine whether the learners from different L1 backgrounds demonstrate differ...

This book explores the challenges of cross-cultural translation of American literary works into Arabic which, I argue, have prevented many nineteenth-century literary works from being translated into Arabic. I have used the Arabic translations of Harriet Beecher Stowe‘s Uncle Tom’s Cabin and an abridged English text accompanying one of the translations as a case study. Since most of the Arabic translations of English and especially American literary works are merely linguistic oriented ones, I reinforce the importance of adopting a period-specific cultural-oriented approach that maintains the ...

This dissertation presents a study on the acquisition of telicity by Spanish and English native speakers. In addition to the study of acquisition, it investigates the syntactic and semantic properties of locatum constructions (e.g., the water filled the bucket), which are sentences that contain two internal arguments and whose subject is non-agentive. This dissertation explores the syntactic and semantic properties of elements of the verb phrase that had not been previously considered in the interpretation of telicity, such as the role of non-agentive subjects and the type of movement that tak...

Modality is a grammatical, or semantic-grammatical, category. It is an important component of human languages. This is at least the case in most European languages. To what extent is it a near-universal? This thesis is to contribute to the question. It focuses on modal verbs in English and Chinese, two genetically and geographically unrelated languages, and analyzes what these two languages have in common and how they differ in their systems of modality. To achieve the aim, the thesis adopts the theoretical framework proposed by van der Auwera (1996, 1998 with Plungian, 2001) for the typol...

James Hogg, a Scottish writer, was the founder of the psychological novel. He perfectly understood the notions of dream and reality, the danger of the voyage in “Nancy Chilshom”, the world of the illusions, the lure, madness and strangeness towards the reality of the tragedy, the kingdom of the fairies, death, the finality of art, the supernatural, the Devil and sorcery in Scotland, the Scotland-England couple : the female nation and the male devastator, the carnival of the masks and the reality of his Masonic initiation at the end of his life.

This study attempts to re-evaluate Lawrence's poetry, which has often been read as a set of biographical documents or supplementary notes to his novels, as fully independent literary work in the light of post-modern critical theory. The author carefully examines how Lawrence needed to misread his precursors, the nineteenth-century Romantics, to establish himself as one of the modern poets. What separates his poetry from his precursors' is his self-consciousness as a modern poet. His search for radical freedom in language and his meta-poetic exploration of a new poetic expression make him a tr...

(Note: Dissertation is written in Spanish.) The principal aim of this thesis is to discover the origin, formulation and effect of what is known as a “strategic behaviour”. A very well-known type of strategic behaviour is the persuasive behaviour, the purpose of which is to produce changes in the ideas, behaviour or feelings of a person. The corpus chosen for analysis has been one made up of five parliamentary sessions which preceded and followed the 1988 Education Reform Act. This acts represents the most important governmental initiative in the education service of England and Wales si...

This thesis dissertation, written in Spanish, presents a new model for the linguistic specification and the computational management of man-machine dialogues following commands issued in spoken natural language. Our aim is to design and implement a conversational system for the automatic telephone task scenario, namely Delfos. Voice dialing represents a current trend in research, the purpose of which is to provide functional systems for products ranging from domestic appliances such as a video or a washing machine to more sophisticated environments such as a complete house, with an interface i...

Joseph Conrad's novella "Heart of Darkness" (1899) is taught and read all over the world. Everywhere, novelists and travel writers respond to it in their own creative work. I discuss 30 responses, or rewritings, from Africa, India, the Caribbean, Australia, Europe and the US. Their perspectives include those of groups who identify with Conrad's Europeans and groups who feel close to his Africans, and increasingly those of groups who situate themselves between these two extremes in various ways. I identify world-wide developments as well as themes, strategies and paradigm shifts that co...

The elements of menace and terror are crucial aspects of Elizabeth Bowen's pervasive theme of betrayal in her investigation of human relationships. Bowen introduces menace into the familiar and predictable environment of her characters and threatens their sense of security and safety.