School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemWritten feedback in intermediate Japanese L2 classes: Teachers’ and students’ attitudes and practices( 2022)This thesis investigates the attitudes and practices of students and teachers surrounding written feedback in the context of an intermediate Japanese as a Second Language program. Despite the abundance of research investigating written feedback and the factors that influence its implementation and uptake in programs that teach English as an Additional Language, the field of research into second language acquisition has yet to explore written feedback outside of this context in any depth. Hence, the current study aims to begin to address this apparent gap in the existing literature by applying methodologies and theories from previous study to the novel environment of Japanese as a Second Language education. In particular, this was done in order to determine the validity of existing findings outside of the usual context and consider the reasons for any differences in results that might arise. Nine students and two teachers of an intermediate university JSL program provided both qualitative and quantitative data to the study via interviews, surveys, and collection of feedback provided on assignments. Analysis of this data then demonstrated that despite the difference in target language of the educational environment, teachers and students displayed similar attitudes and practices to those that had been observed in previously studied English as an Additional Language learning environments. Thus, the study demonstrates the validity of drawing upon previous literature from English as an Additional Language programs to inform pedagogy in other language learning environments, and facilitates further research on written feedback in environments that teach languages other than English.
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ItemMiscreants or Mere Mortals? Representation of Female compared to Male Politicians in Comments to Australian Online Newspapers: a Corpus Assisted Discourse Study( 2023-01)Female politicians in Australia appear to have experienced more severe criticism and more career obstacles than male politicians, while public opinion remains divided over whether males and females in political leadership are treated at all differently. However, effective female presence in government, decided by the voting public, is vital if legislation is to address inequalities and issues pertinent to women. Beliefs and attitudes about women’s suitability for political leadership may partly explain the embattled careers of many women in politics. Attitude can be uncovered by examining how people are represented in discourse both thematically and in terms of linguistic devices. This study examined comments in online newspapers by members of the public to discover if, and in what manner, female politicians were represented differently than their male counterparts. Most research into representation of female politicians has examined mass media revealing more negative attitudes toward female politicians and widespread traditional gender stereotyping. However, journalistic representation may reflect a stance imposed by the publishing institution rather than the attitudes of the broader society. Public attitudes have largely been sampled through surveys, which are limited by what respondents choose to reveal. Few studies have examined the opinions of members of the public expressed in authentic, unprompted natural language. Furthermore, the framework of social stratification views public attitudes as shaped by culture, and culture determines the cohorts that may legitimately occupy powerful roles in society. Such attitudes are ideologically based and encoded in linguistic choices including the construction of a politician through thematic roles, naming, omission, assimilation or individualisation within a group, and how actions are represented. Language of appraisal also provides information on evaluation, descriptive lexicon and its intensity and attitude encoded in traditional literary devices such as metaphor, litotes, metonym and synecdoche. I examined 19,464 reader comments to on-line newspapers in two publications from 2013 to 2018, totalling 701,883 words. The method of Corpus Assisted Discourse Study was followed to enable identification of major themes at the corpus level, verified by Logistic Regression. These themes were then examined within comments using qualitative techniques drawn from Appraisal Theory, Sociolinguistic Analysis and Discourse-Historical Analysis. Results both supported and extended previous research into gender representation, finding male and female politicians were represented differently, stronger reactions being evident toward females in intensified vocabulary, extended arguments and saturated appraisal. Other features included omission, argumentation using abstraction or concrete description as a persuasive device and exaggeration of alleged female misdemeanours, while these were mitigated for males. In contrast with previous research, traditional gender stereotypes did not dominate. Instead, females were delegitimated within their role through association with moral and behavioural characteristics that were cardinally incompatible with political values. I argue that gender-based discrimination against Australian female politicians has been rendered implicit by prominent moral and behavioural censure of gender stereotyping and more frequent use of delegitimising strategies which are commonly applied to all politicians. Such strategies parallel the nature of discrimination against other social cohorts grouped by such features as ethnicity or class, especially when a cohort presents a threat to established hierarchies of status.
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ItemThe Dynamics of Contemporary Pitjantjatjara: An Intergenerational Study( 2022)This thesis investigates several areas of Pitjantjatjara grammar, drawing attention to the ways in which the language varies between and within generations, and the ways that the language is being both adapted and maintained by young adults. The primary goal of the thesis is to find out how young people are speaking Pitjantjatjara today, against a backdrop of rapid social change and language contact. How does their language use differ in comparison to older generations, and to previous descriptions, and what areas of the grammar are being changed or maintained? Pitjantjatjara is one of only a dozen Australian First Nations languages that have been continuously transmitted since colonisation, and which are still being acquired by children as a first language today. Many Pitjantjatjara speakers have noticed that the language is changing and are concerned about its future. In light of speakers' concerns, which are presented at length, this thesis investigates six topics in the language: phonetics and phonology, verbal morphology, case-marking, possession, nominalisation, and negation. Each of these presents a different picture of a dynamic system in constant flux, with different patterns of variation and change, maintenance and innovation, simplification and complexification. To investigate these issues, a corpus of over 40,000 words was recorded in Pukatja/Ernabella (SA). This corpus was designed to capture spontaneous speech among different generations of women. In addition, I draw upon an annotated collection of previously published texts, from the substantial body of previous description and documentation of the language. A combination of qualitative and quantitative methods is used to investigate variables and grammatical structures of interest. In some areas, such as the phonetics and phonology, there are numerous differences between generations; over a dozen variables are described. In the verbal morphology, there is variation in both derivational and inflectional morphology. This appears to be system-internal, not motivated by language contact, and shows an overall maintenance of a complex and interesting system. The syntax of case is fully maintained, although there is some change in case allomorphy, and a new, innovative use of the inclusory construction that has not been documented elsewhere. Possession is an area where contact-induced change has been reported in many languages, including in Pitjantjatjara. However, variation in this domain appears stable between generations, and influenced by subtle semantic, pragmatic, and lexical factors. Nominalisation shows significant morphosyntactic complexity, which is described in detail. Complex sentence structures utilising nominalisations are being fully maintained, with no reduction in the range or use of subordination constructions among young people. Negation is also an area with significant complexity in Pitjantjatjara, and which is typologically unusual in many respects. While there is currently no variation in negation between generations, there are some differences to previous descriptions, and this can shed light on broader questions of how negation constructions evolve. Overall, my findings do not point to a single identifiable youth variety, a radical break between `traditional' and `contemporary' Pitjantjatjara, or to any significant grammatical borrowing from English. The thesis makes a descriptive and analytical contribution to our understanding of Pitjantjatjara phonology, morphology, and syntax, pointing out several areas of typological and theoretical interest. It also adds to the growing body of work describing variation, change, and contact in contemporary Aboriginal language varieties. The findings of this thesis show the benefits of embedding the study of variation and young people's language within language documentation.
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ItemThe Expression of Location in Wumpurrarni English: Continua and Coherence in an Australian Contact Language( 2020)This thesis investigates the expression of static and dynamic location in Wumpurrarni English, a contact language spoken in central Australia which is derived from English, Warumungu, and other nearby contact languages. First, it offers a description of the morphosyntax and semantics of ‘locative phrases’ in the language – phrases which express location and contain a noun phrase plus optional locative markers – and discusses this in comparison to the source languages. Then it analyses the co-occurrence of morphemes in a locative phrase relative to the language they derive from, finding some degree of ‘lectal coherence’ but also a wide range of variation; the usage-based framework of schemas and constructions is applied to understand these findings. The results support the existence of a continuum in Wumpurrarni English but suggest it should be understood as multidimensional rather than linear.
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ItemSilence in the works of Patrick Modiano( 2020)The 2014 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded to the French writer Patrick Modiano (b. 1945) for work that ‘uncovered the life-world of the Occupation’. The jury recognised the author’s significant role in addressing the heavy silences surrounding this uneasy period in French history. Modiano’s novels, however, are full of silences, the unsaid, and the unsayable. While his work is an indictment of certain sociohistorical silences, it is also a literature which performs, and is permeated by, a multitude of silences. This thesis seeks to elucidate the nature of this tension through an analysis of silence across twenty-seven of Modiano’s texts, from his first novel, La place de l’etoile (1968), to Souvenirs dormants (2017). A defining aspect of silence is its fluctuating semantic value and the plurality of its applications, from language and noise, to art and ethics. Its meaning is not fixed; it is, rather, an amorphous concept and its denotation and connotations shift depending on the context in which it occurs. The way in which silence signifies also changes over time; what might be silenced in 1945 could become sayable a generation later. Given the intrinsic semantic plasticity of the concept, this thesis develops an evolutive analysis of silence, which exists in multiple guises and occupies multiple spaces in Modiano’s works, from the awkward silences to those that are more eloquent, to the salutary, recuperative and respectful silences, to the silences that condemn and denounce, and the silences that gesture to the very limits of language, thought and logic. This thesis is arranged in three parts, each one based on a particular interpretation of silence. Firstly, reading silence as a generative force which, paradoxically, can be productive of narrative, the multiform silent beginnings and origins of Modiano’s texts are investigated. Secondly, silence is considered as a place of forgetting, loss and erasure, which is opposed by Modiano’s texts. This shifts the discussion to the ethical tensions associated with biographical writing and testimony in his works. Finally, silence is interpreted as something that can be created, both through the text and through other artistic media. Here, silence is positioned as a destination in its own right and the trajectories made towards and around silence by Modiano’s characters in their various fields of expression are explored. Through these differing interpretations of silence, this thesis examines how Modiano’s writing comes from and engages with silences, resists meaning and evades conclusion, creating a kind of literary silence unique to his work.