School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses

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Now showing 1 - 10 of 38
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    Languages of the body : Kathy Acker's corporeal sublime
    Rose, Miranda. (University of Melbourne, 2007)
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    In states and up town and down country : poetic landscapes of Richard Hugo
    MacCarter, Kent. (University of Melbourne, 2006)
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    In states and up town and down country : poetic landscapes of Richard Hugo
    MacCarter, Kent. (University of Melbourne, 2006)
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    Writing in the space : the development of a play from conception to performance
    Price, Norman, (Norman Thomas) (University of Melbourne, 1989)
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    Heroides ventriloquism in the Italian Baroque
    Pelosi-Thorpe, Julia Anastasia ( 2020)
    Sixteen-hundred years after the Roman elegist Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ (c15–5 BCE) articulated the lament of abandoned heroines (and one historical figure: Sappho) writing and responding to their heroes, several male baroque poets re-ventriloquised Ovid’s epistolary interlocutors. Leading seventeenth-century literary presence Giambattista Marino was himself an early exponent of the form, which he describes as “imitated from Ovid” (“imitate da Ovidio”) in his ‘Lira’ (1614 CE). My research considers why and how these little-studied Seicento texts—produced by Marinist circles affiliated with the libertine Venetian Accademia degli Incogniti—reinterpret Ovid’s ventriloquism, and what this indicates about seventeenth-century attitudes toward gendered writing. A largely overlooked niche in the reception of Ovid’s unique elegies, many of these baroque poems are yet to be examined by scholars. My close readings compare the new ‘updates’ to popular early modern Latin and vernacular Italian ‘Heroides’ editions of the seventeenth century, revealing the significance of Ovid's collection for the dominance of elite men in Marinist literary culture.
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    Hurdy-gurdy: new articulations
    Nowotnik, Piotr ( 2016)
    The purpose of this thesis is to expand existing literature concerning the hurdy-gurdy as a contemporary musical instrument. Notably, it addresses the lack of hurdy-gurdy literature in the context of contemporary composition and performance. Research into this subject has been triggered by the author’s experience as a hurdy-gurdy performer and composer and the importance of investigating and documenting the hurdy-gurdy as an instrument capable of performing well outside the idioms of traditional music. This thesis consists of a collection of new works for hurdy-gurdy and investigation of existing literature including reference to the author’s personal experience as a hurdy-gurdy composer and performer. It will catalogue and systematically document a selection of hurdy-gurdy techniques and extended performance techniques, and demonstrate these within the practical context of new music compositions created by the author. This creative work and technique investigation and documentation is a valuable resource for those seeking deeper practical and academic understanding of the hurdy-gurdy within the context of contemporary music making.
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    Depictive secondary predication and quantization
    Farrell, Jake Andrew ( 2017)
    This thesis analyses depictive secondary predicates and their restrictions. Depictives can be predicated of either the subject or object of a clause (e.g. John ate the fish drunk vs John ate the fish raw). These types are known as Subject-oriented and Object-oriented depictives respectively. Object-oriented depictives show more restrictions in their distribution than Subject-oriented depictives, e.g. Johni pushed Maryj drunki /∗j . This depends on the verb class, and Object-oriented depictives are generally most acceptable when predicated of objects of accomplishment verbs. This restriction has led to the claim that Object-oriented depictives are unacceptable with non-accomplishment verbs. However, this is incorrect, and there are cases of Object-oriented depictives being acceptable with non-accomplishment verbs, like e.g. John pushed the cart loaded. This thesis addresses this variable acceptability, and presents an account that captures and explains the difference in acceptability of Object-oriented depictives with different verb classes. The variable acceptability of Object-oriented (adjectival) depictives with objects of activity verbs depends on the type of adjective scale used, and this is ultimately due to the depictive’s sensitivity to quantization. Since quantization surfaces in various domains (e.g. Mass/Count in nominal, telic/atelic in verbal, Closed/Open scales in adjectival, Stage-Level/Individual-Level predicate in the predicative domain), this predicts that depictive acceptability should interact with changes in these domains, which is shown to be borne out. This can be extended to interactions with lexical aspect more generally, which captures the variable acceptability of Object-oriented depictives with different verb classes. Based on this, this thesis poses the Depictive Aspectuality Constraint: Object-oriented depictives and the sentence they are contained within must be aspectually compatible with durativity and quantization. This constraint gives a greater empirical coverage of depictive behaviour than previous analyses, and successfully predicts and explains previously unnoticed interactions of depictives with other domains.
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    Friends are friends are friends: a study of communication and meaning on Facebook
    Champion, Lesley ( 2016)
    As the impact and capacity of online technologies grows, we are increasingly spending much of our lives communicating using social networking sites such as Facebook. These novel ways of interacting with the world present many avenues for research that challenge the way we think about communication and the role it plays in our lives. All communication is constructed and understood in relation to time and space, which are fused inseparably to form the context of social action. At the same time, online media are subject to a process of ‘context collapse’ (Marwick & boyd (2010) or ‘convergence’ (Rambe, 2013), where multiple and distinct contexts or audiences merge into a single group. These environments can and do destabilise traditional conceptualisations of time, space and the nature of communicative interactions. This study therefore, conceptualises Facebook primarily as a mediating artefact through which meanings can be created and communicated, rather than simply as a technological tool comprising a set of features or affordances. The aim of this research is to explore how Facebook users communicate with their ‘friends’ in such unstable and ever-changing environments. The research adopted a mixed methods approach, which involved the analysis of data from 230 online surveys and 9 interviews. Findings indicated that Facebook ‘friends’ can and do inhabit multiple spaces simultaneously, in particular, those that are both personal and professional. Importantly, despite the fact that participants felt very strongly that Facebook should offer a personal space and should not encroach on their professional lives, this was a conviction that many struggled to reinforce. The destabilising nature of this interactive communication environment resulted in participants feeling dragged into multiple digital and physical spaces simultaneously. This study concludes that Facebook is a source of tension: it creates a mediating and interactive environment that facilitates fluid and multimodal forms of communication between its users across multiple time-space zones simultaneously. It is also a site of struggle, in which participants attempt to resist a sense of ‘context collapse’ and ‘convergence’ within and between online and offline interactions. Further research into the nature of this struggle and how it is played out between other Facebook ‘friends’, and across other forms of technologically mediated communication environments, would be very valuable.
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    Language and identity in Melbourne's Francophone Mauritian community
    Lord, Jennifer ( 2007)
    Australia’s 18,000-plus Mauritian immigrants make up the country’s largest single French-speaking community, but they also speak Kreol, a creole language specific to Mauritius and its dependent island Rodrigues. Kreol is both the lingua franca of Mauritius and the L1 of a growing majority of people there. Census data show that in Australia, Mauritians maintain French as a language at home at much higher rates than Kreol, while this and earlier research by the author (Adler, Lord & McKelvie 2003) indicates that the two languages are used and valued differently in the immigrant community. A starting point for this study was the idea that although social conditions affecting immigrants after they have settled in their adopted country must impact on their ability to maintain first language(s), their pre-migration experiences, beliefs and identities should also be taken into account but are often ignored in accounts of language maintenance and language shift (LM/LS). Through a thematic analysis of interviews with 17 French- and Kreol-speakers from Melbourne’s Mauritian community, this study explores the language attitudes these immigrants acquired growing up in Mauritius, and investigates the impact of these attitudes on postmigration maintenance of French and Kreol. It then examines the part French and Kreol play in post-migration identity construction. The study shows that their premigration beliefs, attitudes and experiences were in fact extremely relevant, even decisive, to subsequent LM/LS and language use for this group of Mauritians. Specifically, the study shows that the attitudes to and beliefs about French and Kreol that the study participants brought with them from Mauritius led them to put more effort into transmitting French than Kreol to their children, but have also led them not to resist a shift by children to English at home. However, for themselves, the participants continued to use both French and Kreol at home with spouses and in the Mauritian immigrant community, and in the latter context, some of the dominant French-speakers appeared to be using more Kreol socially than they would once have done in Mauritius. The research harnesses Pierre Bourdieu’s theory of practice, in particular his concepts of ‘habitus’ and ‘symbolic violence/domination’, to show how the participants’ attitudes were formed and how they have played out in post-migration language choices and use. For these 17 participants growing up in Mauritius, dissatisfaction with the economic and social disadvantages of using Kreol and with the low status offered to Kreol-speakers was transformed – in an instance of the symbolic violence described by Bourdieu – into an undervaluing of the language itself, and that French was misrecognised as an inherently superior and more useful language, a differential valuation embedded in diglossic usage in Mauritius. This process led the study participants to accord French a greater symbolic value, which has persisted in the postmigration context regardless of the fact that in that broader Australian context French and Kreol are of similar value to the Mauritian community.