School of Languages and Linguistics - Theses
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ItemCreative Collisions: Uncovering creativity in doctoral writing contexts( 2023-05)Creativity exists uneasily in the shadows of doctoral life; its exact shape and form ambiguous and largely uncharted. Despite this peripheral presence and the silence which often surrounds it, this thesis asserts it is a necessary precursor to any original contribution to knowledge and thus, discovering more about it is crucial to doctoral educators. This work extends knowledge on creativity from two perspectives; the thesis / dissertation writers and their academic readers. The doctoral writer’s perspective was obtained through tracking the experiences of four multi-lingual writers in the Faculty of Arts at a research-intensive Australian university. Yet another perspective was gained through interviews with six experienced doctoral supervisors in the same faculty. Employing a critical ethnographic methodology, the researcher traced the students throughout their doctorate. This rich, longitudinal data helped illuminate the complex role creativity has in doctoral writing and highlights how doctoral writers emerge – or fail to emerge – as creative academic writers. I initially framed creativity as operating at the level of ‘literary’ language through ‘creative writing’ techniques such as word play and metaphor use. I felt that using these creative forms could be a force for positive change and innovation in doctoral writing contexts, encouraging writers to stretch boundaries, play with convention and transform patterns. However, I witnessed many writers moving away from these creative approaches during their candidature. This avoidance confounded me until I uncovered the many constraints swirling about creativity in the doctorate such as the strong centripetal pressures for standardisation and textual conformity exerted by supervisors and the disciplines they represent. I found that doctoral writers can also impose these restrictions on themselves or learn them from peers. In the latter stages of my project, I utilised queer theory to investigate these paths towards or away from creativity taken at critical moments by my quartet of writers, observing how creativity was often awkwardly ‘mis-fitted’ into their doctoral writing contexts. Accessing and using a creative writer’s voice appears key in activating creativity with the mobilisation of this voice having the potential to animate creativity in doctoral writing contexts. Another centripetal force encouraging creativity is students accepting the identity of a ‘creative’ academic writer and allowing this emerging writerly self to permeate their writing and writing practices. Embedded throughout this identity shift is the battle to use personal pronouns in writing; a tussle that symbolised the struggle over creativity for many doctoral writers. Ultimately, any creative queering of doctoral writing requires courage, confidence and a sustained effort over time. Although focused on a small group of Arts doctoral writers and readers at an Australian university, the findings from my research may inform future studies into creativity in doctoral writing and doctoral education more generally. For, if writers can recognise and control the censorious and potentially disruptive forces against creativity in their work, they may be able to produce writing that is recognised not only for its creativity but also for its novelty and originality.
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ItemA grammatical description of Marri Ngarr( 2023-05)This thesis presents the first comprehensive grammatical description of Marri Ngarr, a critically endangered Australian indigenous language traditionally spoken in the Daly River region of the Northern Territory. Prior to this research, description of Marri Ngarr was limited to descriptions of only a few aspects of the grammar. The research in this thesis documents and analyses many aspects in the grammar for the first time and extends previous research by covering other topics in more depth. A substantial part of the project involved the collation, transcription and interlinearisation of Marri Ngarr recordings which were made by various researchers over the last 50 years, as well as making this information available through PARADISEC. Some of the transcription work was undertaken on field trips to the Daly River region, where I worked collaboratively with Marri Ngarr speakers to transcribe and translate Marri Ngarr stories from these recordings. Marri Ngarr is a non-Pama-Nyungan language of the Western Daly family. It is a head- marking language with highly complex verbal morphology and as such can be considered polysynthetic. The thesis presents many aspects of the grammar which will be of interest to Australianists and linguists interested in morphologically complex languages. I outline just a few properties of the grammar here. The consonant inventory of Marri Ngarr is unusual in the Australian context in having three series of obstruents, with contrasting stops at five places of articulation, a bilabial and apical voicing contrast and four phonemic fricatives. Marri Ngarr is also unusual in Australian language terms in exhibiting onset clusters. In the Noun Phrase we find a rich nominal classification system which categorises entities into one of 13 semantic categories. The system contains both bound and free classifiers and this mixed system shows some evidence of grammaticalisation. A functional NP word order analysis, as well as case-marking characteristics and a lack of true discontinuity in nominal expressions provides strong evidence for NP constituency. The verb is a central element of the clause and can encode several types of clausal information. Marri Ngarr frequently uses a type of complex verbal predicate where two predicative elements contribute predicate semantics and argument structure information to the same verb. These two elements combine in various, but structured ways to render verbs of differing transitivity values and thematic roles. The verb template contains 12 slots for encoding a variety of inflectional and derivational information. For some types of information such as argument number and tam, distributed exponence is observed, where meaning can only be understood by considering particular combinations of morphology interspersed through the verb, rather than deriving meaning through consideration of single morphological elements. Concerning the wider clause, word order is flexible in Marri Ngarr: it does not determine grammatical function. However, a case study analysis reveals that it is used for pragmatic purposes such as reference-tracking and clarification. In documenting and analysing these and many more aspects of the grammar for the first time, this thesis makes a significant contribution to our knowledge of the Marri Ngarr language and through the collection and transcription of old recordings it has made the language more accessible for people in the future.
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ItemInvestigating Collaborative Writing and Collaborative Feedback Processing among Advanced ESL Learners: A Sociocultural Perspective( 2023-03)Informed by Sociocultural approaches to learning, collaborative activities in general and collaborative writing (CW), in particular, have attracted the attention of both educators and researchers in the field of second language learning (e.g., Storch, 2013). Several studies (see Storch, 2017) reported on the language learning benefits of CW and how different factors (e.g., task type) impact on the affordance of language learning opportunities. However, to date, despite research demonstrating the range of factors affecting group dynamics, the effect of group size and partner change has been under-researched. Adopting a Sociocultural perspective, this research project addressed these gaps in the literature in two separate Studies: Study 1 investigated the impact of group size and Study 2 looked at partner change. The findings were interpreted from an Activity Theory perspective to gain a deeper understanding of the interaction between individual and contextual factors affecting the participants’ behaviour. This research project was conducted in a private English college in Australia. Collectively, 23 high-intermediate to advanced English as a Second Language (ESL) students participated in the research project in two separate Studies. In Study 1 (i.e., Group size), carried out over five weeks, three pairs and three triads wrote three collaborative essays and collaboratively processed the teacher’s feedback in two Collaborative Feedback Processing (CFP) activities. In Study 2 (partner change), which was conducted over a longer period of time (8 weeks), the participants were required to collaborate in six CW and four CFP tasks. To collect data, I used a mixed-methods research design to collect both qualitative and quantitative data using a pre-study survey, Zoom video recording of the student interactions, Google Docs (CW and CFP tasks), interviews and individual essay writing tasks. It should be noted that, despite the initial in-person data collection design, due to the pandemic, the data were collected via Zoom and Google Docs to replicate face-to-face interactions as much as possible. In Study 1 which targeted group size, to analyze for patterns of interaction, I drew on Storch’s (2002) patterns of interaction framework and found that group size was not a determining factor. As per the data, in Study1 (group size) except for one pair (expert-novice) and one triad (active/collaborative/accommodating), all the other groups formed a collaborative pattern of interaction. Additionally, both pairs and triads produced similar numbers of languaging episodes (i.e., discussing language, content and organization related problems), mostly discussed lexis and content related issues and correctly resolved most of the episodes in both CW and CFP activities. The analysis of the students’ languaging also indicated that when collaborating, most of the episodes were discussed extensively (i.e., high level of engagement). Lastly, using a process-product approach, I found that those students who engaged with each other’s contributions and equally contributed to the task completion benefited the most in terms of language gains (i.e., knowledge transfer/retention). Therefore, Study 1 revealed that collaborative patterns of interaction rather than group size afforded the participants with most language learning opportunities and language gains. In Study 2, where each participant collaborated with two different partners (on 3 CW and 2 CFP activities) to see the impact of partner change, the data revealed that the change positively affected patterns of interaction. After the change, most of the students either remained collaborative or adopted a more collaborative stance. Furthermore, the change resulted in the production and resolution of more languaging episodes in both CW and CFP activities. The participants also produced more languaging episodes and discussed these more extensively after the change of partner (i.e., higher engagement with episodes), focused more on language related problems (e.g., grammar), and reduced their reliance on the teacher’s help to resolve their problems in CFP activities. Furthermore, looking at the findings from Engstrom’s (2001) second-generation AT perspective, I found that the interplay of individual and contextual factors in both studies played a significant role. More specifically, it was revealed that goals, previous collaborative experience and self and other perceived proficiency as well as the perceived value of peer contributions explained the variations between and across groups. These findings, as a result, have several important theoretical and pedagogical implications. From a theoretical perspective, this research project shed more light on how specific individual and contextual factors can impact on patterns of interaction and language learning benefits. From a Pedagogical perspective, this research highlights a number of issues for teachers to consider in implementing collaborative writing in the classroom. These include the importance of learning about individual factors before the task design, monitoring the interplay of individual and contextual factors during the task performance, and making amendments (e.g., partner change) when necessary. Finally, teachers should be aware that a few collaborative sessions are required before students learn how to effectively collaborate.
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ItemVisions of Re-Conquest: Pedro Albizu Campos and Puerto Rican nationalism in the context of Latin American and trans-Atlantic anti-imperialism( 2023-03)This PhD thesis explores the political, philosophical, and cultural influences on Puerto Rican anti-imperialist nationalism under the leadership of Pedro Albizu Campos, especially during the critical years from 1924 to 1950. The Puerto Rican Nationalist Party’s (PNPR) policies, goals, and tactics are analysed in the international context of trans-Atlantic anti-imperialist decolonisation networks. These include Irish revolutionary nationalism and communist anti-imperialist networks which connected the United States and Latin America, including the ‘Latin Caribbean’, with European decolonisation networks. The influence of Irish separatism on Puerto Rico’s 1930s decolonisation campaign is explored. This thesis analyses the Puerto Rican nationalist movement in terms of a reaction to the enactment of formal and informal colonialist policies by the United States toward Caribbean nations. Puerto Rico in particular was affected by U.S. colonialism in the region as the island has been subject to both formal and informal mechanisms of extending U.S. power and control. The PNPR’s decolonisation strategies are contextualised within global anti-imperialist thought current at the time. It is argued that United States foreign policy toward Latin America during much of the 19th and 20th centuries - and beyond - has been dominated by the pursuit of political, economic and military dominance. Puerto Rico’s role as a vital part of a militarised island ‘buffer’ aiding the U.S.’ control of shipping routes and geo-strategic locations is highlighted. The PNPR in contrast sought to decolonise Puerto Rico and re-establish a sovereign state on the island - one that the nationalists argued had already been constituted at the time of the U.S. invasion in 1898. The PNPR’s economic policies centred on economic nationalism and greater social justice for working Puerto Ricans which, it is argued, stood in direct opposition to the U.S. ‘Open Door’ policy which prioritised the operations of U.S. capital at the expense of the Puerto Rican population. Contrary to much of the existing historiography, this study argues that the Puerto Rican Nationalist Party led by Albizu Campos pursued a non-violent and popular decolonisation project, centred on economic nationalism and political sovereignty - which came close to establishing a Puerto Rican Republic. The failure to decolonise and establish the Republic of Puerto Rico is ascribed to the multi-facetted program of violent repression levelled at the nationalist movement, by the U.S. government and its elite Puerto Rican allies.
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ItemNo Preview AvailableTalk about absent others in everyday Australian conversation( 2022-12)The discussion of other people in conversation is a ubiquitous feature of talk (Dunbar, 2004); some of that talk naturally occurs when the person or persons being referenced are absent from the conversation itself. This thesis explores these sections of conversational talk about absent others. Previous research (Aslan, 2021; Bergmann, 1993; Dunbar, 2004; Eder & Enke, 1991) into talk about absent others has focused on the cultural concept of ‘gossip’. The majority of this research takes a genre-approach to understanding talk about absent others, often presuming evaluative talk as a critical component a priori. A great deal of this research has contradictory findings, such as that gossip must be characterised by negative assessment (Brenneis, 1984) and yet instances of positive assessment do occur (Baumeister et al., 2004). This contradiction is due in some part to taking a genre approach to conversation, whereby gossip is treated as a predetermined category of conversation that takes a particular form and covers particular content. In contrast to these previous studies, this study spearheads an Interactional Linguistics (IL) approach to understanding talk about absent others in conversation. This study uses audio-visual recordings of multiparty interaction in rural Australian settings to investigate how talk about absent others is done in conversation. The key findings of the study are that talk about absent others focuses on several distinct activities, some like storytelling which are well-documented in the literature, as well as new concept: “social mapping". However, none of these consistently match previous scholarly criteria for 'gossip'.
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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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Item'Outside the Machine': The Displaced Woman in Paris( 2022-09)In this thesis, I focus on the female protagonists in novels and short stories by Jean Rhys, Nancy Huston and Leïla Slimani. Although each writer comes from a different background, culture and era, their protagonists are remarkably similar. Thus, I consider whether the ‘displaced’ woman who appears in Rhys, Huston and Slimani’s narratives is a literary archetype, which traits define her as such and what causes her to feel displaced. To answer these questions, I draw upon the theories of Julia Kristeva, Simone de Beauvoir and Gilles Deleuze to examine and compare each protagonist’s childhood, life experiences, emotional temperament and self-destructive behaviour. This process reveals the lasting impact of early trauma and the reality of feeling displaced from an interior and exterior perspective.
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ItemIndexing the Co-creation of meaning in Gay manga: A multimodal discourse analysis of Japanese men's language, visual style, and narrative structure.( 2022)Within both Japanese sociolinguistics and popular discourse, gendered language has been a salient and heavily debated topic of study and cultural politics. In popular culture, Japanese women’s and Japanese men’s language have been under constant scrutiny as markers for the state of heteronormative gender roles, seemingly representative of any change in gender roles, which if perceived as losing their monolithic nature, was a danger to Japanese society. The nature of this intense cultural scrutiny lies in entrenched ideologies of gender and sexuality, which prescribe a naturalised linguistic history to both Japanese women’s language and Japanese men’s language as traditional aspects of Japanese culture, themselves constructed speech styles (Nakamura, 2014). It is these very ideologies which the analysis of this thesis seeks to interrogate and trouble. The LGBT+ community is itself a resistance to heteronormative ideology; the very existence of queer identities troubles the binary heteronormative configuration of gender and sexuality. The doctoral project explores the indexical potential of Japanese pornographic gay manga utilizing multimodal analysis. Of particular interest is exploring the indexical field of heteronormative “Japanese men’s language” and how it might be subverted within homoerotic contexts. Whilst Japanese women’s language has a long history of study, Japanese men’s language has only really been closely interrogated in the last twenty years (by researchers such as Cindi Sturtz-Sreetharan, Momoko Nakamura, Shigeko Okamoto, and Janet Shibamoto Smith), and even then, existing research has not explored how gay men or mediatised representations of gay men make use of Japanese men’s language. The thesis analyses three stories from gay manga, each from three different authors, Terujiro, Gai Mizuki, and Miyoshi Hiromi. Analysis explores how ideological “Japanese men’s language”, visual style and narrative structure co-create meaning and index character archetypes, desire and eroticism. The thesis is concerned with how these elements work together, interacting with ideologies and discourses of gender and sexuality to generate meaning. Analysis particularly examines the function of narrative to overcome roadblocks toward reaching erotic and emotional fulfilment, finding that stories conclude in ‘happy endings’ in the spirit of queer hopefulness. The thesis contributes to the understanding of not just Japanese men’s language but also gay manga as a genre within pornography. Findings show that the use of Japanese men’s language is complex and very much not limited to expressing heterosexual masculinity, rather its use in gay manga is subverted to express queer desire as part of its indexical potential. Furthermore, the thesis shows that gay manga are semiotically rich texts which not only co-create meaning through a multimodal semiotic sign system but also function to tell stories of not just desire, but also of joy and hopefulness.
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ItemPerceptual modification of nonnative phonemic sequences( 2023)This thesis investigates how native language (L1) segmental phonology and phonotactics interfere with the perception of phonological structures in a nonnative or second language (L2). Previous research has shown that nonnative listeners at times modify the phonological structures of an L2 based on the regularities of their L1 phonology, and that they sometimes experience perceptual difficulties in distinguishing L2 contrasts. The present thesis presents a total of five case studies focusing on different kinds of L1-L2 phonological mismatch, all of which trigger different corresponding modification strategies, including neutralisation (contrastive phonemes become non-contrastive), substitution (replacing a target phoneme with a different segment), epenthesis (perceiving an illusory segment when there is no target), and deletion (failing to perceive a target segment). These perceptual modification strategies are investigated through a series of psycholinguistic experiments relying on established methods in the field (e.g., categorisation, identification, and discrimination), and newer methods such as mouse tracking for triangulating on the cognitive processes involved in perceptual modification strategies. The thesis also explores whether extensive experience with the target language and especially the expansion of the L2 vocabulary, is predictive of L2 listeners’ ability to accurately perceive novel phonotactic structures. The findings of the present thesis have strong implications for extending the prevalent theories of nonnative speech perception, including the Perceptual Assimilation Model (PAM, and its extension, PAM-L2; Best, 1995; Best & Tyler, 2007), the Vocabulary Model of Rephonologisation (Vocab; Bundgaard-Nielsen et al., 2011a, 2011b, 2012), and the Automatic Selective Perception Model (ASP; Strange & Shafer, 2008; Strange, 2011). On the basis of the experiments conducted, this thesis argues that while perceptual assimilation is the fundamental mechanism for understanding nonnative (L2) segmental perception, the current frameworks must be extended to also allow cross-language category mapping for more complex phonological structures (i.e., phonemic sequences) in order to understand how L1 phonotactic expectations interfere with segmental perception in L2 speech perception.
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ItemConcealed from the eyes of the banquet’s guests: The ‘Officers of the Mouth’ at the court of Ercole II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara( 2022)This thesis presents a comprehensive study of an unexplored aspect of the court of Ercole II d’Este, Duke of Ferrara (1534–1559), that is, the roles, duties, and organisation of employees known collectively as the “officers of the mouth”, officials devoted to food-related professions inside the duke’s household. More specifically, it investigates and analyses the contribution these officers made to the efficiency and economic growth of the duke’s court. It draws primarily on unexamined archival material including registry books and numerous inventories from across the several household departments responsible for procuring, storing, and preparing food. By doing so it presents the first available prosopographic study exclusively concerned with the officers of the mouth working at Ercole II’s household and presents a complete database featuring the main characteristics of their roles. Furthermore, this thesis takes readers from food markets, wholesalers, and specialist suppliers to the court’s food pantries, credenze (ornate sideboards used to store silverware and expensive plates), and kitchens, where the officers and other ducal employees prepared the duke’s favourite dishes. It also details the duties of the officers of the mouth who made the d’Este household a highly-organised machine. From there, I take the information I gathered on the officers of the mouth from my primary sources and critically examine it within the context of descriptions and other information available in gastronomical and household treatises of the period. My aim here was to provide an in-depth knowledge of contemporary society’s perception of the roles of these officers and how that perception played out in their public image.