There has been considerable research investigating bilingual phonological acquisition revealing its complexity and its multifactorial nature. However, a comprehensive theory that accounts for the contribution of different aspects of variability remains elusive. The study aimed to analyze bilingual production to gain insight into bilinguals’ phonological system(s). The main focus of the thesis was to examine stop and voiceless sibilant production by bilingual children aged 8-12 and determine how distinctive and monolingual-like their phonological categories are. The language pairs selected were Greek-German and Greek-English for stops and Greek-Albanian for voiceless sibilants due to their competing phonological categories. The factors under investigation were the amount of input, the Age of Onset of bilingualism (AoO) and their combined effect. The speech material consisted of word-initial stops and voiceless sibilants in real CVCV words (except for one nonsense word). The words were embedded in carrier phrases. Data from 56 bilingual children and 45 monolingual children were analyzed. VOT (Voice Onset Time) analysis was conducted for stops and spectral moment analysis for voiceless sibilants. The results revealed pervasive and mainly bidirectional cross-language interference. However, evidence of monolingual-like production was also present. Patterns in the data indicated as key factors the input and the combined effect of AoO and input. The results supported bilingual acquisition theories that recognize input as a major factor influencing bilingual acquisition (e.g. revised Speech Learning Model (SLM-r) (Flege & Bohn, 2021), Native Language Magnet extended (NLM-e) (Kuhl et al., 2008) and Perceptual Assimilation Model-L2 (PAM-L2) (Best & Tyler, 2007). They also suggested that the L1 categories were not fully established when the L2 was introduced. After filtering for input, the differences observed in the production of SiB (Simultaneous Bilinguals) and SeB (Sequential Bilinguals), supported previous findings and were in line with theories suggesting different neural structures for SiB and SeB (e.g. NLM-e) and consequently different processing of the input (Berken et al. 2016). Findings from SeB suggested a shift from an L1 to an L2 system as a result of the increased L2 input. These findings do not agree with the predictions of L2 acquisition theories as they showed no L1-strength effects on voicing. They were interpreted as indicating that the AoO determines the way the L2-dominant environment affects bilingual voicing systems and especially bilinguals’ ability to maintain distinct systems. Lastly, variation emerged in the results regarding the way the above factors influenced the voicing characteristics (i.e. voiceless vs. voiced) and the voicing types (i.e. short-lag, long-lag, prevoiced) of stops as well as the place of articulation of sibilants. In conclusion, bilingual stops and voiceless sibilants appeared to be produced in a manner that minimized the speaker’s effort (articulatory and cognitive) while satisfying listeners’ needs for communicative effectiveness.

 

This thesis aims to study the form, meaning and use of the vocabulary used by adult non-native speakers of Greek at B2 level. Specifically, its focus is on adjectives. In order to carry out the research, a Corpus of Texts written in exam conditions by Adult Learners of Greek at the B2 level (SKEENSE(B2)) was compiled. The SKEENSE(B2) consists of 474 texts (81,379 tokens) produced by 237 successful candidates at the proficiency exams (B2 level) conducted be the School of Modern Greek Language (SMGL) during the examination periods 2011-2017. The aim of this thesis is twofold. On the one hand, it focuses on studying the depth of lexical knowledge in terms of Nation’s (2001) dimensions, form, meaning, and use. More particularly, it evaluates the adjectives’ morphological, derivational and inflectional complexity, the lexical sophistication (Hamada & Koda, 2010; Koda, 1999; Laufer, 1997; Nation, 2001; Ricketts, et al., 2011; Bauer & Nation, 1993; Hatch & Brown, 1995), the description of language proficiency and the assessment of language development (Ortega, 2012). Furthermore, the development of synonymy, antonymy, and polysemy knowledge of adjectives is examined, while, finally, the functions (Fragaki, 2010) with which they appear in the SKEENSE(B2) are recorded. The second objective of the research concerns the adjective functions. More specifically, it examines whether the overall frequency of adjectives correlates with texts of the same Text Type (TT) (categories of texts that have similarities in terms of text type or genre) and whether the various TTs differ significantly in terms of the same criterion. In addition, we investigate whether the frequency of adjective functions (descriptive, evaluative, demonstrative, classifying, and quantifying) correlates with the various TTs as well as whether it differs significantly in each TT. The basis of the data analysis presents several characteristics of the B2 level. However the B2 learners seem often to prefer lexical units that reflect a lower language proficiency level while at the same time there are also lexical units taught at higher levels according to syllabi. Additionally, topics of the same TT do not differ in terms of the overall adjectives’ frequency, whereas, on the contrary, the TTs differ significantly both in terms of the same variable and in terms of the frequency of specific adjective function. The findings of the research have direct application in areas concerning Greek as a second language, such as the syllabus, curriculum or teaching material (coursebooks) design. From the literature review conducted within the context of the research, a framework for describing lexical knowledge focusing on adjectives has emerged. Its novelty and originality lie in the gradation of adjectives not only in terms of the morphological criteria adopted but also according to their function.

This study investigates vocabulary development in Greek primary school students, focusing on both Greek as a first language (L1) and English as a second language (L2), to assess vocabulary growth patterns and determine if a "Word Gap" (Hart and Risley, 1995) - a concept suggesting vocabulary disparities that impact educational attainment - exists in Greece. Conducted over two years with students from three public schools, the research used both receptive (X-Lex, Meara and Milton 2003; Pic-Lex, Alexiou, 2020) and productive (Category Generation Task, Roghani, 2017) vocabulary tests in Greek and English. Data collection occurred at the start and end of each academic year, and statistical analysis was applied to evaluate vocabulary growth and correlations between L1 and L2 knowledge. Findings indicate that Greek primary students acquire two to three new Greek words daily, achieving an average vocabulary size of 8,000–9,000 Greek words by age twelve. This rate of vocabulary acquisition compares favourably with international benchmarks, suggesting Greek students are learning at or above levels observed in other countries (for English and Arabic, see indicatively: Biemiller & Slonim, 2001; Milton & AlSager, 2017). Vocabulary expansion was consistent across primary grades, with a significant increase in vocabulary as students progressed through the grades. English vocabulary growth was also impressive, with students acquiring over 4,000 English words by the end of primary school - exceeding curriculum expectations and outperforming learners in countries such as the UK (Milton, 2006; David, 2008), Spain (Alonso & Garcia, 2014), Saudi Arabia (AlShaikhi & Milton, 2017), and Turkey (Kavanoz & Varol, 2019). This achievement may stem from factors like increased multimedia exposure during the pandemic, Greece's tourism-driven emphasis on English, and a supportive educational environment with ample resources and tutoring. An analysis of the relationship between Greek and English vocabulary acquisition showed inconsistent correlations across grades. For receptive vocabulary, a moderate link was observed in first grade but disappeared in the following two grades. Starting in fourth grade, a consistent moderate correlation re-emerged, suggesting that early vocabulary acquisition in L1 could positively influence subsequent L2 learning. However, no significant link was found for productive vocabulary, indicating that vocabulary production in L1 and L2 may develop independently. Importantly, this study did not find evidence of a Word Gap in Greek primary schools. Participants demonstrated sufficient vocabulary in Greek to navigate every day and academic language, with no noticeable deficiencies that would hinder educational performance. Similarly, English vocabulary development was strong, showing no substantial gaps among learners. This suggests that Greek students are making commendable progress in both L1 and L2 vocabulary, aided by effective educational practices. The research underscores the success of the Greek education system in fostering vocabulary growth, which can serve as a basis for further improvement. Targeted interventions and resources could enhance these gains, providing even stronger foundations for students' linguistic proficiency and academic achievement. These findings imply that while vocabulary growth varies, Greek primary education effectively supports substantial language acquisition in both Greek and English, contradicting the Word Gap hypothesis in this context.

Language attrition remains a widely underexplored area. This dissertation aimed to comprehensively investigate the predictors and manifestations of first language (L1) attrition among Greek L1 speakers in Germany. Drawing from existing literature on L1 attrition, as well as from heritage language and second language acquisition studies, the present study examines the participants' biographical data, assesses L1 attrition predictors, evaluates the participants’ proficiency levels in both L1 (Greek) and second language (German), establishes correlations between predictors and proficiency to identify attrition-related features. The methodology used involves a detailed analysis of participants' social backgrounds, attitudes, and motivations, followed by proficiency assessments and the collection of oral narratives. Participants were recruited primarily from Greek communities in Munich, Augsburg, and Nuremberg, with additional outreach efforts through social media and cultural organizations. Data collection, both in-person and remote due to the COVID-19 pandemic, yielded a sample of 66 Greek attriters in Germany. The findings indicate a strong connection to Greece among participants, with Greek language predominating in familial and religious contexts, while German is more prevalent in professional and social settings. Proficiency assessments reveal higher self-assessment and test scores in Greek compared to German, suggesting the dominance of the L1. Correlation analyses further support the influence of certain predictors, such as age at emigration and length of residence, on proficiency levels. The analysis of spoken corpora reveals significant differences between Greeks in Germany and a control group of Greeks residing in Greece, particularly in lexical variety, lexical borrowings, verb tense usage, and clause structure. The analysis of spoken corpora also revealed disparities in the use of referring expressions between Greeks in Germany and the control group. Specifically, there were notable distinctions in the utilization of overt subject pronouns and pronoun resolution. To our knowledge, the current research constitutes the first extensive exploration of L1 Greek attrition.

My dissertation explores the rich tapestry of Lewis Carroll’s Alice narratives and their contemporary screen reimaginings, to offer fresh insights into the posthuman predicament. The examination of the six selected reimaginings, spanning from 1966 to 2016, traces the convergence of post-humanism and post-anthropocentrism, as well as the challenges and sites of resistance that arise in relation to the context of each work. This study has harnessed the potent tools of posthuman critical thought to decode and interpret works influenced by the evolving notions of anthropos and the human, taking figurations and processes of becoming as departure points to analyse our posthuman condition. Notably, the profound theoretical framework of Rosi Braidotti and her work on the posthuman have been instrumental in shaping this exploration. Reflective of the posthuman predicament, my research is essentially interdisciplinary, always in dialogue with literary and cultural studies, film studies, feminist theory, nomadic theory, technoscience studies, and environmental studies. The primary contribution of this thesis lies in showcasing how Carroll’s intricate Victorian tales, along with their reimaginings, serve as exceptional platforms for the contemplation and reevaluation of the posthuman condition—a dimension that few nineteenth-century literary works have ventured into with such depth and complexity.

 The aim of the present study is to explore translation through the prism of a historical linguistics analysis. More specifically, the study seeks to explore issues related to the translation of earlier texts, written in Early Modern English and Early Modern (Cretan) Greek; the goal is to identify the existence (or not) of linguistic features representative of variation in present-day translations. Subsequently, and based on the linguistic findings, the intention is to establish whether broader translation strategies can be identified in present-day (Greek and English) translations of texts presenting earlier forms of the language on the basis of a comparative analysis. The study is conducted through the use of parallel bilingual corpora created for the purposes of the present dissertation, involving translations of Renaissance texts, as well as comparable corpora involving translations of present-day texts and non-translated present-day texts, belonging to the same genre (theatrical plays). The findings of the quantitative, corpus-based research revealed that the sum of translations of earlier texts examined exhibit linguistic characteristics pertaining to non-standard varieties, indicative of some degree of linguistic otherness. Τhe linguistic markers indicative of variation identified belong to generic non-standard varieties of the target language, not tied to a specific regional or geographical context. In the case of the corpus of Greek translations of Shakespearean texts, the majority of non-standard markers identified belong to the categories colloquial/informal, while the English translations of earlier Cretan texts exhibit lower frequencies of non-standard markers (mostly ‘archaic’ or ‘old-fashioned/dated’ items). At the same time, the English translations of earlier Cretan texts exhibit a stronger tendency towards the adoption of standard lexical items representative of a more elevated type of discourse. When comparing these findings to the data drawn concerning translations of present-day texts or non-translated present-day texts, overall, it can be observed that translations of present-day texts/non-translated modern texts tend to present higher frequencies of non-standard (offensive/obscene or informal/colloquial) lexical items; this is especially true in comparison to English translations of earlier Greek (Cretan) texts. At the same time, translations of present-day texts and non-translated texts generally exhibit lower frequencies of items labeled as ‘formal’. To conclude, it can be inferred that translations of earlier texts generally display a tendency towards the ‘normalization’ or, at least, ‘centralization’ of the discourse, aiming at a type of transparent, normative discourse, characterized by ‘monoglossia’ (a tendency more prominent in English translations of earlier Cretan texts). At the same time, all translations of earlier plays examined are representative of a ‘minimal modernization’ or a ‘superficial archaization’ approach: they all employ elements of an archaic/outdated type of discourse, indicative of the earlier temporal framework of the source texts (especially the English translations of earlier Cretan texts). However, such markers are not employed systematically enough to account for a profound archaization of the discourse employed, while, at the same time, they are not exclusively tied to a particular temporal historical/linguistic context; instead, they are illustrative of a stereotypical representation of dated language (not indicative of a type of a low-prestige register).

The present thesis used the British animated programme Peppa Pig in a different context than it was originally designed for; the show originally addressed preschoolers native speakers of English, but in this research it was used to address EFL preschoolers. The researcher had two main research goals: to test if Peppa Pig can be an effective EFL language teaching tool and if it can be used to model prosocial and cultural behaviour.To meet the first goal, the researcher examined the vocabulary contained in the programme. A corpus, which contains the majority of the show’s episodes, was compiled to investigate whether the vocabulary of Peppa Pig is frequent and appropriate for beginner learners of English. Also, it was explored if the most frequent formulaic sequences are included in the show and whether there is repetition. To test if Peppa could successfully teach formulaic sequences to preschoolers, the researcher conducted an experiment in two phases. Eighty-nine preschoolers (3-, 4- and 5-year-olds) were tested to determine if formulaic language could be receptively acquired simply by watching the show, if its acquisition was reinforced by explicit teaching and if there was an age effect. For the second goal of this thesis, a thorough qualitative analysis of the show was conducted to determine whether prosocial behaviour, gender equality and cultural diversity are promoted in the show.Results showed that only one third of the show’s words are highly frequent; most of the words are infrequent. Also, Peppa Pig was found to contain the appropriate vocabulary for very young beginners of English, but at the same time most of its vocabulary was found to be of advanced level. More than a third of the most frequent formulaic sequences were found to be included in the corpus and they were extensively repeated. As far as the testing phases of the study are concerned, findings showed that simply watching Peppa Pig led to receptive uptake of formulaic sequences for both 4-year-olds and 5-year-olds in both testing phases. As was expected, viewing accompanied with instruction led to greater lexical chunks’ gains than merely being exposed to the show in both testing phases. Age played an important role in formulaic language acquisition; older learners generally scored better than younger ones. Finally, the qualitative analysis of the show determined that Peppa Pig can be used to model prosocial and cultural behaviour. Prosocial behaviour (i.e. volunteering, social interaction, eco-awareness, inclusion) is widely promoted in Peppa Pig as well as gender equality. There is a balanced ratio between female and male characters and gender representation challenges stereotyped beliefs. Cultural and ethnic diversity is promoted in the show through the characters’ appearance, the plot, and the setting.

In this research, the focus lies on the exploration of the reasons why and the ways how burlesque re-introduces itself as a new genre; that is as neo, new or nouveau burlesque in the twenty-first-century American society and how it affects both the national and the international popular culture scene through a feminist and sociopolitical perspective. As American theatrical genres, both burlesque and neo-burlesque have functioned as political acts against the sociocultural phenomena of their respective eras. Neo-burlesque negotiates on the sociopolitical distresses of the twenty-first century such as politics, gender ideologies, and the objectification of the female, feminine, and effeminate bodies around the globe, and has managed to excel as an international spectacle. Moreover, the multiple crises currently faced such as terrorism, financial worries, and nostalgia for the past along with gender, race, beauty, and age biases lead to the viewing of neo-burlesque as a meta-traumatic healing process. This sociopolitical instability has intensified the need to understand the cosmos through an intercultural spectacle and engage in an international cultural dialogue between performers and spectators. The politics of neo-burlesque performance, audience reception, and the performers’ empowerment have re-designed the map of neo-burlesque performance and have created new spaces in terms of how the venues, performers’ aesthetics, and audience attendance –both in the national and the international stages– have been transformed. However, the question lies on whether the burlesque performers act in a critical tone to clearly depict their political stances on the persisting gender stereotypes or; if, on the contrary, they are conducive to the perpetuation of commercialization, commoditization, and objectification of the female body. In this light, my objective is to ascertain whether neo-burlesque is a political spectacle when gender, race, and social narratives are re/narrated in a universal context. This is achieved by the choice of a plethora of neo-burlesque routines and performers drawing inspiration from multiple genres and subgenres. The technicality and artistry along with the reciprocation with the audience of performers from a global gathering contribute to the illumination of the ways how neo-burlesque has become a political spectacle and affects popular and theatre culture. Moreover, feminist theories have been utilized to approach the work of female neo-burlesque performers from different backgrounds, nationalities, and performance spaces. Aesthetics is also explored as through the multiplicity and the plurality of their routines, the performers touch upon versatile narratives and either manage to create new versions of past routines or become creators of new her/stories. In processing my case studies, I have specifically selected these neo-burlesque performers from diverse age groups, national backgrounds, and aesthetic choices. These neo-burlesquers’ routines as well as the spectators’ reactions attending the spectacle were accessed through YouTube and Vimeo video platforms. By interviewing female burlesque performers, researching the sociocultural influences of new burlesque, and attending live shows and festivals, my purpose is to prove why burlesque turned into a popular spectacle with political extensions in contemporary society across cultures.

Affective and cognitive variables seem to collaborate when desire comes into being in motivated learners who invest time and effort in the longstanding undertaking of mastering a foreign language, i.e. English in our case. The English language is inextricably linked to the Greek educational setting as English has been an inherent part of curricula for several decades. Beyond its status as the leading foreign language taught, English tends to compile attributes of a language necessary for communication and accomplishment of future targets or aspirations within the Greek context and across diverse cultural backgrounds. The present research stemmed from a genuine interest in what motivates learners to devote time and put effort into attaining the goal of learning English. To be more specific, the present thesis delves into the nature of learners’ motivation and learning strategy use, and the relation between the two variables with regard to English proficiency level and level of education across the Greek context. The participants of the study were 862 learners of English from primary and lower secondary schools in Greece, in particular 380 students in the 6th grade of primary school and 482 students in the 3rd grade of lower secondary school learning English as a foreign language at state schools in the district of Thessaloniki. The study adopted a mixed methods approach. Quantitative and qualitative data was collected with the help of survey questionnaires, a Quick Placement Test measuring proficiency in English and semi-structured interviews. The findings of the study accentuate that primary and lower secondary learners of English in Greece hold ideal images of themselves as competent speakers of English. Besides, learners appear to possess instrumental motives that promote positive learning outcomes and prevent negative consequences in English learning. The English learning experience relates to the ideal self and to learners’ instrumental motives of a promotional disposition, and the three factors have an effect on proficiency level. In addition, primary and lower secondary learners’ learning strategy use shows an overall medium frequency and most of learning strategy factors have an effect on proficiency level for lower secondary learners. Results reveal that primary learners demonstrate higher scores than lower secondary learners in motivation and learning strategy factors, and that there is a strong relation between motivation factors and learning strategy factors for both levels of education. Moreover, the results of the present study expose four cluster profiles in relation to learners’ motivation to learn English. On the solid foundation provided by the research findings, pedagogical directions are proposed so as to be integrated in curricula and syllabi regarding tuition of English in primary and secondary education. Implications concern reinforcement of learners’ motivation and attention to increased application of learning strategies in order to achieve proficiency in English. Suggestions for further research are also put forward in the light of the present results.

The present thesis contributes to the ongoing academic debate about translation and gender by exploring the representation of William Shakespeare’s female dramatic characters in Greek translations of his plays. The study covers the time span of eighty years (c.1875-1955), an important period in terms of the changes that profoundly affected Greek women’s identity and social position. Five chapters constitute the main body of the thesis; each focuses on the translation of one or two Shakespeare plays and includes parallel comparative examination of preceding translations of each play. The exploration of the transformations of Shakespeare’s women begins with Dimitrios Vikelas’s appropriation of Desdemona (1875) and Lady Macbeth (1882) according to the model of womanhood suggested by the ideology of the upper-middle class mercantile diaspora. The study then focuses on Konstantinos Theotokis’s progressive reading of Desdemona (1915), which was influenced by his socialist, woman-friendly views. Next comes Nikos Velmos’s reconstruction of Cleopatra (1924) as a sympathy-triggering victim of love in the context of the experimentations of the 1920s. The final two main chapters examine Vasilis Rotas’s representation of Gertrude and Ophelia (1938) before World War II, and his portrait of Cleopatra (1954-1955) after World War II. My analysis of the above translations proves the adaptability of Shakespeare’s women and demonstrates that in being recurrently translated they are also reinterpreted in ways that, among other things, reflect the changing concept of womanhood in Greece and the translators’ attitude towards the woman issue. The reinterpretation of Shakespeare’s women seems to move, though in a non-linear fashion, from a conservative perspective of womanhood towards more progressive images of women, which criticize patriarchal conventions, and even reach the point of embracing androgyny.

The PhD thesis is a study of morality-linked metaphors which were employed in the Greek parliament before and after the 2009 financial crisis. More specifically, I focus on health/illness-related metaphors which were used by the Members of the Parliament (MPs) in the years of 2003, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2015, and 2018. The research aims to answer two questions: first, to show if and how parliamentary metaphors for morality describe the path of major social phenomena happening in a country, i.e. the financial crisis, and then, to see if and how the employment of this type of metaphors mirrors the politicians’ agenda, and reflects their ideology. The whole project is driven by research findings showing that metaphors, as being powerful conceptual tools, can reveal how individuals think. Likewise, it is informed by studies noting that politicians use metaphors as a tool for ideological purposes, to form their profiles and persuade their audiences. Thus, the thesis is built upon theory coming from the field of Cognitive Linguistics, which embraces Conceptual Metaphor Theory, while its methodology and analysis take insights by work within the fields of Critical Discourse Analysis and Corpus Linguistics. In order to answer my research questions, a large corpus of more than 40 million words was compiled. This corpus consists of six sub-corpora, with each one containing all the speeches that were delivered in the Greek parliament in the years of 2003, 2005, 2009, 2013, 2015, and 2018. At the same time, I chose particular search terms to be entered in AntConc; they are lexical items from the conceptual domain of health/illness, with half of them carrying positive semantic associations, and the other half carrying negative ones. The concordance hits provided by the software were examined to see if the search terms were employed metaphorically, and then, all the metaphorical expressions were listed on the basis of the year in which they were used, as well as the political party/politician that employed them. What is more, metaphors were categorized on the basis of their target domains, adopting an abstract complex systems’ approach, which is presented and further developed in the thesis.Regarding my first research question, I first show that the path the financial crisis has followed cannot be accurately described by the frequency of moral metaphors that are employed by the MPs. Yet, by taking a closer look at the metaphorical expressions used during the six years, I argue that the parts of the complex systems that the politicians put under the spotlight (through the employment of the conceptual metaphor an abstract complex system is the human body) offer valuable insights on how the crisis evolved. The analysis puts to the foreground the power of metaphor in the genre of parliamentary debates. Moral metaphors are found in the forms of different metaphorical constructions, and their meaning is highlighted by other figuratively employed lexical items, or even chains and clusters of metaphors. Changes in the positive/negative semantic associations of metaphors’ source-domain items over the course of time are also observed and discussed. As far as the second research question is concerned, a link is drawn between the employment of moral metaphors and the politicians’ interests, as well as their ideology. The analysis of this multifaceted issue has been revealing in some respects. More specifically, differences are not only noticed in the prioritization of particular complex systems (or some of their parts) in their political agenda, but also in the context of the metaphorical expressions, and in the lexical items that are found in the source-domain slots of the MPs’ expressions.

Variability in the speech signal is a topic that has been studied by many researchers. Coarticulation relates to variability, as it studies context effects on segmental production. Coarticulation models aim to offer explanations regarding the temporal and spatial characteristics of speech gestures and their interaction. The Degree of Articulatory Constrain (DAC) model of coarticulation accounts for coarticulatory patterns based on the gestural characteristics of different segments. The aim of the current thesis is to examine variability in selected acoustic characteristics of Greek fricatives (duration, amplitude, spectral moments) and vowels (F1, F2, F3, duration and F0), as well as the coarticulatory characteristics of selected fricative-vowel syllable combinations. Variability in fricative production will be investigated and compared, in the productions of female adults, male adults (18-50 years old), female children and male children (8-10 years old). Even though Greek fricative and vowel production by adults has been examined in previous studies, child speech has not been studied extensively and knowledge regarding the developmental characteristics of speech production is limited. Besides, gender differences have not been studied extensively. Additional factors including voicing and stress will also be examined. The current thesis also examines coarticulation, within the framework of the DAC model, as there is limited knowledge on Greek coarticulatory phenomena both in adult and child speech. Speakers’ utterances are compared not only for age but also for gender specific coarticulatory characteristics. The results show that fricative production varies as a function of place of articulation, voicing and context. Gender variability is detected in spectral mean (M1) measurements, while age affects fricative duration, spectral mean (M1) and variance (M2). Findings on vowels reveal that vowel quality, stress and fricative context are the factors that mainly cause variability. Age affects all acoustic characteristics apart from normalised duration, while speaker gender does not affect absolute or normalised duration measurements. Voicing of the preceding fricative also affects vowel quality. Findings on coarticulation reveal that the four groups of speakers share some general coarticulatory patterns. Regarding age and gender differences on fricative to vowel coarticulation effects of the F2onset values, male adults and female children showed context effects on more consonant categories, while for F2mid values, adult vowel productions were more affected by context. Regarding anticipatory coarticulation on fricatives by the following vowel, the four speaker groups showed different effects by vowels on the various fricative categories.

Originating in classic fantasy literature and pulp fantasy magazines, the increasingly influential genre of Tabletop Role-Playing Games (TRPGs) contains multiple problematic elements in its treatment of race, gender, and sexual orientation. The current thesis investigates whether TRPG participants in early 21st century perpetuate established tropes, or whether they engage in their negotiation, subversion, and eventual transgression, revitalizing speculative fiction in the process. The subversive potential of TRPGs is examined through a framework which combines narrative studies with cultural studies and the analysis of two case studies. Findings suggest that since their inception in 1975, TRPGS have reflected regressive cultural attitudes despite attempts at a progressive narrative. The demographics of the gaming subculture exacerbated the situation. However, current scholarship argues that popular culture—especially the culture of the pulps, including TRPGs—constitutes a field of conflict and negotiation between various societal forces. This process is further facilitated by globalization and the advent of the Internet. In addition, the intrinsic postmodern qualities of TRPGs, such as the usage of narrative identity, the collaborative narrative process, the ownership of the means of production and the transmedial quality of game narrative, allow for an unprecedented degree of consumer agency over the production of the final narrative. Taking these findings into account, the trans-textual and transmedial examination conducted on the two most influential TRPGS, Dungeons & Dragons and World of Darkness, has revealed that TRPG narratives are constantly evolving to reflect cultural shifts. The overall conclusion is that TRPG narratives appear to be the outcome of a multifaceted and multifactorial negotiating process, closely mirroring wider cultural conflicts to a degree unmatched by other artifacts. Therefore, studying TRPGS, can illuminate certain aspects of cultural evolution as well as shed light on the evolution of speculative fiction.

This Ph.D. dissertation undertakes the investigation of locative media from a narrative perspective within the context of North American Literature and Culture. The emergence of locative media in the beginning of the twenty-first century marked a shift in the ways in which physical, digital, and narrative space can be perceived. This doctoral project explores the effects of locative media on narrative production, intending to bring to the fore different manifestations of the convergence of locative media and narrative practice across print and digital media. Through the examination of fictional and non-fictional texts produced by North American authors and practitioners, this dissertation explores the affordances and limitations of locative media as well as the impact of these newly-emergent technologies on the reading and narrative strategies that participants are invited to develop. The first chapter examines print manifestations of locative media in William Gibson’s fictional texts, Spook Country (2007) and The Peripheral (2014); in the second chapter emphasis is placed on Eli Horowitz, Kevin Moffett, and Matthew Derby’s The Silent History, which features as both a mobile app (2012) and a print novel (2014), as well as on two site-specific sound-walks, Times Beach (2017) by Teri Rueb, and Fens (2017) by Teri Rueb and Ernst Karel, situated in Buffalo, New York, and Boston, Massachusetts respectively; while the third chapter concentrates on Niantic, Inc.’s locative game, Ingress (2012-). These texts constitute case studies that shed light on the innovative contribution of locative media, when examined within the framework of narrative and new media theories, to the ways in which the concepts of textuality and narrativity are perceived.

Diasporic by nature, the texts of the Greek classics are further uprooted and re-roo/uted by American playwright Charles Mee through his collagist and multi-dimensional approach, to become relevant for a contemporary audience. Reclaiming several ancient plays for his own social, political, and cultural milieu, Mee intersperses their lines with shards of modern culture, integrating extracts from a variety of sources into the ancient works. The fragmentary, pluralistic, migratory texts that emerge aptly reflect the sense of chaos and atmosphere of decay that Mee finds symptomatic of modern times. In presenting ancient and modern characters, and, by implication, humanity as a whole, trapped in a vicious cycle that was incited and is still fueled by war, violence, injustice, miscommunication, and (false) claims to innocence, Mee reinforces the communication line between past and present and examines the reasons behind humanity’s current predicament. This doctoral dissertation seeks to examine the foregoing issues and thematic strands in the light of their cross-cultural and cross-temporal migrations from ante-text to new text, and explore the very cultural conditions and shaping forces that impelled the modern creations. It will also provide an insight into Charles Mee’s approach to playwriting, exemplified in the methods he employs to contemporize the plays of Aeschylus and Euripides.

 

 

This project examines contemporary American novels that feature verbal and non-verbal modes of representation as integral part of their narratives. Focusing on the design of these print novels as material artifacts, the present dissertation explores the experimentation with multimodality as evidenced in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000), Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud & Incredibly Close (2005), J.J. Abrams and Doug Dorst’s S. (2013), and Zachary Thomas Dodson’s Bats of the Republic: An Illuminated Novel (2015). The dissertation identifies recurrent features of multimodal novels, and proposes that their complex terrain be considered with a critical synthesis informed by the field of multimodality studies and print book history in order to shed light on the qualities and functions of the literary practices the reader encounters. By foregrounding a range of features relating to typography, photography, and design, multimodal novels challenge literary conventions, open interdisciplinary critical territories, and reassert the print novel’s presence and significance in the twenty-first century.

This thesis has a twofold purpose. Firstly, to frame the position of second language teaching in modern Europe and investigate the gap which exists in the current L2 methodologies. Secondly, to suggest and promote an innovative and promising L2 teaching method, called Vocabulary Acquisition via Drama (VAD) which emphasises the importance of vocabulary, its acquisition and its committal to memory. At the same time, this thesis tackles the importance of performativity as a research tool and finally its impact on L2 acquisition. In more detail, the thesis describes the problematic and ambiguous nature of vocabulary, the research goals, the theory, principles and structure of VAD, the methodology of VAD and the two applications in which VAD was implemented to teach two languages, Welsh and Greek, in two different school contexts. For both applications, there is detailed analysis of the participants, course designs, research tools, data analysis and results, using t-tests and ANOVA for their interpretation, along with a brief discussion for each application. Finally, this thesis’ wider goal is not only to suggest a new alternative L2 teaching method for the busy modern language teacher but also an enjoyable and affordable teaching method for L2 learners.

This dissertation argues that adaptation is a cultural practice involving the conscious negotiation and change of identities taking place along the vertical axis of hierarchies. The vertical axis constitutes the context of adaptation. The conscious negotiation results in a variety of texts and products along the horizontal axis of narrative media. The dynamics of both axes reveal the intentions and purposes of those who adapt texts or products. Furthermore, the two axes demonstrate the power play between those who adapt and those who receive the adapted product or text. It is the power play, however, along the vertical axis that influences and governs the process and product of adaptation. The point of intersection confirms adaptation products as synchronic identities. The dynamic relationship of the vertical and horizontal axes on the other hand confirms the diachronic nature of adaptation as practice. Adaptation is first and foremost a cultural practice of identity negotiation. To support this argument, the current dissertation adopts a cultural studies approach to adaptation as both process and product. As a cultural practice adaptation can produce literary texts but it should not be understood as producing only literary texts. To that end, this dissertation more specifically combines elements from John Bryant’s fluid-text approach so as to argue that all texts, both source material and adaptations, exhibit an identity. The practice of adaptation is concerned with negotiating how that identity will manifest concretely. Contrary to expectations, this project does not provide a textual analysis of its case studies. Rather a contextual examination is conducted by employing the tool of brand identity. The chosen case study this dissertation provides a contextual reading of is the Marvel Cinematic Universe (MCU) Phase One franchise. While adaptation theory examines the end-product or text, brand identity is dependent on the product-context relationship and the development of an identity. By adopting brand identity for the examination of adaptations, one is immediately confronted with what the entertainment industry is adapting, namely identities of Intellectual Properties (IPs) that are treated and promoted as brands. Brand identity demonstrates the workings of culture via its structure, aims and intentions. The structure of brand identity provides an alternate way of approaching, analyzing, and comparing adaptations because it takes the context of production/reception into consideration. As a result, it reveals the power play in the dialogue between producers and audiences concerning the adapted identity. In contrast to adaptation studies which so far focus on the literary and textual aspects of adaptations as products, this project focuses on the cultural significance of the context and adaptation as a process. The overarching question this dissertation seeks to answer is what adaptation is and what is its cultural significance? The answer, as this project demonstrates, is not found solely in the adaptation products. It is located in the dynamic relationship of products, process and context. In other words, cultural significance lays in the interrelationships between producers, texts and consumers that negotiate and contribute to the perpetuation of cultural textual-identities.

This doctoral dissertation explores the experimental poetics of the North American poets Susan Howe, Stephanie Strickland, and Caitlin Fisher, focusing on the different materialities that their works manifest in the print book, the computer, the iPad, and augmented reality. Specifically, it sheds light on the capabilities as well as the limits of print and digital tools when put into the service of literary and, in particular, poetic production. Focusing on the ways that these poets advance the audiences’ literacies, I explore how concepts such as interactivity, machine reading, programming languages, and immersion enrich the discussion of poetry writing. This doctoral dissertation draws on theories by Johanna Drucker, N. Katherine Hayles, Lev Manovich, and Marie Laure Ryan with regard to materiality, visuality, programming and natural languages, narrative vs. database, immersion and interactivity. The main question this dissertation attempts to answer is how such experimental poetic practices can be read; this is achieved by adopting a flexible approach towards poetic practice, whileunderlining the literariness and poetic elements of the works. The first chapter focuses on the development of innovative American poetry in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, whereas the second chapter discusses Howe’s print material poetics in her books The Midnight (2003), That This (2010), Spontaneous Particulars: The Telepathy of Archives (2014), and Debths (2017). The third chapter focuses on the transition form print to digital poetics as seen in Strickland’s print book Dragon Logic (2013), and her intermedia project Vniverse (2002, 2014). The last chapter explores poetry in augmented reality as seen through Fisher’s Circle (2010) and 200 Castles (2012). This dissertation attempts to provide a close reading of experimental pieces of poetry across media in an effort to highlight the impact of inscription technologies on poetry writing and reading.

My thesis entitled “Moving On the Globe: Issues of Mobility and Migration in a Globalized World as Depicted in Films of the 21st Century" explores how globalization has affected issues like mobility, migration, space perception, nationality, ethnicity, identity and communication, as depicted in contemporary films. Specifically, I explore various types of mobility as presented in films produced in various countries and try to link it with various theories, forms and genres. In the first chapter I analyze films that depict mainly migratory journeys from the East to the West like In This World (2002) by Michael Winterbottom, Promised Land (2004) by Amos Gitai and Eden Is West (2009) by Costa-Gavras. The films presented in the second chapter juxtapose migratory and privileged journeys in films like Code Unknown: Incomplete Tales of Several Journeys (2000) by Michael Haneke, Babel (2006) by Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, and The Missing Star (2006) by Gianni Amelio. The films presented in the third chapter deal with characters situated in confined, yet globalized places like an airport terminal in Steven Spielberg’s The Terminal (2004), a theme park in Jia Zhangke’s The World (2004) or the “Globus” bar in the film My Sweet Home (2001) by Philippos Tsitos. I claim that contemporary films produced all over the world address very effectively topics like mobility, migration and globalization, by trying to show that the values of communication and the need for contact will always be at the core of human existence.

The present study investigated Theory of Mind (ToM) and storytelling abilities in school aged high functioning children with autism spectrum (HFASD) and typically developing (TD) children. Firstly, we examined how HFASD children performed on first- and second order ToM tasks, as compared to their TD peers. Specifically, we examined if whether they would perform differently regarding cognitive and affective-cognitive ToM/emotion understanding (i.e., recognition & identification of emotions) tasks. Secondly, we examined whether narrative production and narrative comprehension of children with HFASD differed from that of TDs. More particularly, we sought to determine whether narrative production would exhibit differences in narrative language and cohesion (i.e., microstructure), or narrative structure and coherence (i.e., macrostructure). Thirdly, we examined whether there is a relationship between ToM and narrative abilities and, if so, what was the directionality of this relationship. Finally, our fourth goal was to improve our understanding of how formal aspects of language relate to ToM and narrative performance in children with HFASD. Participants were 24 HFASD (22 male, 2 female; mean age 9.6) and 24 age-, language and gender-matched TD children (22 male, 2 female; mean age 9.75). Children with autism had been previously diagnosed by a certified clinician; both groups had mental age of at least 7 years, and a Full Scale IQ score above 70. Children with HFASD and TD completed a test measuring social perception abilities: first and second-order cognitive and affective-cognitive ToM/ emotion understanding. In addition, children’s story-retelling abilities were evaluated response to two different wordless picture books. Stories were rated on microstructural—i.e. measures of cohesion like narrative productivity, lexical diversity and syntactic complexity—and macrostructural—i.e. measures of coherence like, event content/ story’s essential information, internal state terms and narrative comprehension—aspects of language form and content. The present findings show autistic children to be less adequate at understanding thoughts, beliefs and desires of others (cognitive ToM). In line with the ToM deficit hypothesis, children with HFASD were found to be less able to perform successfully in both first-order and second-order cognitive ToM tasks. Also, the performance of children with HFASD was poorer than the performance of their TD controls in first-order affective-cognitive ToM tasks, but both groups performed similarly in the second-order affective-cognitive tasks. Concerning narrative performance, the microstructural analysis showed a similar performance with respect to verbal productivity, lexical diversity, syntactic complexity, and syntactic diversity, but the length of communication units and the overall length of children’s narratives was lower for children with ASD. Also, macrostructural analysis showed lower performance with regard to narrative structure and narrative understanding (i.e., coherence) for participants with HFASD. An analysis of Internal State Terms (ISTs) yielded a rather surprising finding, an equal performance between the two groups. In addition, our results revealed a positive relation between children’s use of Internal State Terms and their performance in the tests evaluating their cognitive ToM abilities. Finally, formal language measures, ToM and narrative performance—especially in the macrostructural level—were found to be closely related only within the ASD group.

The present thesis undertook to examine how the historical events of the Nazi Occupation and the Greek Civil War were represented in an extensive range of films produced between 1946 and 1989. Through a detailed reading, the study attempted a critical analysis of cinematic depictions of the 1940s events in more than eighty films. Particular emphasis was given to the social, cultural and political environment in which movies were created and which affected the postwar filmic production. Occupation films appeared shortly after the end of the Second World War. However, the representation of the Civil War has been completely elided from screen. Through a close examination of the thematic concerns of several popular films of the post-war period, the thesis explored the ways in which the issue of the Civil War actually appeared in disguised forms in the narratives of classical cinema. The historically-themed pictures of the late 1960s and early 1970s was another main focus of this thesis. By examining Occupation and Civil War-themed features released between 1967 and 1974, the thesis identified the structure of the Dictatorship’s vision of the nation and recent history. Regarding cinematic production after 1974, the dissertation highlighted the screen representation of the Occupation and the Civil War by the representatives of the New Greek Cinema. The post-1974 cinema has a clear left-wing orientation, in contrast to the majority of films released during the Dictatorship that had a right-wing and militaristic content. The directors of the New Greek Cinema shifted their focus from the depiction of the warfare and paid attention to marginal aspects of the conflict, such as the fate of the political refugees, or dealt with memories and trauma of the war. Therefore, the thesis was concerned with the relationship between trauma and film, centering upon pictures indicative of trauma narratives.

As a result of globalization, English has spread to such an extent that non-native speakers far outnumber native speakers. English is often used as a lingua franca between people from diverse lingua-cultural backgrounds and is undeniably the global language of business communication. The present study stemmed from an interest in the way English is perceived and used by Greek Business School students as well as their identity in relation to English. This thesis tackles these issues from an English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) perspective and aims to give answers to questions that arise from that new sociolinguistic reality. Moreover, this study examines the factors that influence the students’ perceptions and the way they identify with English. The participants were 561 undergraduate students from a number of Greek tertiary institutions but mainly from the Aristotle University of Thessaloniki, the University of Macedonia and the Athens University of Economics and Business. They were 3rd, 4th, or final year students majoring in Business-related fields. The study adopted a mixed methods approach that involved data collection through questionnaires, semi-structured interviews and a social media research tool. The results highlight that students embrace the role of English as the undisputable medium of global business communication and tool for their career advancement and personal development. Moreover, the findings demonstrate that students claim ownership of English, while using it for their own purposes. Also, though the students favour native speaker accents, they allow some space to non-native speaker accents. The study pinpoints the interpersonal element of international communication and shows that intercultural experiences, gained through travelling, or participating in Erasmus programmes and internships abroad, are conducive to the formation of the students’ attitudes and identity in relation to English. The in-depth interviews proved insightful as they let students’ experiences unfold, providing more evidence of the factors that affect students’ attitudes and way of identification with English. The ELF use offered students the opportunity to develop an open-minded and cosmopolitan mentality, become more confident, and aware of the strategies and skills associated with successful international business communication. Based on the research findings, this study offers pedagogical recommendations for incorporating a more holistic approach in the teaching of English for specific purposes (ESP) taking into consideration the role of English in international business communication.

The present study extends previous research on implicit learning and teaching conditions and compares the relative effects of 2 types of instruction, i.e. Structured Input (labelled SI), and Typographical Input Enhancement (TIE) & Input Flood (labelled IF), targeted to the acquisition of the regular English Past Simple Tense –ed by young Greek L1 3rd-grade Primary State School learners of English. A pilot study and a main study were designed and implemented. Only the findings of the main study are reported in the present thesis. Accordingly, in the main study 41 8-year-old classroom learners of English were assigned to 1 of 2 instructional treatment conditions: SI group, TIE & IF (IF group). A Control (C) group of learners who only participated in the assessment measures was also incorporated in the research design. Pre-tests and post-tests included interpretation and production tasks. These tasks were very similar to those used in research within the Input Processing (IP) and Processing Instruction (PI) paradigm commonly addressed to adult L2 learners. Consequently, a major objective of the present study was to document whether young L2 learners could successfully respond to the SI and IF & TIE instructional treatment conditions and the aforementioned assessment measures, i.e. whether such research designs can assist young learners acquire a grammatical structure beyond their current proficiency level. The data obtained were submitted to detailed statistical analyses (SPSS). These statistical analyses not only aimed at measuring learners’ performance per se, but also at validating the design and suitability of the assessment measures as to their efficacy in assessing these learners’ performance. An unexpected finding of the present study concerned the results obtained by the learners in the C group who exhibited enhanced learning performance as to both the interpretation and the production of the target structure. The overall results indicated that (a) the aforementioned treatment conditions can be successfully applied to teaching young Greek EFL learners, (b) young Greek EFL learners can learn grammatical forms beyond their proficiency level if such treatment conditions are adapted to their age and current proficiency level, (c) interpretation and production are 2 distinct processes at this age, and (d) such learners profit the most from unobtrusive and highly implicit learning techniques. The study adds to the EFL literature focusing on learning at a young age.

The aim of the present thesis was the study of young learners' L2 input and output. To this end, 17 young (nine year old) learners of English as a foreign language in a Greek primary school were video recorded with multiple video cameras for a whole school year. The transcription of the video recorded material totalled 4,825 single spaced pages which were examined anew in order to separate the input (listening, reading) from the output (speaking, writing) for each one of the seventeen learners. This process yielded 4 distinct subcorpora: (a) the listening subcorpus (referring to everything that was listened to through the teacher, media or other learners), (b) the reading subcorpus (referring to everything that was read in and outside the class through texts, worksheets, whiteboard projection, readers), (c) the speaking subcorpus (referring to everything that was uttered by the learners), and (d) the writing subcorpus (referring to everything the learners wrote on the whiteboard, worksheets, tests, notebooks). All of these subcorpora constitute what was termed YoLeCorE (Young Learner Corpus of English) and was used in this thesis to: (a) measure quantitatively (types and tokens) and qualitatively (lexical density, sophistication and variation) the young learners' English input and output at this school, (b) compare the input with the output and determine the degree of dependency of the learners' output on the teacher or other input, and (c) assign the learners' output to a CEFR level.

Indian autobiography has been characterized as a contradiction in terms since the traditional ways of Indian artistic expression are incompatible with the requirements of the genre of autobiography. For this reason, the first Native Americans who appropriated the genre in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries stepped out of their traditions and elicited negative criticism. They were accused of selling out to white ways and, accordingly, their works have been reviewed as assimilationist pieces of writing. Contrary to negative critical assessments, I argue that Native American authors did not mean to relinquish their values by assuming the autobiographical task. In fact, through the Western genre they found the opportunity to link the personal to the communal and promote racial causes. Borrowing Jace Weaver’s coinage, I hold that their works exhibit “communitism” (active concern for the community). Native American autobiographical texts that appear assimilationist on the surface yield quite different meanings if studied from this perspective. I will illustrate my point by discussing the ambivalent works of four early Indian autobiographers: William Apess (a Christian convert), Charles Eastman (an Indian doctor), Sarah Winnemucca Hopkins (a chief’s daughter who served as an interpreter) and Zitkala-Sa (an Indian teacher and activist). My analysis will be methodologically organized by Mikhail Bakhtin’s notion of the “chronotope,” as particularly elaborated and implemented by Betty Bergland in the study of autobiographical material.

This study seeks to construct a philosophical/theoretical/analytical framework that will accommodate the distinctive aesthetics of illness-related performance: namely, the unpresentability of cancer and the sublime feeling it generates in spectators. Contemporary postdramatic, intermedial performance offers the ideal ground for such explorations. The cultural/geographical milieu of the cases studied is predominantly American/European and the historical period ranges roughly from the seventies to the present day. Consistently challenging American critic Susan Sontag’s postulation that cancer “cannot be aestheticized,” articulated in the seventies and under the shadow of her own illness, ill artists under discussion try to mine an aesthetic idiom of the unpresentable through bringing (their) cancer in performance. Their goals are: a) to overcome the inexpressibility of the experience of cancer and its mythological layering in western culture, b) to subvert the systematic disqualification of the legitimacy of existing terminal illness in the production of high art, as it has been noted in discussions among critics, c) to reshape society’s perceptions around cancer, and ultimately, d) to promote healing bonds with other human beings by means of the elevating effects of performance.

The aim of the study was to address the question of whether, in the course of foreign language learning, the oral correction of learners’ errors in their first language is more effective than that delivered in the foreign as to their grammatical development in a specific target form. The review of the relevant literature laid the foundations for the evaluation of teachers’ first language use and the assessment of feedback effectiveness, highlighting the need for experimental testing of their multifaceted effects. For this purpose, three treatment conditions, with oral corrective feedback in Greek, in English and without any correction, were organised, targeting two preselected English grammatical structures and with primary school pupils as participants. The effects of these were measured by means of written and oral pre- and post-testing of learners’ performance in these structures. The statistical analyses of the test scores obtained showed that learners who were corrected, either in Greek or in English, did better than those who were not corrected and those who received feedback in Greek maintained their gains more in the long run. Also, it was found that this variation was mainly due to the students of lower proficiency, as those of higher proficiency did almost the same, having gained equal benefits and showing a more consistent performance. Finally, the issue of the learners’ readiness for this stage of second language acquisition emerged, as it was crucial to the outcomes of instruction.

The study focuses on conceptual metonymy and its impact on word productivity. It is assumed that conceptual processes such as metonymy and metaphor can play a role in the understanding of grammatical phenomena and in particular in derivation. In order to attest the relationship between figurative processes and derivation, non-words were formed and presented to a group of non-native group of speakers (Czechs, Germans and Greeks). The non-words, which would eventually be possible words in English, were accompanied by potential interpretations, and the participants were asked to choose which one would be the optimal. All items end with the suffixes –ize (i.e. gossipize), -ify (i.e. bossify), -dom (i.e. cookdom), -ship (i.e. academyship) and –hood (i.e. dragonhood). The proposed interpretations range from literal to figurative ones. The aim of the study is to decipher whether there is a tendency towards selecting specific meanings on the basis of the morphological suffixes. The cognitive approaches to the figurative processes taken into consideration are those of Lakoff and Johnson (1980), Langacker (2009), Panther and Thornburg (2002, 2009), Radden and Kovecses (1999), Ruiz de Mendoza (2000, 2011), Trips (2009), Plag (1999) among others. Overall, the study identifies the cognitive processes that took place when the particular derivatives/ non-words were processed and indicates factors that contributed towards a dominant preference in terms of the proposed meanings together with the implications in figuration in general.

The aim of the present thesis was to explore the attitudes of English language teachers working in Greek state schools towards differentiated instruction. Moreover, it was attempted to discern the extent to which and the ways in which differentiated instruction has influenced the teaching practices of teachers in Greek state schools. The collection of data for the present thesis was accomplished through the use of both qualitative and quantitative methods. Initially, a questionnaire was distributed in order to elicit teachers’ views on differentiated instruction. The questionnaire was completed by teachers of English in Greek state primary schools in the area of Central Macedonia. Subsequently, classroom observations of English teachers working in state primary schools in the city of Thessaloniki were carried out. These teachers were then interviewed with regard to their opinions on differentiated instruction and its classroom implementation. The findings showed that primary English teachers have incorporated certain differentiated techniques into their teaching repertoires (e.g. pair/group work, etc.). On the other hand, other strategies, particularly those that are more demanding in terms of time or teacher preparation constitute less popular choices (e.g. producing differentiated materials for student evaluation purposes, learning contracts, etc.). Furthermore, the findings indicate that a number of teachers foster vague or inaccurate perceptions of the principles of differentiated instruction (e.g. with regard to teacher roles in the differentiated classroom).

This classroom-based case study explores the first pedagogical intervention in the teaching of pragmatics in the Greek EFL classroom. The motivation for the study is to be sought in the new demands brought to teachers, students and schools by the recent curriculum innovation, revised textbooks across the school system, and current calls voiced by the research community. The study adopted the methodology of Exploratory Practice, engaging 16 students (10 girls & 6 boys) of the first grade of Upper Secondary School (Lykeio), aged 15, in classroom research with a view to “moving in relationships from power over students, to power with students” (Groundwater-Smith, 2007, p. 126, emphasis in the original). Using explicit awareness-oriented metapragmatic instruction, the study aimed at raising students’ awareness of the Greek and the English cultural ethos, as well as their pragmatic and intercultural awareness, enhancing their pragmalinguistic and sociopragmatic skills. The intervention was as an attempt to seek positive washback among assessment, instruction and learning as well as the alignment of both of these with instructional practices. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of formative, summative, and self-assessment and triangulated results demonstrated that such an alignment was highly effective in raising students’ pragmatic and intercultural awareness of comprehending and producing appropriate apologies in Native Speaker English.

The present research endeavors to shed light on the role that gender plays in the language classroom in the Greek context. Due to the fact that to date no systematic investigation has considered special aspects of gender and interaction in primary school classrooms, this study seeks to investigate how teachers and students position themselves within different discourses in the EFL classroom interaction. The issues discussed include turn-taking and interruptions, praise and reprimand, class dominance, teacher attention and class participation in classroom interaction. Drawing on language and gender research, it was hypothesized that gender of the learner affects the learner’s language use and behavior during EFL interaction. In order to complete the research objectives, a study was undertaken in order to investigate and to reveal whether there are any correlations between gender and linguistic behavior of fifth grade learners by adopting both a qualitative and a quantitative approach. The methodology employed in this investigation is that of questionnaires distributed to seventy teachers designed to capture data in relation to the extent, pattern, nature of gender differences in language use and behavior, as well as observations conducted in four different classes of eighty two students. This study advances our understanding of gendered classroom interaction and highlights important ways in which students’ gender influences teacher-student, as well as student-student interaction. Moreover, this study sheds light on gender bias which occurs in the classroom and thus impedes teachers’ abilities to work successfully with all students. The Greek data revealed great similarity with findings of previous studies by supporting the assumption that (a) teachers are biased in favor of boys especially in respect of giving them more attention, (b) male students demand more teacher attention and more instructions from the teacher than their female peers, (c) female students are more likely to receive praise and positive comments, whereas male students are reprimanded by the teacher, (d) male students are more active in class participation, by taking more turns, volunteering and calling out. The concluding chapter submits recommendations and conclusions, encapsulating the main findings that have been obtained from the research, and demonstrates how it can be extended to future research in relation to gender bias.

In the present study it is explained what beliefs experienced EFL teachers have about in-service training and what expectations they have regarding in-service training. Their beliefs are then compared with the views of school advisors about in-service training. If in-service training aims towards helping experienced teachers improve, then teachers' beliefs about in-service training should be considered and identified in advance.

This doctoral dissertation explores Edgar Allan Poe’s presence in Greek literature at the end of the nineteenth and early twentieth century by placing his works in conversation with specific works by Emmanuel Rhoides (1836-1904), Georgios Vizyenos (1849-1896) and Nikolaos Episkopopoulos (1874-1944). In particular, this study attempts to elucidate the ways in which the specific Greek writers engage in a dialogue with Poe’s works that allows for diverse ways of writing to be introduced to the Greek literary production of the time. The dissertation focuses on Poe’s theories of composition, themes and innovative narrative techniques as well as on certain key notions as, for instance, the fragile boundaries between life and death, the problematic nature of reading the city and its inhabitants, the detective’s ingenious means of solving mysteries, and, finally, the representation of mysterious female characters as well as hypersensitive male ones. Focusing on these diverse aspects of Poe’s artistry, the specific Greek writers, with strong cross-cultural interests, create short stories that pollinate the literary conventions of the time with innovative themes and motifs. Moreover, this doctoral research examines Rhoides’ translations of Poe’s tales in an attempt to highlight the ways in which Poe’s work reaches the Greek-speaking readership of the time. This dissertation ultimately aspires to join and expand the discussion about Poe’s global influence, which is currently growing.

The present study endeavors to provide a new direction for Cinema Theory, based on recent findings in the field of cognitive theory and visual perception, with a special focus on digital moviemaking. The study associates Computer Generated Imagery (CGI) with various technologies that have been used over the years in both cinema and in its kin arts, i.e. photography and painting, while at the same time it reviews major theories of cinema such as formalism and realism on the various uses that they made of such technologies. By establishing a common genealogy for the entire art of cinema, the study justifies the need for a more encompassing, stable and objective theory applicable to all cinematic texts. The research was based on applications of cognitive theory to cinema, mainly the work of Julian Hochberg and Virginia Brooks, in search for a framework that is relieved from the influence of any ideological or philosophical trend that might limit its universal applicability and objectivity. Hochberg’s cognitive theory of schematic mapping was deemed to be the most appropriate one to address universalities of human perception that are based on the actual physiology of the human visual system, as regards both its function and its limitations; based on this feature, this theoretical framework is capable of explaining all encounters with any cinematic text, from realism to extreme worldmaking. The corpus of cinematic texts in the study comprises CGI fantasy blockbuster Hollywood movies, as they manifest two distinct features: on one hand, they abide to the rules of classical continuity which emanates a sense of realism, while posing the challenge of this realism being entirely contradicted by the synthetic cinematic universes in which these movies are set. Hochberg’s model of schematic mapping adequately explains that synthetic worldmaking is able to function realistically exactly because it is based on the schematic maps that both moviemakers, CGI designers, and spectators alike share, due to their physiologically common visual experience of the real world. The study distinguishes between the cinematic story and the cinematic world as the two constituent factors of any cinematic universe, and applies Hochberg’s framework as well as other theories of perception in key aspects of the cinematic experience, i.e. composition & montage, motion, and narrative. The main findings were that schematic mapping is more than a promising field on which to establish a cinema theory for the future, for two main reasons: first, all assumptions are verified in terms of the framework being applicable to any kind of narrative cinematic text; and second, the model is not incompatible to other theories of cinema, older or contemporary, as it operates on a physiological level of human vision, thus providing a scientific objectivity that literature on this art is in need of.

This thesis explores the ways in which Orhan Pamuk and his pre-Nobel novels in English translation were recontextualized, i.e. received and (re)presented, in translation and journalistic discourse in the UK and USA, two major centers of the Anglophone literary world. The English translations of Pamuk’s books and their reception as presented in the reviews or other journalistic articles are inarguably two crucial factors in establishing Orhan Pamuk as a writer of world literature. Therefore, the analyses in the present study focus on the translations themselves on one level and on another, the journalistic texts, such as reviews, interviews with and news articles about Pamuk, all of which form the discourse surrounding Pamuk’s novels, shaping and representing their reception in the target cultures.The corpus of the present study comprises Pamuk’s pre-Nobel novels, namely TheWhite Castle (1990), The Black Book (1994 and 2006), The New Life (1997), My Name is Red (2001) and Snow (2004). Among these, The Black Book in its two translations, and Snow, Pamuk’s last novel published in English translation before he won the Nobel Prize in 2006, are subjected to comparative textual analysis as two case studies. The analyses of the journalistic texts reveal that the (re)presentation, hence the reception, of Pamuk’s novels are heavily marked by “metonymics” (Tymoczko 1999), the representative potential of literary translations to stand for the socio-cultural, political and historical realities of their source culture. In this respect, Pamuk’s novels are linked, in the overwhelming majority of these texts, to a broader discourse on Turkey’s identity and status in world politics and in what is conceptualized as “the Muslim world”, mainly described in terms of the idea of “clash of civilizations”. As such, the novels were received and presented as providing insights into the history, politics and cultural identity of the country. Orhan Pamuk’s own influence on this reception was also demonstrated by the analysis of his interviews and articles. Taking translation and the formation of the journalistic discourse (manifested mainly in reviews) as two significant dynamics in the process of recontextualization that traveling literature undergoes, the study also sets out to show how translational and discursive analysis can be linked methodologically. For this reason, a chapter is devoted to the exploration and problematization of the extent and nature of translation’s presence (or non-presence) as a topic in the reviews. More importantly, however, the analysis in the case study on the retranslation of The Black Book is almost completely based on the comments on the first translation by Guneli Gun and the retranslation by Maureen Freely in the reviews as well as other critical work on the translations. This case study also provides insights into the “literary positioning” (Goknar 2013) Pamuk wanted to achieve as an author in the Anglophone world, since the retranslation of The Black Book was his initiative, involving him actively in Freely’s retranslating process. As a major finding of this case study, the two translations of The Black Book establish different metonymies with the Turkish source text, which is a consequence of various factors such as retranslation dynamics, Pamuk’s changed status as a world writer in a span of 12 years, and the status envisaged for The Black Book in the Anglophone world as a novel establishing different intertextualities. In the second case study, the translational analysis of Snow and the insights provided by the translator Maureen Freely bring out the parallelisms between the novel’s reception in the reviews and its English translation published in two editions, one by Knopf, and the other by Faber and Faber, a comparative analysis of which demonstrates differences between them. These differences bend the novel towards seriousness and the assumed expectations of the target readership, most of the time against the will of the translator, through revisions by editors. Findings of this case study also shed light on a process whereby the English translations of peripheral literatures are subjected to assimilative and reductive dynamics. All in all, focusing on a significant period in Orhan Pamuk’s career, i.e. from the publication of his first novel in English translation in 1990 until his Nobel Prize in 2006, the study reveals in its entirety the dynamics and the roles played by actors of world literary space in the making of Orhan Pamuk an established member of this space.

This Ph.D. thesis investigates the connections between textuality, literary writing, and new technologies within present cultural production that converges with digital media. Specifically, it sheds light on Stephen King’s twenty-first century popular literary production, which flourishes both in print and in electronic environments. For this reason, the literary and technological convergences that have emerged from the digital revolution after 1945 constitute the backbone of this doctoral project. King being an eminent horror writer for more than four decades, I highlight his literary departures and media shifts that have contributed to the re-invention of his writing craft and have led to a revision of traditional Gothic fiction. For these reasons, this research project examines the diverse effects of King’s media turn on writing and reading practices as well as on authorial roles and intentions. Focusing both on the potentials and the constraints of electronic media and their interconnection with the content and form of King’s fictional works, this thesis explores the different types of relationships that bind King’s authorial team and active audiences in the formation of amplified literary experiences within the context of present participatory culture and under the pressures of an insatiable entertainment industry. Then, attention is drawn to the latest marketing practices of the book and entertainment industries (always with regard to King’s production) in favor of new transmedia franchises and the creation of a new consumer consciousness that determines the writing and reading of a literary text. I focus on a selection of King’s printed novels and novellas of the twenty-first century, such as Lisey’s Story (2006), Duma Key (2008), and Ur (2009). Then, I examine Discordia (2009), King’s online interactive computer experience as well as other electronic projects King creates for his readers on his official website (StephenKing.com). An attempt is made to explain the dynamic relations that arise and the new possibilities that open up with King’s authorial practices and his oscillation among different expressive modes and writing textualities. As regards the theoretical background of the present thesis, theories on Narratology, New Media and Videogame Studies, Cinematography, Popular Culture, and Marketing are synthesized for the formation of an enhanced and interdisciplinary context. My intention is to contribute to a constructive dialogue, concerning popular fiction as well as the roles authors and readers have to adopt in an electronically-mediated world.

The aim of this thesis is to investigate the role of the Syntax-Semantics and Syntax-Discourse Interface in the acquisition of ambiguous manner-of-motion verbs, by typically developing children acquiring Greek as a native language, as well as the implications of such an interface in a delayed or defective child language acquisition. The expression of motion is interpreted with respect to the linguistic phenomenon of aspect. A series of off-line experiments were run across both the comprehension and the production modality. 142 adults were administered an acceptability judgment pre-task, which tapped into the role of aspect and preposition in the interpretation of the sentence and contributed to the identification of the acceptability of motion verbs, on the basis of their inherent aspectual meaning, and to the determination of the critical items employed in the main study. In addition, 196 children (and 76 controls) participated in the comprehension sentence-video matching tasks, which investigated the degree to which native speakers of Greek use the perfective-imperfective distinction to differentiate between locative and directional atelic readings (Syntax-Semantics interface) and telic-endpoint reached vs. atelic-locative interpretations (Syntax-Discourse interface). The findings indicate that at the age of 5;7, grammatical aspect is not acquired, which is in place at 9;6, when still the integration of the aspectual character of the lexeme with grammatical aspect is not yet fully target like. However, the interface involved which seems to inhibit comprehension is predicted to intervene in the early acquisition of production. Thus, 102 children (and 48 controls) participated in the speech elicitation task. This study examined the effect of aspect on the expression of telicity. The use or not of a prepositional phrase, the preposition type and the verb type are also taken into consideration. The production data pointed out that the production of motion expressions to describe locative events is distinct from that observed for non-locative events. The cutoff point for adult like production of motion seems to be late compared to performance, i.e. after the age of 5;7, but still before the age of 9;3. The expression of motion is delayed in the case it is not pragmatically transparent. When the additional conceptual features of terminativity and telicity are at place, path is expressed in the adult range. However, in the case that such lexical cues are not at place, an interaction of the aspectual features of the verb with other arguments in the motion predicate is required. The results, overall, indicated that the aspectual value of the motion verb is compositional in nature. Children are aware of this nature from an early age, but they fail to integrate aspect in discourse, which protracts adult like acquisition of motion at around the age of 10.

The present thesis investigates the L1 acquisition of the Greek connectives afu (=after/since), enό (=while/even though) and kaθos (=while/since), which are ambiguous between a temporal and a non-temporal interpretation, and contrasts them with the unambiguous temporal prίn (=before) and όtan (=when). Following a syntax-semantics and syntax-discourse interface account arguing for a dependency formed between the connective’s bounded feature and verbal aspect which licences the temporal interpretation of the ambiguous connectives, we aim to investigate the order of development of the temporal and the non-temporal interpretation of the ambiguous connectives. In particular, we examine whether temporal interpretation is acquired first, as it is universally predicted. Also we investigate the order of acquisition of some temporal relations (i.e. sequence and simultaneity) and some non-temporal ones (i.e. premise and concessive). The role of ambiguity, cognitive complexity, clause ordering and exposure to input (i.e. priming) are investigated as factors that further influence the age of acquisition. Two comprehension and two production experiments were administered to 120 children and to 30 adult controls. The results support an earlier acquisition of the temporal interpretation. The comparison of the ambiguous temporal with the unambiguous temporal ones shows that unambiguous connectives are earlier comprehended as they are processed easier. Predictions for an earlier acquisition of the sequential over the simultaneous connectives and for the priority of the premise over the concessive meaning are regulated by the inherent lexical properties of the studied connectives. Working memory limitations and processing load are assumed to be responsible for the lower accuracy observed in tasks and structures of more cognitive complexity.

The objective of the present research is threefold: First, to examine the element of violence in contemporary American cinematographic narratives, as well as the mechanisms with which violence is employed in the narration in order to create an effective impact to the viewer. Second, to analyze violence as a defining element of the characters and their identity. Third, to look into violence as a commentary of its cinematographic expression. The dissertation is divided into two parts. In the first part a brief historical overview of the use of violence in cinema from 1895 to 1992 is presented, the notion of violence is defined, and the theoretical background is established. In the second part the following seven films are used as case studies and therefore are thoroughly analyzed: Unforgiven, Reservoir Dogs, Natural Born Killers, Funny Games, A History of Violence and No Country for Old Men.

This dissertation examines the popular feature films which belong to the broader genre of comedy (character comedy, slapstick comedy, romantic comedy, musical comedy) and were screened between 1950 and 1970 in Greece. The theoretical approach used is the genre theory. In particular, the theoretical framework consists of the theories of Thomas Schatz and Rick Altman about the existence of conventions in the films and their distinction between morphological / syntactic and narrative / semantic. The concept of feedback is also studied and the fact that it results from an implicit contract between the producer and the audience, is stressed. The concept of feedback leads to the theory of Thomas Schatz of a “cultural ritual” which is a cultural experience that the public is experiencing in a form of a massive and collective expression. Moreover, the thesis focuses on Robert Ray’s view concerning the determinant influence of the dominant ideology on the conventions of the genre films, as well as on Richard Dyer’s theory about the link that connects musical comedy and utopia. Within this theoretical framework, the special features of the sub-genres of comedy are studied and the recurring thematic (narrative) motifs in comedies are categorized. Then, the popular comedies are analyzed and the recurring stereotypical characters are traced. Finally, the cases where the popularity of a film comedy is mainly due to the star-protagonist are shown.

The aim of the present study is to examine attitudes and motivation to learn English among Greek learners of the sixth grade of primary school and the third grade of lower secondary school in relation to variables such as age, gender and language attainment level. What is more, this study seeks to explore the extent to which Greek learners are aware of the concept of English as an International Language (EIL) and their attitudes towards and motivation to learn EIL or at least to incorporate some EIL-related features into their English language learning. The data were collected in 27 state schools (13 primary schools and 14 lower secondary schools) in the eastern and western parts of Thessaloniki, Greece. Both quantitative and qualitative approaches were adopted with the overall number of 1,142 survey respondents and the total of 31 interviewees. The data elicitation tools employed were a 71-item attitude/motivation questionnaire, which explored learners’ attitudes towards English, towards learning English at school, towards the native speakers of English and learners’ motivation to learn English for a plethora of reasons; the Oxford Quick Placement Test, which measured the respondents’ language attainment level; and a concise questionnaire used for the short semi-structured interviews. The results of the study highlight that age is the most influential variable across almost all attitude/motivational variables, in which young learners are reported to have more positive attitudes and a higher level of motivation. With regard to the impact of proficiency level, more proficient learners have more positive attitudes towards English and are motivated to learn English for instrumental reasons and for personal enjoyment. In addition, the results show that gender is not influential, and this finding leads to the assumption that, with special reference to English, attitudes and motivation seem to have become gender-neutral. The qualitative data obtained from the short interviews amplified and enriched the findings of the study by providing a more insightful and detailed picture of the learners’ attitudes and motivation. Suggestions for future research and a number of pedagogical recommendations are made on how to increase and sustain learners’ attitudes and motivation and to raise learners’ awareness of EIL, based on the findings of the present study.

Recent scholarship in early modern studies often reads the representation of the Muslim woman in English dramatic works in the light of postcolonial identity politics, which sees an organic relationship between the West’s historical domination of the East and the Western discourse on the East. Within this view, the Islamic woman is rendered a symbol for her land and people and her conquest by European men is supposed to signify the Western superiority over Islam. This thesis problematizes the above trajectory, which is largely informed by Said’s theory of Orientalism, by arguing that the assumption of a power relation between a dominating West and a subordinate East cannot be sustained within the context of the political and historical realities of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Although the English acquired an experience in the New World that enabled them to articulate their first colonial aspirations, in the East they were far from the position of superiority that they assumed in later centuries. Against the Islamic superpower of the Ottomans, which was a threat to the entire Europe, England was only a nascent nation seeking the Ottomans’ commercial and military support to rival the other nations within the radically fractured Christendom. For this reason, the image and the function of Islamic femininity in the period’s drama should be re-interpreted so as to reflect this overturn in the world’s power balances, as well as the complex and intricate dynamics of England’s intensified contact with Islam in the Mediterranean. While referring to historical and theoretical texts, the present study analyzes in detail a series of early modern plays that thematize Islam, including plays by Marlowe, Massinger, as well as Beaumont and Fletcher. The analysis discusses the representation of the Muslim woman by reformulating Said’s theory in line with the unique global dynamics of the age. At the same time, it pays attention to the interconnection of gender notions across the Muslim and Christian cultures. The early modern era witnessed significant transformations with respect to the position of women within the English society. Humanism, the Reformation, and new forms of production enabled Englishwomen for the first time to articulate ideas of equality and defend their rights for greater liberties. Women’s transgression of their culturally prescribed roles caused serious patriarchal anxieties, which are evidenced by the substantial effort observed in the writings of many male writers and moralists to legitimize women’s subordination. The same constant preoccupation with proper gender roles can also be seen in the dramatic works with Islamic themes and characters, and in these plays Muslim women are constructed as negative feminine figures who embody what the patriarchal understanding found threatening and undesirable in women. By extending the arguments countering the post-colonial theory with references to the period’s gender debate, this thesis shows how the fictional Muslim female figures of the early modern English stage functioned as a versatile dramatic material that allowed playwrights to reflect on the Christian patriarchal anxieties with respect to both the overwhelming power of Islam and the oppositional voices of Englishwomen.

The main aim of the present thesis is to investigate the production of English vowels by Greek learners of English and the effectiveness of explicit or implicit pronunciation instruction within a foreign language setting. To this end, three groups of speakers aged 9 and 15 years old were examined; i.e. two experimental groups, one which received explicit pronunciation tuition and one which was taught the pronunciation of the English vowels implicitly, via the use of recasts, and a control one which did not get any pronunciation tuition. Both experimental groups received 43 mini pronunciation interventions embedded in the regular English classes at school. The methodology adopted was the one proposed by Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (1996) moving from controlled and guided activities to more communicative ones. Additionally, L1 Greek and L1 English data were obtained in order to compare the vowel inventories of the two languages. The results showed that after teaching, explicit pronunciation instruction can selectively bring about a change in both young and older students’ L2 vowel production, while no improvement was reported for the implicit and control groups for either age group. Moreover, no clear effect of learners’ age was documented. Generally, considerable intra- and inter-speaker variability was revealed after tuition and despite the small changes observed, systematic native-like production was difficult to attain.

The aim of this thesis is to explore aspects of Newton’s influence on Charlotte Bronte’s four novels and the way this influence informs issues of epistemology, narratology and feminism as well as provides a model of reading her novels. Newton’s optical theories can be detected in Bronte’s work in a number of instances: first, in the handling of light and colours in her poetry and prose; second, in the construction of her narratives which are like prisms and spectrums full of converging and diverging voices and perspectives; and third, in the representation of the mind both as a prism and as a camera obscura. The representation of the mind as a prism and as a camera obscura is part of Bronte’s experimentation with the concept of female epistemological agency. In her novels, the female educator emerges as an exemplary image of female epistemological agent, who, thanks to her profession, is drawn away from a marginal position, experiments with different viewing positions and establishes a dialogic relation with her social environment. As a result, the female educator constructs an epistemological discourse which prioritizes the female mind and mental qualities, foregrounds alternative and feminine ways of knowing, like intuition, and helps the female subject express herself in narrative spectrums full of both realistic accounts and narratives of fantasy. This way, Newtonian discourses of reason and objectivity are endorsed by Bronte but at the same time they are undermined by discourses of subjective vision and fantasy. The perception and the epistemic viewpoint of the female educator are tested against the epistemic viewpoints of other women in the novels. In the end, the female educator is foregrounded as an empowered “heterogeneous” woman, whose mental power and originality of thought make her unique, as she progresses from ignorance to knowledge and from obscurity and darkness to light, constructing ‘a knowledge of her own.’

Detective fiction has been an appealing reading pastime for over a century. However, despite numerous sociological studies on popular culture and literature, the consumer/reader largely remains an elusive persona. The sociology of literature and reception studies traditionally focus on a hypothetical reader whose horizon of expectations must be reconstructed from extant texts and/or the fiction itself. This dissertation zeroes in on the actual perusing individual. The aim is to achieve an empirically-constituted, sociological portrait of contemporary readers of popular detective fiction and involves a twofold objective; to identify their conceptual classificatory schemas and compare them with the respective schemas of critical approaches to popular detective fiction from its inception to the present. The dissertation meets the aim through an extensive study of relevant literature and a treatment of postings to DorothyL as an empirical database that comprises marked combinations of socio-literary information. The statistical processing of an empirically-constructed corpus via a combination of qualitative content analysis and Greimasian structural semantics yields important information. It ascertains that daily-recorded correspondences of taste regarding the literary can indeed provide an eloquent description of the contemporary bibliophile. The key finding is that the contemporaneous detective-fiction reader is keen on a combination of characteristics. This combination emerges in the late 1970s and intertwines historicity with structural excellence. The main conclusion drawn is that the empirical deficiency in popular-literature studies has led theorists of culture to perceive its consumer as a lobotomised adherent to the status quo, and popular fiction as one of the instruments for the operation. However, the current approach reveals that DorothyL subscribers are self-willed/emancipated agents who appropriate the original detective fiction formula; they demand that their favourite sleuth stories display certain characteristics. In this dissertation, the actual receiver of culture sanctions French structuralist and post-structuralist critical assumptions about the nature of language, culture, and (wo)man. Posters to DorothyL attest to the autonomous subversive, ideological nature of literature, and to the dialectical relationship of texts to reality — assumptions long validated only via (meta)textual criticism and virtual-readership constructions. This thesis argues for a methodologically unbiased approach to popular culture, however, one that does not disregard the actual consumer, and proposes that more research should be carried out based on authentic communications of readers’ preferences and opinions.Detective fiction has been an appealing reading pastime for over a century. However, despite numerous sociological studies on popular culture and literature, the consumer/reader largely remains an elusive persona. The sociology of literature and reception studies traditionally focus on a hypothetical reader whose horizon of expectations must be reconstructed from extant texts and/or the fiction itself. This dissertation zeroes in on the actual perusing individual. The aim is to achieve an empirically-constituted, sociological portrait of contemporary readers of popular detective fiction and involves a twofold objective; to identify their conceptual classificatory schemas and compare them with the respective schemas of critical approaches to popular detective fiction from its inception to the present. The dissertation meets the aim through an extensive study of relevant literature and a treatment of postings to DorothyL as an empirical database that comprises marked combinations of socio-literary information. The statistical processing of an empirically-constructed corpus via a combination of qualitative content analysis and Greimasian structural semantics yields important information. It ascertains that daily-recorded correspondences of taste regarding the literary can indeed provide an eloquent description of the contemporary bibliophile. The key finding is that the contemporaneous detective-fiction reader is keen on a combination of characteristics. This combination emerges in the late 1970s and intertwines historicity with structural excellence. The main conclusion drawn is that the empirical deficiency in popular-literature studies has led theorists of culture to perceive its consumer as a lobotomised adherent to the status quo, and popular fiction as one of the instruments for the operation. However, the current approach reveals that DorothyL subscribers are self-willed/emancipated agents who appropriate the original detective fiction formula; they demand that their favourite sleuth stories display certain characteristics. In this dissertation, the actual receiver of culture sanctions French structuralist and post-structuralist critical assumptions about the nature of language, culture, and (wo)man. Posters to DorothyL attest to the autonomous subversive, ideological nature of literature, and to the dialectical relationship of texts to reality — assumptions long validated only via (meta)textual criticism and virtual-readership constructions. This thesis argues for a methodologically unbiased approach to popular culture, however, one that does not disregard the actual consumer, and proposes that more research should be carried out based on authentic communications of readers’ preferences and opinions.

The aim of the present thesis was the observation of the adaptation techniques and strategies that localisers adopt in the framework of international corporate website localisation when addressing an english, french and greek audience. We examined the way website content and format is transferred in relation to the addressees' cultural characteristics. Then we tried to find out which verbal means of persuasion are selected with a greek audience in mind and we recognised two main strategies of persuasion. Our main focus was on the study of the metaphorical figure of speech both on a verbal and a nonverbal level of analysis. In our attempt to observe the way optical and verbal metaphors are transferred from one locale to the other we adopted a causative research model which allowed for the connection of adaptation techniques with the receivers' cultural background. The analysis revealed a tendency of maintaining the macrostructure and culturally adapting the microstructure of the website.

The study aims to provide a detailed demonstration of how needs analysis (NA) can be carried out and utilized for creating a needs-based experimental ESAP course. In particular, the major goals of this study were: to identify the needs of accontancy students in the context of Greek tertiary education (TEI); determine how these needs can be best addressed

Based on the presupposition that literature and psychoanalytic theory function as communicating repositories of narratives, this dissertation consists of a parallel reading of paradigmatic texts found in Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm’s Kinder und Hausmarchen, and the theoretical texts by pioneering psychoanalyst Melanie Klein. Born in 1882 Vienna, Klein was brought up in a cultural environment where the Grimm tales had been institutionalized as the primary entertaining and educational narrative for children. Klein’s theories of psychic development stemmed from her analyses of children who were also brought up in a similar cultural milieu. This congruence, I argue, is reflected in some of Klein’s theoretical papers and recently available clinical notes, which are saturated with imagery, symbols and structures often found in the Grimm tales. I contend that the Grimm tales exercised an indirect yet formative influence on Klein’s theories. Simultaneously, however, a synchronic study of the two discourses brings out their common structural and symbolic elements in a way that permits us to achieve a different understanding of the way Grimm tales resonate with different audiences. Key Kleinian concepts such as the centrality of the maternal in the formation of individual identity, anxiety as a prerequisite to symbolization, the paranoid-schizoid and the depressive positions, the good internal object, all find their structural or symbolic equivalent in aspects of the tales. This mediation between psychoanalytic theory and the tales is facilitated by the use of Propp’s theory of the morphology of the folktale, a landmark text in the study of folklore, as well as by aspects of the work pf psychoanalytically-oriented folklorist Alan Dundes, whose work revolves around the view that any collection of folklore, whatever its form, should be accompanied by informed attempts to situate folkloric elements within their cultural contexts, as well as to provide interpretations of their possible use and significance for their audiences.

The aim of this PhD thesis is to develop automatic methods for Noun Phrase Recognition in Modern Greek corpora. The linguistic research is placed within the framework of Harris’ distributional and transformational theory (1951; 1965; 1968). For the detailed and systematic description of Modern Greek syntax, we adopted Gross’ methodological model (1975), called Lexicon-Grammar, which can provide extremely rich and exhaustive linguistic information. According to Gross (1975), in order to proceed to syntactic analysis, we should first study the structure of elementary sentences. Based on the structure of elementary sentences in Modern Greek, we delimit our research and define noun phrases within our research. More specifically, we focus on noun phrases that are non-prepositional first complements of verbs. As far as Noun Phrase Recognition Is concerned, we constructed and applied to corpora machine-readable grammars. These grammars, which have the formalism of Recursive Transition Networks (RTN), are very often used to represent linguistic data (Gross, 1993; Roche & Schabes, 1997). In total, we constructed 925 grammars (graphs), consisting a linguistic resource of great importance as they recognise a big part of noun phrases. Because of their detailed descriptions, these grammars were also used to eliminate morphological ambiguities in noun phrases. The latter task was evaluated in terms of recall and precision.

This dissertation deals with total reduplication (TR) of the type vima vima ‘step step’ “step by step”, aspros aspros ‘white white’ “very white”, vivlio vivlio ‘book book’ “real/proper book” and pes pes ‘say:2SG.IMP say:2SG.IMP’ “by saying all the time”. The object of study concerns Modern Greek (MG), but since it is approached from a typological point of view, it involves reference to other languages and to theoretical or typological models of analysis. The central aim of the dissertation is to describe the language-specific regularities of a phenomenon that is largely attested among languages of Southeastern Europe. Thus, focusing on MG, the thesis addresses the types of TR, its phonological, semantic and pragmatic aspects and the constraints and/or preferences of speakers concerning its use. The typology of TR in MG focuses on four meanings/functions, identified as the intensive, the contrastive, the distributive and the iterative. Part of the analysis of these functional types is based on data that come from two experiments: a Sentence Completion Task (SCT) referring to the relation of the above meanings/functions with word classes and semantic features of words, and a scripted speech (reading-aloud) task concerning the relation of intonation with the interpretation of TR constructions. The SCT has confirmed or refined earlier assumptions regarding the effects of word class, the [± concrete] feature, number, person and mood on the interpretation of TR. It has also pointed to correlations between these functions and other parameters, such as discourse type. The phonological task addressed the notorious issue of single stress of TR expressions, and resulted in clarifying the idea of prosodic unity in TR (as a feature that distinguishes it from pragmatic repetition). The phonological experiment has also provided a (formal) basis for making distinctions between types of TR in terms of status (esp. grammatical vs. pragmatic status). In general, the discussion of formal and lexical constraints on the use of TR functions leads to the observation that TR is a heterogeneous category that involves grammatical (e.g. the distributive), pragmatic (e.g. the contrastive) and lexical (e.g. “indefiniteness”) construction types, which nonetheless meet highly specific criteria for their status as TR constructions. From a theoretical viewpoint, however, TR cannot be unambiguously considered a grammatical or lexical class (in the sense of Walchli 2005). Overall, TR seems to have a special, borderline, character, which is evident, first, in that it has both a lexical/idiomatic and a grammatical aspect, and, second, it is best described as the result of a copying process, not present in other types of construction. Independently of its fuzzy status, the TR types discussed are productive and “vital” (in the sense of Stolz, Stroh & Urdze 2011), hence it is proposed that MG is a language that exhibits reduplication, contrary to earlier approaches that either reject the idea or consider reduplication a universal. As a productive, grammatical mechanism (with the distributive type being its “best” representative), TR should not be merely taken as a strategy for “emphasis”, but it should be systematically represented in grammar textbooks.

The ultimate aim of this thesis is multi-faceted: Firstly, it will include a presentation of the scientific framework and the context in which the ST and the TTs, as well as the playwright, the translators and the audiences have existed and influenced each other. Once the text functions and types have been determined, the thesis will provide a comparative analysis of all the potential translatologically problematic culture-specific elements, which are included in the three most recently published Greek translations of A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams. The final step will be a critical evaluation and a conclusion regarding the norms that govern the translation process of these problematic areas. Τhe descriptive analysis is well-supported by empirical findings and observations, as well as secondary research.

The present thesis investigates poetry translation in Greece (1810-1974), focusing on Greek poet-translators and their theorizing about translation and especially on the views expressed by Ioannis Vilaras, Iakovos Polylas, Lorentzos Mavilis, Kostis Palamas, George Seferis, and Odysseus Elytis. The thesis aims to explore the relationship between the poets’ thinking on translation and their practice of translation by examining part of their translation work from a DTS perspective. The study helps us draw conclusions about the impact translation has on the poets’ original poetic production, as well as on the development of Modern Greek poetry, language and education, illustrating thus the need for more systematic and methodological studies of the translation activity of 19th- and 20th-century Greek poets.

Τhis thesis describes an interdisciplinary research project which combined selected play-texts with techniques from drama in education, with the aim of renegotiating the stereotyped identities of the ‘immigrant-Other’ and the ‘national-Self’ in an educational context. Moreover, the thesis’ wider aim was to upgrade the role of the play-text in the classroom, providing innovative ideas which re-consider the pedagogical potential of acting a play-text out, for future teachers and drama educators to experiment with, according to their own specific class dynamics and thematic orientation. In more detail, the thesis describes a qualitative research which was carried out at an Intercultural High School of Thessaloniki. During the research project three migration-oriented play-texts were introduced to 15 migrant and Greek students through a drama-based methodology using techniques from the field of drama in education. According to the findings of the research, the pedagogical role of the play-text was made clear. It emerged that the play-text can be a vehicle of intercultural awareness, affecting the students’ preconceptions of migrant and national identities, triggering a critical thinking of one’s attitude to the Other and finally leading to a fuller understanding of one’s Self. Moreover, it emerged that the drama-based methodology employed was also very effective for it engaged students into an active and self-absorbing approach to the play texts, preventing, thus, a superficial reading of them. Seeing into the learning potential and the joy of the students’ experiencing the play, the final suggestions of the thesis concern acting the play text out, reconsidering the art of acting as a means of exploring a play and deepening one’s understanding of the Self and the Other.

The present thesis sets out to explore how Irish cultural identity is rendered in the Greek translations of 20th-century Anglo-Irish poetry, and more specifically in the translated works of William Butler Yeats, Patrick Kavanagh, and Seamus Heaney. Taking as a starting point the notion that the distinct national culture of Ireland is both shaped by and reflected in its literary production, this thesis investigates how the literary image of Irishness is represented when Irish writing in English is translated—an issue which has received scant attention in the literature. For the purposes of this thesis, Irishness is understood as fluid and multifaceted, owing its formation to the colonial/postcolonial experience. Its traits are described with the help of various definitions of culture and nation; its specific cultural markers—namely place, politics, history; memory, religion, mythology and folklore—are located and discussed in the original poems and their translations. The study involves not only a textual analysis of the translations with emphasis on the way culture-specific elements are rendered into Greek, but also an analysis of the form of the translated poems, an examination of the peritexts, as well as a macro-analysis of what part of the three poets’ work has been selected for translation. Having contextualized the poems in the source culture from which they originated, this study explores the extent to which cultural specificity comes across in the Greek translations. The findings of this study suggest that domesticating practices have prevailed, obscuring to a certain extent the cultural particularities of the source texts. Moreover, the various conceptions of Irishness as manifested in the work of the three poets are not fully captured in the Greek translations. Although the translation of Anglo-Irish poetry undeniably creates a meeting point between source and target culture, the image of Irishness is altered in the process. Taking into consideration the issue of translatability, this thesis offers an insight into the way cultural transfer between two minor cultures performs.

The purpose of this research was to investigate the effect of instruction on written mediation strategies for Greek English language learners aged 14-15 at intermediate level of proficiency who were involved in exam preparation for the written mediation activity of the KPG writing module at B2 Level. The research included two major research questions: first, whether the teaching intervention influenced the learners’ perceptions regarding the application of the written mediation strategies, and second, what types of mediation strategies facilitated the English language learners in improving their written mediation performance. To assess the effectiveness of instruction we trained sixty learners in mediation strategies; these learners formed the experimental group. There was also a control group of the thirty-six learners who followed the regular exam preparation course for English language exams at B2 Level, without receiving training in mediation strategies. The intervention in the experimental group consisted of nine fifty-minute lessons that took place every second week over a period of four months. The following instruments were used to collect our research data: (a) a questionnaire to measure the learners’ perception regarding written mediation strategy use before and after the teaching intervention, and (b) a written mediation checklist to evaluate the learners’ written performance before and after the teaching intervention. The research findings indicate that the experimental group improved on their use of written mediation strategies more than the control group. Also, findings indicate the need for further research into the design of assessment instruments of written mediation performance. Moreover, on one hand assessor-training programmes should be developed in order to facilitate the task of written mediation assessors. On the other hand, teachers should be trained in teaching written mediation strategies in the EFL classroom.

The aim of the thesis was to study the acquisition of English object-gap A`-dependencies with a null/overt wh-operator by Greek learners of English. The theoretical framework adopted in the study was the Interpretability Hypothesis (Tsimpli 2003), a feature-based account which makes a crucial distinction between interpretable and uninterpretable features. The hypothesis of the study was that uninterpretable features (of abstract subject and object agreement) are responsible for the optionality in the gap and resumptive pronoun strategy attested in the acquisition of the aforementioned dependencies. We examined the resumptive strategy through two experimental tasks. Τhe data came from two experimental groups of intermediate and advanced Greek learners of English and was compared to the data from a control group of native English speakers. The findings of the study showed extensive optionality of the resumptive strategy among the intermediate-level learners and a significant decrease at more advanced stages of acquisition. Furthermore, the advanced learners were found to differ significantly from the native speaker group in the acceptability of resumptive pronouns. It was also found that the preference of the two learner groups for the (ungrammatical) resumptive pronoun was regulated by semantic factors (animacy of the pronoun) and structural complexity. The study also examined the acceptability/production of (ungrammatical) subject readings in clauses with a tough adjective. The high rates of non-target performance in conjunction with the results from object-gap dependencies led us to conclude that the uninterpretable subject and object agreement features were not reset even at advanced stages of learning.

The Assessment for Autonomy Research Project (AARP) was a five-year study related to autonomy in foreign language learning, which in this instance was English as a Foreign Language at university level. It was implemented in the School of English of Aristotle University of Thessaloniki and involved the investigation of peer-assessment and self-assessment of writing and speaking skills as a means to promote greater autonomy in language learning. The study consisted of three phases: a Preliminary Study (2005-2006), the Main Study (2006-2009), and, finally, a Post-Study (2009-2010), which involved intervention in the form of training for peer-assessment. The participants, each year, were students from the Instructor-Researcher’s own two groups on the 1st year autumn semester course, Language Mastery I, which means that the cohorts used for research purposes, which were ten in total, were convenience samples. Quantitative data was gathered related to peer-, self- and instructor assessment of two writing assignments and one in-class oral presentation, prepared by students at home, so that both the assessment results and their analysis were triangulated, with assessment, in each case, being conducted using the same pre-determined criteria. Qualitative data related to assessment processes was collected by means of assessment questionnaires, with responses given on a Likert scale, which could be analysed quantitatively, while accompanying comments offered holistic insights into students’ views of learner-centred assessment. The research questions aimed to establish if learners could assess the oral and writing skills of their peers and of themselves, objectively and reliably, taking on ownership of pre-determined criteria, which they used to form judgements, in an atmosphere of cooperation and trust. These questions seemed for the most part to be satisfied, but the processes involved overcoming existing preconceptions and beliefs about learning and assessment and engaging in reflection, criterial and critical thinking. It also required that the students accept a recalibration of power over assessment and a move away from the heteronomy to which they were accustomed. Although their engagement in peer- and self-assessment processes was relatively short, using peer-assessment as a stepping-stone, learners were able to assume greater responsibility and self-direction and thus exercise a greater degree of autonomy. In this way, they developed skills which would be useful to them throughout a lifetime of living, learning, and, in most cases, language teaching.

The aims of the present thesis are to review the linguistic area of aspect and telicity and to investigate the acquisition of telicity in Greek. Telicity lies at the syntax-discourse interface and it is compositionally determined by the aspectual class of the verb, morphological aspect and the presence/absence of object and particles. Aspect in Greek is a grammaticalized, interpretable feature interacting with argument structure and interpretation and is morphologically expressed in a binary way, namely perfective and imperfective. For the purposes of our research, we assumed that the mapping between syntax and arguments is mediated by grammatical aspect and we adopted an endpoint approach to telicity. According to the endpoint account, a sentence is interpreted as telic if the event is represented as having an endpoint beyond which the event cannot continue. The structures, we examined, include a specific object or goal as possible manifestations of an endpoint. The endpoint’s visibility was established within the sentence through grammatical means; that is the perfective marking of the verb makes visible the endpoint of the event, while the imperfective marking of the verb does not make visible the endpoint of the event. The thesis explores both the comprehension and expression of telicity through acquisition data on activity and motion constructions. The research questions concern (a) the development of the interaction between the verb’s aspectual marking (perfective vs. imperfective) and the presence of a complement both being used to mark telicity compositionally in adult language, and (b) the developmental difference between activities and motion verbs in the comprehension and expression of telicity (DP vs. PP complements). In the comprehension study, we tested 150 Greek-speaking monolingual children aged 5 to 8 (three age groups) and in the production study 250 children aged 5 to 10 (five age groups). 40 adults also conducted both experiments for control purposes. Due to telicity’s interface status, we expected a delay in acquisition, with grammatical aspect appearing early in development whereas telic/atelic interpretations turning adult-like quite late. We further hypothesized that the expression of telicity will be particularly problematic for motion verb constructions for our youngest participants. The results confirmed these predictions.

This dissertation aims at a detailed and empirically verified analysis of the interactional competence displayed by Pontic-Greek immigrants from the former USSR who have not attended Modern Greek language classes. It combines two strands of the Ethnomethodological study of talk-in-interaction (Garfinkel 1967), i.e. Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff & Jefferson 1974) and Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks 1992a, b), to analyze authentic conversational data culled from semi-/un-structured interviews with the native researcher herself. The ethnomethodological perspective is further supplemented by Contextualisation (Gumperz 1982, 1992) which studies conventionalised cues, as well as with the concept of ‘Face’ (Brown and Levinson 1987), which is equivalent to the conversation analytic notion of ‘preference’. Within this theoretical framework, the immigrants’ interactional competence is investigated as the accountable product of the co-conversationalists’ interaction –not excluding the researcher herself–, and not with reference to pre-established criteria of assessment, as instantiated in mainstream second language theories. The analysis of the non-native/native conversations show that, while grammatical deficits in the incomers’ talk do not ultimately impede the accomplishment of ‘reciprocity of perspectives’ or intersubjectivity, the incomers’ insufficient linguistic competence can affect the development of the interaction, in the form of production difficulties –occasionally making relevant the incomers’ non-nativeness as an occasioned category. Inversely, grammatically correct structures often contribute to the accomplishment of actions by the incomers which make available the co-conversationalists’ divergent and incompatible turn-taking, preference and repair organisations. When the clashes in the co-conversationalists’ orientations are not attributed to the intercultural/interlanguage character of the interaction, the incomers’ action emerges as blameworthy, which in turn contributes to their treatment as socially deficient. The particular categorisation is further reinforced through the native speaker’s curtailment of the incomers’ accountability, due to the consequentiality of the research/interview context. On these grounds, the findings point to the necessity for an interactional turn in research that deals with L2 in general, and with Modern Greek in particular, and aim to inform the (effective) design of educational and social policies.

Research has shown that speech acquired in profound hearing loss presents differences on both the segmental and the suprasegmental levels compared with normal hearing speech. Recent studies focus on the dynamic aspects of hearing impaired speech, i.e., coarticulation as coproduction of gestures, but findings are variable. Although this issue has received a lot of attention in the English literature, phonetic research in Greek is still scant, this being the first study of coarticulation in Greek hearing impaired speech. The main aim of the present thesis is the acoustic exploration of (a) vowel-to-vowel and consonant-to-vowel coarticulation in degree and/or temporal extent and (b) static characteristics such as vowel space, distribution and duration of the three point vowels, in the speech of Greek young adult male and female speakers with normal hearing (NH) and hearing impairment (HI). The aforementioned dynamic and static acoustic properties are investigated in relation to certain variables, i.e., vocalic and consonantal context, stress, syllable position, as well as speaker gender and intelligibility. The speech of nine subjects with profound HI, five male and four female, and five subjects with NH, two male and three female, was analyzed acoustically by measuring formant frequencies F1 and F2 at vowel onset, midpoint and offset of the Greek point vowels [i, a, u] in disyllables of the form [pV1CV2] with consonants [p, t, s] stressed on the first or the second vowel. An additional experiment was conducted in order to rate the intelligibility of the speakers with HI. Three groups, i.e., very high, high and medium intelligibility, were formed on the basis of judgements made by 60 naive listeners with NH who rated 101 words and 25 short sentences produced by the speakers with HI. The acoustic analysis showed some similarities in vowel characteristics and coarticulatory patterns between the two hearing groups, but also revealed significant differences. Differential relative coarticulatory resistance/aggression of the segments under study was observed in HI vs. NH speech. Most importantly, predominance of the anticipatory component in coarticulation was located in alveolar contexts in HI speech. Major findings regarding acoustic characteristics include [u]-fronting, reduced vocalic contrast, higher acoustic variability and longer durations for HI vowels. Moreover, differential effect of gender and stress on the acoustic characteristics of vowels and coarticulation was found in the two groups. Findings are discussed on the basis of possible articulatory strategies adopted by the two hearing groups and are considered in light of the coproduction framework and, in particular, the Degree of Articulatory Constraint (DAC) model.

The purpose of this thesis is to investigate whether the process writing (White & Arndt, 1991) approach to teaching writing, which focuses on the process rather than the product of writing, can enable young learners of the sixth grade of the Greek state primary schools to become independent writers in their L2. The present research was conducted in two state schools in a town in northern Greece during the school year 2007- 2008, addressing the main hypothesis: The process approach to writing helps sixth grade students of the Greek state primary schools develop their writing skills in English. To this end, two experimental and two control groups were randomly chosen in the two participating schools. The students’ level was specified through the Oxford Quick Placement test, which is a standardised test, and a pre-test defined their original writing performance, while a post-test detected their writing attainment at the end of the study. A questionnaire was administered to students in the beginning and the end of the research to trace their attitudes towards writing at the entry point and explore any alteration of stances after the study. The control group followed the materials assigned by the Ministry of Education for this grade, whereas the experimental group members attended a supplementary writing syllabus designed by the researcher under the philosophy of process writing. The results indicated that the present research verified the aforementioned hypothesis that the process approach to writing aids sixth grade students of the Greek state primary schools to develop their writing skills in English. To be more specific, the term writing skills is used to imply both the students’ writing proficiency and their attitudes to writing. A significant implication for teaching writing is that a meaningful, encouraging framework can support the students of this level whose linguistic resources are still limited, since it instills favourable attitudes towards writing. The thesis concludes with recommendations based on the findings and suggestions for future research.

The general aim of this dissertation is to investigate the acquisition of wh-interrogatives in L1 Greek by typically developing children. More concretely, comprehension and production of wh-interrogatives is examined with respect to four fundamental questions on children’s sensitivity to long-distance movement constraints, to PF/LF discrepancy reduction, to locality considerations and to economy-based parsing. All these questions are addressed mainly on the basis of the following conditions: short-/long- distance extraction, presence or absence of wh-islands/negation/Discourse-linking, and presence of complementiser ‘oti’ vs. ‘na’. In order to test the Greek-specific predictions made in relation to the fundamental questions outlined above, ninety 4-to-7 year-old Greek children participated in a series of comprehension and production experiments. The analysis of their results aims at comparisons between question comprehension and production, as well as between short- and long- distance question production. These comparisons are drawn both at an intralinguistic and at a crosslinguistic level, with the ultimate goal of gaining deeper insight into the acquisition of wh-movement. Overall, the obtained results provide evidence for the availability of successive cyclicity and for sensitivity to wh- and negative islands, for convergence of PF and LF representations, for early preference for maximally local movement and, finally, for the operation of economy-based parsing principles. On the whole, all the patterns observed point to a UG-compatible linguistic behaviour and thus attest for a continuity account of language acquisition. Maturation seems to pertain to children’s processing ability and more prominently at the level of meaning rather than at the level of form.

This study investigates third language acquisition of articles and object pronouns in English L3 by successive bilingual speakers of Turkish L1/Greek L2. This group of speakers is compared to monolingual speakers of Greek L1 learning English as an L2. The level of proficiency in English for both groups is Lower Intermediate. Additionally, a pilot group of Greek L1 and Turkish L1/Greek L2 speakers of English at an Intermediate level is examined in the same phenomena. The population comprising the participants in this study are secondary school students in the region of Evros, Greece, who attended English language classes taught by the author of this dissertation. At the time when data collection for this study commenced (i.e. 2004), the acquisition of English articles as an L2 had already received a lot of attention but L3 acquisition of the same category was a relatively under-explored area. Therefore, its investigation would produce results touching upon a novel area of research. However, the most deciding factor regarding the selection of the particular categories for this study was the typological distance between Turkish and Greek/English with respect to the article system as well as the licencing of (pronominal) object drop. At the same time, as both articles and pronouns are considered to be D-elements, their developmental course in the speakers’ IL would be of particular interest. For this purpose, 3 different types of oral tasks were administered, which revealed that exposure to Greek L2 exerted considerable influence in the development of a D representation as regards the acquisition on articles in English L3. However, such a claim cannot hold for the development of object pronouns in English, which seems to follow a rather asymmetrical path.

The general goal of this dissertation is to investigate four basic effects (word order, morphological, language and task effects) on the different grammatical phenomena in both morphologically rich languages, Serbian and Greek in order to determine the level to which the comprehension and the production is impaired in agrammatism. The data presented in the thesis is drawn from the study of five non-fluent aphasics, three native speakers of Serbian and two native speakers of Greek language. More specifically, in order to investigate agrammatic comprehension of thematic roles and patients’ ability to use morphological cues in both canonical (SVO) and non-canonical (OVS) word order, a sentence picture matching test with orally presented dislocation, focus and restrictive relative constructions was used. The results of this test indicated generally above chance performance on constructions in canonical (SVO) order by both Greek- and Serbian-speaking agrammatics. Nevertheless, a better performance of Greek aphasics in both Focus and object relative constructions, has been also found. On the other hand, a prompted act out test aimed to investigate the effect of movements in both discourse-linked and non-discourse linked wh-questions. Results of this task revealed an above chance performance on canonical wh-questions, which were understood much better than non-canonical equivalents in both language groups (similar results were found in Hickok & Avrutin, 1996; Avrutin, 2000; Salis & Edwards, 2005 by English-speaking agrammatics). The second experiment is comprised by two tests, a grammaticality judgment and a sentence repetition task, which aimed to examine whether agrammatics both comprehend and produce case markers and subject-verb agreement in both grammatical and ungrammatical sentences and whether they comprehend and produce equally well canonical (SVO) and non-canonical (VOS) word order combining syntactic cues with morphological ones. Results of this experiment revealed generally above chance performance in grammaticality judgment by both language groups; patients also showed that they retain the ability to recognize S-V agreement (similar to Friedman's study on Hebrew and Arabic, 2003 and Varlokosta’s et. al., 2006 and Nannousi’s et al., 2006 studies on Greek) and/or case marking errors. On the other hand, a drop of performance in a sentence repetition task has been found; patients confront great difficulties especially in the repetition of ungrammatical constructions. It also must be emphasized that patients of both language groups performed significantly better on SVO than on VOS clauses (in line with Friedman et al.’s results, 2001).These results suggest that although both Greek and Serbian are highly inflected languages, sentence comprehension and production of non-canonical word orders (OVS and VOS respectively) was relatively impaired and, in this respect, similar to the performance of aphasic patients, native speakers of English language. Furthermore, a better performance in some of the non-canonical structures (e.g. focus and object relatives) in the results of Greek-speaking patients indicates that agrammatics of this language group managed to use some of the morphological cues in non-canonical word order in contrast to their Serbian-speaking counterparts.

The aim of the present thesis was the study of translation problems in film subtitling. I examined translation problems focusing on problems that arise when translating swear words and humorous elements in films. Then I analysed the translation techniques for coping with these problems. Furthermore, I presented the language functions of swear words in films and I analysed how these functions have an impact on their translation. This research used the Descriptive Translation Studies’ framework and my corpus consisted of 17 English and French films. I also examined the usefulness of interlingual subtitling in language learning and teaching and I presented the results of a pilot research and a research with a questionnaire in this field. From the results I can conclude that the main translation technique is that of maintaining swear words and humorous elements in films and that subtitling can be very useful in boosting certain language skills.

The present thesis consists a comparative approach to six Italian-American and Greek-American literary works written in the three last decades of the 20th century. Based on the common theme of the authors' return, either metaphorical or literal to the country of origin and its culture, "Novels of Return" explores the common motifs of mythology, ritual and storytelling where the mostly third generation writers resort to in their quest for self-definition. With geographical proximity, common historical and cultural background in the old countries, Greece and Italy, and a similar reception in the new world facilitating a comparative approach, the ethnic writers of the two literatures , as it is proved, adopt a post-colonialist perception of ethnic space as a site of resilience and empowerment.

This dissertation examines the methodic construction of the social identity old person in everyday talk. It combines two strands of the Ethnomethodological study of talk-in-interaction (Garfinkel 1967), i.e. Conversation Analysis (Sacks, Schegloff and Jefferson 1974) and, especially, Membership Categorization Analysis (Sacks 1992a, b), to analyze authentic conversational data culled from both everyday encounters and television programmes. The ethnomethodological perspective is further supplemented by Communication Accommodation Theory (Coupland, Coupland and Giles 1991), which has also concerned itself with the study of identity and ageing, as well as the concept of ‘face’ (Brown and Levinson 1987), which is equivalent to the conversation analytic notion of ‘preference’. Within this theoretical framework, identity is seen as indexical and occasioned, rather than as being a person’s essence. Depending on the interactional circumstances, the elderly and middle-aged members employ various methods in their attempt to construct an age identity: they claim, denounce or change membership in the categories of old/middle-aged/older person and the accompanying activities/attributes bound to them; they tell or refuse to tell their chronological age; they embark on age related troubles-telling and storytelling. The pay-offs might be different, but each time, the relevance of any age identity ultimately rests with the participants to a situated interaction, who may either ratify or resist it through their interactional moves. In any case, both speakers’ and recipients’ methods are inevitably informed by broad sociocultural considerations, and especially ageist stereotypes and expectations.

The aim of the present study is to investigate the production of L2 speech rhythm and selected features of the stop voicing system among Greek learners of English before and after pronunciation teaching intervention that occurs in a foreign formal language context of acquisition. For the purposes of the present study two groups of speakers were examined, an experimental group who received pronunciation teaching intervention and a control group, who followed the regular classes at school without special pronunciation teaching intervention. Each group comprised students of three different ages (10-, 13- and 16-years old) in order to investigate the potential role of learners’ age in relation to L2 phonological acquisition. Data on L1 Greek and English were also obtained. The pronunciation teaching included 51 pronunciation mini-lessons embedded in the regular English language course, following the methodology of Celce-Murcia, Brinton and Goodwin (1996), who proposed five stages of pronunciation teaching that range from controlled to free activities. Rhythm was quantified with the use of the PVI measure (Low, Grabe and Nolan 2000, Grabe and Low 2002), which examines the vocalic and intervocalic duration variability in a long stretch of speech. The acquisition of the durational correlates of voicing was measured with the use of waveform and spectrographic analysis of features in word initial and final stops. The results indicated that, generally before teaching, speakers resorted to L1 interference or to universal tendencies of language. After teaching a change was reported for speakers of the experimental, but not of the control groups. Great inter- and intra-speaker variability was reported, especially after instruction. Generally, improvement was found for the experimental groups, however, systematic target-like production was difficult to achieve. Also no clear global effect of learners’ age was reported. A detailed analysis of the possible constraints in pronunciation accuracy, as well as the pedagogical implications of the findings are presented. The results are evaluated in relation to theoretical frameworks of L2 phonological acquisition.

The present study seeks to explore patterns of reported language learning strategy use by EFL Greek-speaking 6th-graders in elementary school in relation to their language proficiency level, motivation to learn English, and gender. The main hypothesis posits that all the three variables exert influence on the strategy deployment of those learners. The aim is to pinpoint those strategies which differentiate higher- from lower-proficiency students and utilize that knowledge in order to enrich learners’ strategic ways and enhance their achievement in the target language. Both a quantitative and a qualitative approach were adopted with an entire sample of 763 participants in twenty-seven elementary schools in the city of Thessaloniki. The elicitation tools used were a background questionnaire where motivation to learn English was recorded on the basis of Gardner’s (2001) socio-educational model, a strategy questionnaire adapted from Oxford’s (1990) Strategy Inventory for Language Learning (SILL) so that it could best be suited for the needs of the young learners, and the Quick Placement Test (UCLES 2001) for a valid measurement of proficiency. Pilot testing prior to the study led to the final formulation of the strategy questionnaire. All the results confirmed the main hypothesis of the study. More specifically, proficiency level influenced about half of the strategy items on the adapted SILL while motivation to learn English had an overwhelming impact on three quarters of the strategy items. Females exceeded males in the reported use of cognitive, metacognitive, affective, and social strategies exhibiting earlier biological, affective, and social maturity as well as higher motivation. Analysis of the short and long interviews corroborated the quantitative results and led to the portrayal of the “very successful learner”, whose lower intermediate level is regarded as exceptional, distinguishing him/her from the lower levels. Finally, important pedagogical recommendations are made for the English classroom towards particular strategy training intervention, and directions for future research are rendered.

The current thesis undertakes a pragmatic exploration of the finely-grained distinctions in meaning between the two prototypical causal subordinators in Modern Greek with the widest range of application in discourse: 'γiati' and 'epeiδi'. By way of reaction to the problems besetting the implementation of the Gricean model of meaning analysis in the causal investigation conducted and, also, in acknowledgment of the requirement for a more cognitively realistic orientation of pragmatic analysis, an alternative view is offered in terms of the versatile, as it turns out, methodological apparatus that relevance theory seems to afford in the interest of detailed descriptions of meaning. The present description of causal meaning relies on the major distinction in interpretation that has been designed in this framework as a point of reference in classifications of discourse markers, i.e. conceptual vs. procedural encoding, and has been regularly employed in this direction in the relevant literature. In this line of argumentation, it is shown that, contrary to expectations based on first impressions, the two connectives under scrutiny are not interchangeable in context. Rather, it transpires from a range of contextual uses that 'epeiδi' represents the marker of causality par excellence encoding conceptual relations between propositionally explicit clauses, while 'γiati' serves as a multi-functional marker that can act either conceptually or procedurally, though in mutually exclusive terms.

The aim of this thesis is to address two questions related to the role of frequency on a) sentence processing and b) language acquisition. Frequency is measured with respect to the phenomenon of transitivity alternations in Greek, which may or may not involve morphological changes of Voice marking on the verb. Regarding sentence processing, the question is whether the processing strategies involved in the disambiguation of temporarily ambiguous information are driven by the frequency of each of the available choices in the input. Regarding language acquisition the question is whether the developmental pattern of linguistic phenomena whose interpretation is underspecified by the grammar can be exclusively attributed to input frequency. The first question was addressed through the investigation of ‘voice alternating’ and ‘voice non-alternating’ anti-causative verbs. The two classes differ in the availability and lack thereof of Voice alternation on the verb when this appears in an intransitive structure (anti-causative, passive, reflexive). The accessibility of interpretations was measured with an on-line self-paced reading as well as an acceptability judgment tasks addressed to monolingual adult speakers of Greek. The possible correlation between the frequency of the available readings that specific verbs receive in formal and informal written corpora (ILSP-Web) with the on-line data were compared in order to investigate whether processing load is affected by statistical records in the parser. As an alternative, grammar-based, explanation of the psycholinguistic data obtained from the on-line task, the variables of distinctions between active and non-active voice and [+/-animacy] of the sentence subject, as well as their potential interaction were examined. The results from the on-line processing study indicated that the parser is sensitive to morphological cues such as Voice marking (ACT/NACT) on the verb, while semantic factors such as animacy are integrated in subsequent stages of processing. In accordance with ‘coarse-grained’ models of sentence processing, a frequency effect was found, while predictions in line with more ‘fine-grained’ models of sentence processing could not be validated with respect to frequency alone. On the other hand, results from the acceptability judgment task showed that the final interpretation attributed to the verbs investigated often correlated with the most frequently used structures in the corpora. The second question was addressed through the investigation of ‘voice (non)-alternating anti-causatives’, ‘reflexives’ and ‘activity predicates’. The frequency of the available readings that these verbs receive in formal and informal written corpora (ILSP-Web) were compared with the preferred readings of three age-groups of Greek L1 children and an adult control group in order to investigate whether development of transitivity alternations is determined by frequency of exposure alone, or alternatively, voice morphology in combination with subject animacy are relevant. The results indicated that while the adult control group provided answers consistent with the most frequent readings in the corpora, child groups approximated adult responses and frequency data in very few occasions. All child groups were sensitive to voice morphological marking, even if not completely mastered, and to the property of [+/-animacy] of the syntactic subject. Overall, child groups’ performance provided evidence in support of the claim that children have abstract knowledge of syntactic structures and transitivity alternations from an early age, while lack of sufficient exposure to specific verb uses in pragmatically biasing contexts leads to non-adult-like overall performance.

The main aim of this thesis is to investigate the extent to which frequency, lexical, and language-specific grammatical factors affect Greek native speakers’ online attachment decisions for temporary ambiguous prepositional phrases. An analysis of a written corpus sample (Institute for Language and Speech Processing corpus) and a sample of spoken language was conducted in order to assess the frequency of PP attachment in V-NP-PP structures. The corpus data were analysed on two levels (coarse grained vs. fine grained) in order to test the predictions of the Tuning Hypothesis (Mitchell, Cuetos, Corley & Brysbaert, 1995) which predicts that the parser is expected to be “tuned” only to syntactic category (coarse-grained) information during on-line sentence comprehension. The analysis of the corpus data on a level at which only sentences with the prepositions me, se, apo and ja were taken into account, allowed us to investigate whether the corpus frequency patterns are reflected on native Greek speakers’ online parsing preferences on a more fine-grained level of analysis. In addition, the fine-grained corpus analysis included an examination of whether Definiteness Agreement in Greek extends to complex object DPs with prepositions me, se, apo and ja (see Stavrou & Tsimpli, 2009). Three groups of participants were recruited for the psycholinguistic tasks of the present study: two groups of monolingual Greek adults and a group of native Greek 11- to 12-year old children. The first group of adults conducted an off-line acceptability task including sentences in which PPs were either forced towards VP or NP attachment. The results indicated that acceptability ratings differed depending on the lexical choice of Ps. The results of the second task, an online SPR task verified the results of the acceptability to a large extent. In addition, the analysis of participants’ mean reading times indicated that definiteness agreement had an effect on online processing but it largely depended on the choice of the preposition. The investigation of children’s online parsing preferences revealed that children at the age of 11 to 12 employ essentially the same parsing strategies as adults but are less sensitive to lexical information than adults. Taken together, the results of the corpus analyses and the psycholinguistic data indicate that there is a hierarchy of lexicality among the prepositions me, se, apo and ja and that, although there is a degree of correspondence between frequency counts and attachment decisions (on a coarse-grained level), frequency alone cannot account for native Greek speakers’ parsing preferences.

The present thesis is an examination of eight Greek-speaking aphasic speakers with non-fluent speech following a focal lesion or a haemorrhagic episode in the left hemisphere. Our study re-examines the notoriously problematic competence-performance issue from a novel perspective that focuses on the agrammatic processing of the interfaces. Thus, the explanatory framework we adopt considers the language faculty to incorporate interfaces between distinct components of the grammar, so that agrammatic deficit may not be strictly localized on the subcomponents of the syntax, the morphology, or the lexicon. A series of both on-line and off-line experiments was run across both the comprehension and the production modality, with the aim of circumventing processing to linguistic structures conditioned at the discourse-syntax and the lexicon-syntax interface. More specifically, the aphasic group (along with the fifteen language-unimpaired control subjects matched with the aphasic patients along age and educational level) were administered two on-line tests checking the interpretation of null and overt subject pronouns in referentially ambiguous intra- and inter-sentential contexts, as well as a sentence-picture matching, an elicitation, a repetition, and a cross-modal lexical priming task checking the production and processing of reflexive, transitive and (both active and non-active) anti-causative verbs in Greek. The results of these experiments show selective difficulty (i) with the integration of discourse information regulating the interpretation of the overt subject pronoun, and (ii) with accessing lexicon-filtered information regulating the anti-causative sub-categorization of active intransitive verbs. The data also reveals the extensive use of compensatory and heuristic strategies on behalf of both the controls and especially the eight aphasic patients, primarily aiming at offsetting the computational cost under deep processing conditions. The parsing preference of subject prominence, the non-active morpheme serving as a cue to transitivity changes in verbs, and animacy heuristics were among the most popular parsing strategies found to be employed during off-line and (mainly) on-line sentence processing. We speculate on these findings in terms of both performance (vs. competence) limitations related to the properties of interface-conditioned information, as well as a conceptualization of Broca’s aphasia through both linguistic and cognitive/executive dysfunctions.

The aim of this dissertation is to evaluate the role of interpretable and uninterpretable features in second language acquisition targeting the Null Subject Parameter in the Greek/English interlanguage. This study allowed us to explore the source of optionality which characterizes the process of second language acquisition. To this end, semantically uninterpretable features involved in null, postverbal and that-t structures were investigated and the compensatory role of features interpretable both at the levels of Logical Form and Phonetic Form was examined. The semantically interpretable features studied were Referentiality and Definiteness on subjects, Predicate Type, as well as Animacy and Discourse-linking on wh-pronouns. On the other hand, Clausal Length and the constraint for No-Verb-Initial English clauses comprised the set of features interpretable at the level of Phonetic Form. Results from one judgement and two production English tasks as well as from a Greek anaphora resolution test suggested that uninterpretable formal features cause learnability problems even at advanced stages of proficiency, the result being that the abstract properties of subject-verb agreement in Greek are transferred in the Greek/English interlanguage. Crucially though, the effects of no-parameter resetting appear to be scattered in the Greek/English interlanguage in the sense that expletive null subject structures and existential postverbal structures (There-VS) were found to be more problematic for Greek learners than referential null subject structures and postverbal subject permutations respectively. With respect to interpretable features, the study suggested that they have an alleviating role improving learner target-deviant performance in a superficial, yet systematic way. Based on the above, it was concluded that the variability attested in second language acquisition is constrained and stems from the vulnerability of formal uninterpretable features as opposed to the availability of the interpretable ones.

The present phd aims at assessing the students learning greek as a second language on a more subjective basis. Essays of the above students and greek students as well were assessed according to a certain model. According to the results the foreign students have a lot of difficulties learning greek even 5 years after they learn greek, make in any category more errors than the greek students. The proposed model is in any case more reliable, subjective and valid than the existing one in Greek secondary education.

My dissertation approaches a number of Elizabeth Gaskell's first-person works, namely, Cranford, (1853) Cousin Phillis, (1863) 'Six Weeks at Heppenheim', (1862) 'The Poor Clare' (1856) and 'The Grey Woman', (1861) through a post-modern perspective employing such theoretical frameworks as psychoanalytic theory, narratology and gender theory. It attempts to explore the problematics of Victorian subjectivity from a post-modern, to be more precise, from a Lacanian perspective. All along, I assume that the narrative subjectivity which emerges from Gaskell's texts, both as a narrating and narrated one, is split, divided and fluid rather than concrete, autonomous and whole, despite clinging to illusions of autonomy and fantasies of wholeness. This is the result of the narrating subject's misrecognition of its own subjectivity which occurs as part of the continuation or re-enactment of the prototypical encounter between the 'I and its mirror image (Which, again, is one of misrecognition and imaginary wholeness) as experienced in infancy during what Jacques Lacan has theorized as the Mirror Stage. I see it emerging, moreover, as a process in the form of a series of subject positions, imaginary identifications and psychic investments which are discursively, and hence ideologically produced by the symbolic system, rather than as an essence or stable ontological entity or substance. Although over the last two decades Elizabeth Gaskell has been established as one of the major, female, authorial figures as representative of what has come to be known as classic realism of nineteenth-century, she has seldom (if at all) been read as a writer of self-conscious fiction in the ways that some of her more acclaimed cohorts (as, for instance, Charlotte Brontλ and George Eliot) have and this is what this thesis will partly attempt to do. Despite their realistic frame of reference and mode of writing, which is generally informed by a belief in a world of consistent subjects as the origin of meaning, knowledge and action, the result of the dominant ideology of their time which is the post-Enlightment epoch of empiricism and industrial capitalism, Gaskell's first-person texts subtly, but firmly subvert such certainties in ways that point to the instability of the speaking subject itself. Hence, her narrators' splitting ambivalence is to be traced - as a branch of contemporary criticism has consistently attempted to do as regards her better known industrial fiction - even in the most realistically rendered of her narratives, thus giving credit to post-modern interpretations of subject formation. According to them, subjectivity is discursively constructed and dispersed across the range of discourses (cultural, political and economic) in which the 'concrete' individual participates. Moreover, this project is intent upon embracing the view that since the narrating subject is constructed in the realm of the symbolic order, which is also the realm of discourse, mediation and ideology, then it is also discursively constructed in ideology itself, which in a seemingly 'natural' way interpellates it also as a gendered, class-conscious and race-conscious subject, thus forcing it, through subtle coercion, to assume a predetermined set of seemingly fixed positions in a reality which is but a series of inter-subjective positions, repetitive role playing and masquerading. Narration, as the mutual interaction of both the narrator's desire to narrate and the narratee's desire for narrative, has a key role to play, of course, in the subject's 'meaningful' being, since it seems to fulfill its primordial desire for a return to origins and past traumas or as Freud would have it a 'return of the repressed' via a 'compulsion to repeat', which I see as the ultimate goal of all first-person narratives in general and Gaskell's own in particular, that of domesticating otherness and/or coming to terms with trauma by re-telling. It is in this respect that my project also argues for first-person narration as symptomatic of the desire to reconstruct the past in the 'now' of narration, a model analogous to the one we encounter in the analytic situation

Τhis doctoral dissertation aspires to creating a theoretical context in which to examine and accommodate the director-auteur’s contribution in the theatre, and acknowledges that text in the theatre can take as many numbers of forms as there are combinations of scenic idioms (of image, technology, sound, time and body as language). Influenced by the vision of early twentieth-century experimentalists (like Jarry, Craig, Appia, Meyerhold, Brecht), as well as by Artaud’s emphasis on physical forms of expression and Beckett’s integration of performance issues into dramatic writing, contemporary auteurs in the West have in the past four decades created fascinating amalgams of theatre, manufacturing text out of sounds, gestures and images, dethroning the verbal and rewarding the visual. Τhrough an eclectic (historical-theoretical, as well as performance-oriented) methodological approach, the dissertation examines some prominent examples of established auteur work, also foregrounding the dangers of empty Formalism. Furthermore, it addresses the issue of authorship, discussing the battle of supremacy and ownership of the text, which regularly defines the relationship between playwright and director; Similarly, it brings to the fore the Post-Structuralists’ views on the open text, and the authorial contribution of the spectator. In addition, it examines the emergence of a performance-informed new dramaturgy. On that account, it opens up the discussion on the viability of a text-less stage, proposing the reconsideration of verbal text as a necessary partner in performance.

Harold Pinter's plays and screenplays are examined comparatively. Based on the theory of the phenomenology and in particular on Maurice Μerleau-Ponty (concentrating mainly on the first and foremost of his texts, the 'Phenomenolgy of Perception'). The thesis examines selected Pinterian texts, in relation to the 4 more important phenomenological concepts : time, space, subjectivity, objectivity. Concluding it states that Pinter had a phenomenological approach when writing his theatre plays and screenplays.

My dissertation attempts a re-reading of the detective tale, in its prototypical, post-Romantic form, as created by Edgar Allan Poe in the 1840s, as well as in its metaphysical, postmodern restaging in Jorge Luis BorgesΆs work, in the 1940s, through the prism of the logic of ensembles and magmas, as defined by the philosopher Cornelius Castoriadis. More specifically, drawing on CastoriadisΆs twentieth-century critical reassessment of the philosophical and scientific delineations of Western modernity, my thesis investigates the ontological weight of the reasonerΆs attempt to rationally explain the world, by turning its components into elements of a set (that is, by identifying the properties that define a class, through the principles of identity, of non-contradiction, of the excluded term, etc), as well as the aporia triggered by the failure of the decoder to classify aspects of being governed by a non-determinable, magmatic logic. Through an interdisciplinary reading, I undertake a re-location of the aforementioned tales within the ongoing rupture brought about by the rationalization of thought, in order to demonstrate that these detective stories of the past could help us see that now, more than ever, we need to bridge the gap between science and philosophy, in an attempt to elucidate our need for explanation

The present thesis investigates the cause of drama translation in Greece (1932-2007) interwoven into the linguistic, social and theoretical changes of the period given. The analysis of the Anglophone playtexts in translation from a social studies perspective (socio-semiotic approach) and the total cataloguing and tabling of collected data features "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Beckett as the case-study which helps us draw conclusions about the impact linguistic and extra-linguistic factors have on the translation outcome.

During the last quarter of the 19th century, the profound consolidation of the Idea of evolution in the victorian imaginary, along with the spread of Hegelian historicism, gave birth to a new cultural viewpoint that strove to reconcile british empiricism and german idealism. The purpose of this study is to explore the way Pater responded to this intellectual climate trough the synthesis that the promoted between the abstract abd the concrete. My intention is to adpress Pater's model in the light of an inter-disciplinary approach, considering his hitherto unexplored relation to Heraclitean and Kantian philosophy, which comprises the core, as i argue of this program. By systemazising the philosophical and historical implications of Pater's debt to these doctrines, my approach provides a series of fresh insights, suggesting a coherent framework within which his vision can be contextualised, historicized and analysed as an attempt to realign-in the name of Heraclitean and Kantian synthesis-romanticism and contemporary science in order to achieve a form of balance between the forces of tradition and progress.

Translation Studies is considered to be a relatively new area of expertise. What critics seem to agree upon is the communicative nature of translation. In this light, this work‟s major aim has been to illustrate issues regarding the Greek translations of Angela Carter‟s translated novels. During the process of the re-creation of a text in a target language, the translator holds a major role as the mediator between the source and target language cultures. The result of his/her decision-making defines the identity of the translated text within the target language literature. With regard to literary translation, complex issues arise which need to be studied in their immediate and wider contexts. These issues will be examined from a translatological point of view by focusing on the manipulation of the source texts in the target language, in order to illuminate areas of interest in the translations under study in relation to the prominent aspects of the source texts they derived from.

The present study is a synchronic and diachronic analysis of the megamusical and works of Andrew Lloyd Webber in particular. It examines the ways in which the aesthetic from of the gaze reflects the current postmodern socio-economic structures. It also documents the development of musical theatre and its aesthetics form from the classic Brodway musical to the british megamusical.

This dissertations has attempted to trace the development of a feminist ideology in America and in Greece, during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, within the framework of specific literary texts. The local point has been the discussion of two novelists : Henry James and Gregorios Xenopoulos. Centering on the Bostonians, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Tragic Muse by H. James, and Secret Engagements, The Three-Sided Woman, and The actress's Husband not only the dominant thoughts and ideas in the two countries' societies, but also the stereotypes that directed the behavioral norms, and thus validate the place given to the novel's female protagonists by the authors. When confronted with each country's society, the heroines surrender to the dominant ideas and standards, eventhough they have demonstrated their inner forc and their ability to fight for their independence and individuality

This thesis aims at examing the Shakespearean performances staged in Greece during the first half of the twentieth century in the context of the Greek sociopolitical background of the times: the performances are approached in the light of the processes leading to the formation of national identity and social structure. In seeking a methodology for examining the Greek paradigm it appeared that i had to deal with the nations of the bourgeois class structure and "nation" as well as with the leading role of Western European countries in their relation to Greece, a small peripheral country in search of role models(past experience of the Ottoman Empire/Western European prospect). The sociopolitical factors are being examined in parallel to the reviews of the performances and the play bills. Emphasis is also given on the text which, in the case of Shakespearean stagings in Greece, is translated. Thus, it relates to the language issue concerning the domination of "demotiki" or "katharevousa" that preoccupied Greece and in the ideological ferment concerning the formation of national and social identity. What i am suggesting is that during the first half of the twentieth century, the ruling segments of the country evoked a hegemonic vision of the English Band which was also endorsed by the larger sector of the bourgeiosie to serve individual and class interests. At the same time, the account of Shakespeare's Greek appropriations of the times is a register of the country's effort to approach the cultural practices of Europe and, thus, achieve the gradual "Europeanisation" of Greece.

The present thesis investigates the notion of polysemy. We test whether the cognitive-based instructional technique of metaphor awareness will differentially affect learners' ability to acquire the polysemous vebs 'make' and 'do' compared to other learners instructed in accordance with the techiques of memorization and repetion. Results from the experimental part of the study reveal the following findings : a)both techniques play a positive role in both the acquisition and retrieval of the polysemous verbs 'make' and 'do', b)the technique of metaphor awareness yields encouraging results in the field of phrasal verbs, c)the performance of both young learners and adult is conditioned to a large extent byt he variable of age.

In my PhD thesis employing the lens of Lacanian phychoanalysis i explore the gilmic genre of the erotic thriller in relation to the fantasy-objects it produces. In the first part ofd the thesis i attempt a definition of the erotic thriller as genre. Accomodating the slipperiness of any generic delimination, i try to offer a glimpse at the thesis i set off from an image-saturated postmodern milieu to investigate the psychoanalytic frame of fantasy and the fantasizing subject/spectator. Then in the third part i explore the ways in which the erotic thriller incorporates the mechamics of the Lacanian fantasy to appeal toi spectators. Finally, i close my dissertation with a post-mortem instance of the genre : Michael Caton Jone's 2006 "Basic Instinct 2", a film whose failure i read as symptomatic of the genre's demise in the 21st century and of the film's defiance of what i have defined as the erotic thriller fantasy-directives.

The aim of this thesis is to address two fundamental questions related to the nature of specific language impairment: first, is the locus of the problem in the representation of formal features and what is it that renders them inaccessible to SLI children? And second, does language development in SLI deviate from typical language acquisition in such a way that we can talk about language impairment rather than language delay? Three groups of children were recruited: an experimental group of ten children with specific language impairment, aged between 4;2 and 5;9, and two control groups selected based on chronological age (age-matched) and language development (language-matched). The three groups were administered a number of speech elicitation tests, aiming at the investigation of the formal features of tense in the verbal domain, gender, case and number in the nominal domain. Specifically, the effect of feature interpretability - both LF and PF - on the children's performance was explored, while performance differences between the SLI and the two control groups were analysed with respect to the delay/deviance question. The results indicated that LF uninterpretable features like tense and case cause greater difficulties to SLI children than number, an LF interpretable feature. Gender, a lexical/intrinsic feature, seems to be highly accessible to these children, who did not exhibit any notable difficulties. Furthermore, PF interpretability presented strong effects in the SLI children's performance in tense marking, a pattern that was not observed in neither of the two control groups' results. These results suggest that LF interpretability determines the extent to which formal features are accessible to SLI grammars, while PF interpretability constitutes a means of compensation for an underlying morphological deficit. Detailed analyses of the children's error patterns indicated that SLI children have reduced skills of acquiring morphological features and depend on information available on a semantic, lexical or phonological level to a greater extent than unaffected children do. Finally, it is claimed that specific language impairment impedes on the acquisition of the morphological expression of formal features rather than their abstract representation, while the different error patterns exhibited by the language-impaired group compared to the two control groups indicate deviant rather than delayed development.

The present PhD thesis' ambition is to analyze the complete works of the Greek theatre director Theodoros Terzopoulos from the beginning of his career in the 1970s to 2003. It studies the constituent elements of his stage idiolect, its ideological currents and analyzes its status and contribution in both the Greek adn the international theatre. In each case, selected performances are used as examples to clarify the topic under discussion. A variety of theoretical tools are employed for the analysis of subjects like the intercultural, the (post)matern, the essentialist praxis of Attis, that meet on the common ground of the current theoretical problematization on the neutral/idiological/non-ideological body and the cultural/ideological body. If the director in his 1st period(1977-1983) promoted the ideological body, that is the relation of the body experience and expression through the brechtian gestus, still in the 2nd period of Attis(1985-), through ancient Greek tragedy and his biodynamic method of deconstruction, he creates a theatre of cruelty, in which hieroglyphic bodies, archetypal signs of the suffering human being dominate. At the same time, the plays of Heiner Muller give the director the opportunity to re-invert a postbrechtian political language.

The thesis concerns comprehension and production of written discourse by Greek university EFL students. More specifically, a novel discourse-oriented framework for text analysis is proposed that segments meaning into the levels of ideas, authorial stance, and textual organization. These levels are reflected in rhetorical techniques such a polyphony, metaphor, irony, hyperbole, modality, parallelism, resurrence and attitudinally-loaded lexical items. An experimental study was conducted and invelved two experemental groups that were instructed to summarize by drawing on the proposed framework and two control groups. Participants produced written summaries of argumentative texts that were then analyzed qualitatively and quantitatively. Results illustrated a veritable connection between effective performance in summarizing and instruction operating along the lines of the proposed discourse-analytic framework. Finally, the applicability of the framework to teacher training, language instruction(in particular, summary writing and text analysis), and language assessment is discussed. It is contended that a language curriculum that capitalizes on aspects of meaning broadens the scope of language learning and yields interesting insights into the working of language.

The dissertation aims at studying the basic changes that accur during a filmic adaptation of a novel. More specifically we examine how the narrative techniques of narrative voice and focalisation work in the films and if they can focalisation work in the films and if they can affecy the viewer's opinion based on literary theories(Barthes, Gremas, Genette) we compared the four filmic adaptations of Laclos' "Les liaisons dangereuses" with the literary source.

Women poets' introduction of an autonomous speaking auditor in dramatifc monologue, as well lyric and narrative poetry, was informed by developments in acoustic science in the period between the 1860s-1890s. An interdisciplinary approach focusing on physics and physiological psychology can help elucidate the importance of aurality in late-Victorian literature : the dramaticity of women's poetry. I believe the listening self manifest in poetic innovation is saturated by the scintific delineation of audition. I trace acoustic metaphors and motifs, shared by science and poetry, such as sympathetic vibration, the siren, the visual representation of sound, automatism in aural perception, in the work of scientists like John Tyndall and William Carpenter and poets such as Augusta Webster, Christina Rossetti and Mary Coleridge and the dramatic monologues of Jean Ingelaw, Amy Lery, Violet Fane(Mary M. Lamb) and Mathilde Blind. Having become in scintific discourse something other than the receptor of voice, the ear oscillated between being a reproducing and an autophonous instrument that processed sound_women poets allowed the implications of the scientific construction of audition to interact with the ideological construct of the receptive feminine ear, transforming the metaphor of the feminine ear into a trope of receptive expression.

This thesis explores popular cinematic representations of white heterosexual masculinity, primarily in contemporary Hollywood texts. Through a detailed textual analysis of films, which are firmly placed in the specific historical, social, cultural and political context in which they were produced and consumed, it explores how white heterosexual masculinity in popular American cinema is often represented as an "all and nothing" subjectivity, one both universal and invisible, privileged and victimised, phallic and lacking, unified and deconstructed, enfleshed and disembodied, ordinary and anxiously vacuous, the locus of origins and ontologically empty - a flaying of binary oppositions that only a subjectivity that can construct itself as the dominant norm can wield. Approaching this topic through a variety of theoretical frameworks, including feminist theory, critical race theory, whiteness studies, queer theory, and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it contends that white heterosexual masculinity is a radically unstable, performative construct that consolidates itself through discursive strategies. It also explores how the category of class always traverses white heterosexual masculinity, destabilising its construction as a coherent, seamless category. Finally, it argues for the importance of interrogating popular cinematic representations of "ordinary" straight white men, who are always also extra-ordinary as well.

My dissertation discusses the identity and spatial politics of post-napoleonic british expatriates in Italy, recoverning the discursive techniques employed in their identification with italianness and the context of the dominant themes and preoccupations in romantic culture. More specifically, i assert that the so-called "anglo-italians"-defined by Mary Shelley as "as well-informed, active and clever race'-fashioned a hyphenated identity in attempt to establish a bicultural sensibility and thus an alternative coalition with italian place, culture, language and community. Assuning a cultural-geographical approach and drawing on the theoretical insights of Stuart Hall, Michel Faucault, Edward Said and Pierre Bourdieu. My work attempts a re-evaluation of Byron's "all meridian heart", Percy Shelley's "Pisan roots", Mary Shelley's "anglo-italicus" self and of the "italianised cockney" vestiture of the liberal as shown in Leigh Hunt's texts.

The present study seeks to investigate the issue of motivation in the context of EAP syllabus, level of english and involvement in learning on students' motivation, strategy use and performance in EAP. The results indicated that students' trait motivation remains largely unaffected by the EAP syllabus. On the contrary, involvement in learning significantly affects students' state motivation. An important implication for EAP teaching is to provide a framework to support students' limited at this age internal regulation resources. External regulation that maintains students' involvement in learning will equip students with abilities and skills that facilitate their lives in the long run.

This thesis examines the discourse functions of "when" clauses in Greek narratives. The contextual contribution of "when" clauses is studied in the light of the "topic" approach to adverbial clauses, which is developed in view of werth's(1999) cognitive discourse grammar of "text worlds". Furthermore, "when"-clauses are studied in terms of their relationship with respect to the main clause. In this connection, the presuppositional status of the "when"-clause is shown to be of crucial importance. Specifically with the loss of the subordinate character of the "when"-clause.

Teachers make similar errors to learners but they also make other errors which learners do not make. These specific teacher-talk errors are what are being attempted to be identified and analysed along with the errors which could be made by any advanced Greek speaker. It is hoped that their importance will be established by describing the errors in detail and counting them, and by dealing with spoken language in EFL classroom context, and not with isolated written errors. In this attempt, the whole fabric of the Greek state-school socio-cultural setting has been into account. In it suggested that because of constant with learners and distance from university studies etc. that backsliding occurs. It is also argued that the most frequently found of the errors are the most likely to fossilize in Greek speakers and are probably the most difficult to eradicate. The errors are analysed in relation to the teachers' roles in the classroom. Pupil response to teacher error is also analysed with particular emphasis on the "authority" of the teacher which, it is contended, plays a crucial role in the ways in which pupils respond to "linguistic" errors, as opposed to "content" errors. The findings of this study provide background both for further classroom research as well as for language planning of pre-service and in-service teacher training courses. It is believed that teacher trainees can be sensitized to the specific errors they make through working with data such as that collected for this thesis. It is hoped that this would be achieved by raising teacher trainees' awareness to the whole socio-cultural context of the EFL classroom, examining not only teacher talk but also pupil to the teacher talk.

This thesis investigates the L2 acquisition of English root and deverbal noun-noun compounds(e.g. car company, car exporter) by Greek adults, within the theoretical framework of Minimalism Chomsky's(1995).The participants(30 intermediate + 30 advanced Greeks and 20 native speakers of English) completed four types of tasks : picture-naming, grammaticality judgements, referentiality judgements and interpretations. The targeted items were novel or non-usualized. Compounds have the same structure in the L1 and in the L2, with the non-head moun(NHN) in both of them being a stem, not a word. However, unlike in Greek, in English there is no phonological difference between stem and word, so learners seem not to perceive the L2 compounds as zero-level(x0) items. Hence, they differ significantly from the natives as to the production/acceptance of plural and genitive NHNs, the order between NHN and head-noun and the (im)possibility of referring separately to the NHN in compounds. Moreover, the interlanguage forms reveal effects of L1 parametric options regarding noun modification in the phrasal domain and it seems that parameter resetting is not feasible in adult L2 learning when it concerns non-interpretable features. Still, the structure of the L2 compounds is compatible with Universal Grammar principles. Last, the dissociation between regular and irregular morphology is confirmed in the acquisition of compounds, but we cannot offer conclusive evidence as to whether nativist or connectionist theories can better account for this dissociation.

This dissertation investigates a series of travel-exploration narratives that articulate responses to the landscape and indigenous peoples of America across time and scape. These responses result from the encounter experiense in which Europeans and Americans crafted a range of discourses and systems of representation of the Indian Other and American Landscape. By applying the insights of colonial/postcolonial discourse theory and other theoretical frameworks this study sets out to expose the colonial-imperial strrategies embedded in texts part of the travel-exploration genre. Also it simultaneously addresses issues of ambivalence and textual disunity as prominent aspects of the selected narratives.

This project looks at the theatrical works of Arthur Miller through the Faucauldian prism. It concentrates on the correlation, aggrandizement and sententiousness of modern power, as it preoccupies Miller's characters in their system of embodiment, insurgence for existence, rhetoric of dilemma and politics of freedom. On the one hand, the fantasies as well as the promises of self-stultification of the characters are observed to corroborate power's capacity of control, while, on the other, their condescension as well as cultivation of resentment is noted as inescapably subsiding in its playfulness. Power in Arthur Miller is not power proper, but its microphysical technologies and reflective prognosis. It is not limited to epistemologically developed influential issues it rather associates local, marginal and empirically unaccounted for uncertainties. It is a power expressed in subjectivation and exercised through tangential and nominalistic reciprocation. It plays more with the proliferation of identity, the consiousness industry, the vestiges of self-determination and the discursive stance of a subject than its scrupulus historico-political role and condition. It incarcerates the subject's body, manipulates its dreams and outflanks its desires. It engages the subject in a framework of transaction not only by essentializing in it a drive of hegemony or resistance, but also by creating a spell of erotico-masochistic gratification. Invisibility instead of corporal intervention is it process, mormalization instead of extinction its consequence. Even in the case of solidified hidtorical crises, i.e., Nazi transnational aggression, Judeo-Nordic racial confrontationm McCarthyite polarization of political ideologies and frustrating squandering of capital during the Depression, crises that appear and reappear in Miller's dramaturgy, power is fundamentally and predictably manifested at biopolitical level. It simultaneously engages and interacts with different conventionally divisible ingredients, i.e., nationalism, race, class, gender, thus illegitimizing their gridline of distinction and further bureaucratizing their functioning method.

This thesis attempts to aproach magic realist fiction phychonalytically(by means of the theories of freud and Lakan), considering some british and Latin American paradigms. In the introductory chapter magic realism(M.R.) is attempted to be considered within the current critical research and as a result of postcolonialism : this is especially seen within the obsession with historiography. Chapter 1 deals with the dream narrative from the Freudian viewpoint. Chapter 2 explores the concepts of myth and history and their relation to memory and the historiographic writing. Chapter 3 deals with metaphor and metonymy as games which denote the return of repressed desire. Chapter 4 studies two overwhelming magic realist symbols : the labyrinth and the mirror as instances of the Freudian "Ancanny" and offers a Lacanian reading of the concept. The epilogue sums up the psychoanalytic reading of magic realistic fiction

A fairly widely held view in psycholinguistics is that the second language mental lexicon is more "phonological" than the first language lexicon, namely, that a qualitative difference exists between the two lexicons. In this study word association test data together with C-test data elecited from Greek advanced learners of English are presented which challenge the above view. The findings seem to suggest that the way words are processed is not so much related to the status of the language (first or second) to which they belong, but rather it depends on the level of familiarity of native speakers or learners with particular words at a particular time.