My thesis explores the dynamics of choice in digital text construction. Specifically, it focuses on the development of academic writing from a social semiotic viewpoint, drawing on Systemic Functional Linguistics (e.g. Halliday), semiotic sociology (e.g. Bernstein), and sociogenetic psychology (e.g. Vygotsky). Its primary aims are: (i) To contribute to the dearth of longitudinal studies that provide an emic understanding of the development of academic writing practices, particular with regard to L2 writers; (ii) To illustrate how the logogenesis of texture can reveal the ontogenetic development and potential of the individual with regard to context and co-text; (iii) Demonstrate how a more holistic approach to the study of writing development can be beneficial to advancing theory, educational practice, and interdisciplinary knowledge.

This PhD project aims to examine the accents of English spoken in Cardiff from the perspective of dialect levelling – a process occurring across Britain whereby some regional accent variants are losing ground in favour of supralocal variants. Apparent-time methodology will be used along with archive data in order to see any changes that have occurred and are occurring in Cardiff English, which will be identified by a range of phonological and morphosyntactic features. Cardiff’s history of diversity and in-migration make it an interesting location to examine from this perspective, as it is accepted that these factors have already played a role in the difference and ‘non-Welshness’ of CE when compared to other South Walian Englishes.

The data will consist of sociolinguistic interviews with older and younger speakers from Cardiff, and archive audio recordings from the 1980s and 1990s. Mixed methods in variationist sociolinguistics will be used to analyse the rates of selected features across the datasets, as this approach can give a fuller understanding of any processes underlying language change.

My research focuses on the nature and degree of nominality. While it is widely accepted that nouns and verbs constitute two separate lexical classes, this distinction has been shown to be unsatisfactory due to variably applied criteria which inconsistently mix morphology, syntax and semantics (Lyons 1977:423). For example, one problem is that semantic distinctions such as event vs object are not reliable, e.g. the noun ‘fire’ behaves verbally, like a deverbal noun, but this meaning is not inherited from a verb (Vendler 1967:141). Hanks (2013:73) suggests that lexical items, in isolation, do not possess inherent meaning, but “meaning potential”, which is activated when placed in a context. In the field of Lexical Semantics, the analysis of word meaning from the ‘Semasiological’ perspective provides a beneficial heuristic to view the various meanings a nominal can express. By exploring the multidimensional interconnections of meaning within lexical items, we can examine how such nominals can express both event and object semantics. Nevertheless, while this analysis has allowed us to explore the semantics of nominals at a level that cannot be attained from only looking at classifications of lexical class, it does not explicitly provide us with empirical data on how the semantics of these nominals generally behave.Therefore, the aims of this research are threefold: (1) to determine how the nature and degree of nominality can be evaluated, (2) to determine how object, state, and event meaning come to be expressed in nominal forms and (3) to examine the relationship between the syntactic behaviour and the semantic properties of underived event nominals (UENs).

Following the work of Fairclough on the political rhetoric of New Labour (2000; 2010), this research will attempt to diachronically analyse the rhetoric of the Conservative Party in order to examine the similarities and differences in the current rhetorical strategies of both political Parties. Fairclough connected rhetorical strategies of New Labour to changes in the mode of governance: the incorporation of marketing practices into the political decision making process was claimed to be connected to linguistic patterning in a corpus of New Labour texts. Since the modern Conservative Party also employs such marketing practices, there is reason to expect some aspects of linguistic continuity in rhetorical strategies. If continuity in rhetorical strategies of two major political Parties were taken to be damaging to the concept of political representation, this investigation could, therefore, have powerful implications for the state of democracy as we know it.

My project explores the use of linguistic features to navigate agency in narratives written by offenders before they commit crimes. It will take the form of a diachronic corpus stylistic analysis of pre-crime manifestos, diaries and vlogs, and will aim to analyse how agency changes as the perpetrators move closer to committing their crimes, with a view to developing a diachronic model of agency in pre-crime narratives.

The project presents a synchronic, local and group-specific report of the various uses of English in urban India. I chose to study the everyday interaction of young members of the so-called middle-class in one of India’s big cities. I regard the middle-class as a discursively constructed social stratum which is ideologically intertwined with language. I am planning to observe a community of practice (Lave and Wenger 1995) – ideally a friendship clique – and analyse their habitual uses of linguistic and social interaction. Thus speakers will not be studied individually but in an environment of collaborating actors who are jointly negotiating, contesting and refining personal and group identities. Above and beyond a description, the research is therefore able to explore the social meaning of linguistic performances.

My thesis focuses on communication between police officers and alleged victims at the scene during domestic abuse call-outs in England and Wales. Having been a largely unexplored site of empirical research, call-out interactions are now accessible due to the proliferation of police body-worn video (BWV). The study takes a linguistic ethnographic approach to explore the interpersonal work done by both police and alleged victims at the scene.

This project is motivated by the belief that a more contextualised and nuanced understanding of these pivotal interactions could inform the improvement of services provided by the police and other agencies to those affected by domestic abuse.