Browsing English Language and Literature (Theses) by Issue Date
Now showing items 21-40 of 45
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An examination of female characterisation in a selection of the novels and short stories of William Trevor through the lens of Simone de Beauvoir
(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2016)This thesis aims to examine female characterisation in a selection of William Trevor’s novels and short stories. The core argument in this thesis will be to demonstrate that Trevor, in his portrayal of women, presents a ... -
The gravity of oppositions: the life and art of Thomas Hardy
(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2016)A narrative derived from the life and work of a writer can offer deeper insight than looking at his work as a separate study. To concentrate biographically on the superficial details of Hardy’s life and times without ... -
The genesis of the Hunter Figure: A study of the dialectic between the biographical and the aesthetic in the early writings of Hunter S. Thompson
(Mary Immaculate College, University of Limerick, 2018)Hunter S. Thompson revolutionised American journalism in the 1970’s with the publication of ‘The Kentucky Derby is Decadent and Depraved’, in Scanlan’s Monthly, and ‘Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas’, in Rolling Stone magazine. ... -
“A Crooked Mark” - An Examination of the Effectiveness of Using Authentic Materials in Teaching Apostrophe Use in an ELT Context.
(2018-02-07)This thesis focuses on two types of teaching intervention, prescriptive and descriptive, to determine which type may be more beneficial to English language learners in learning correct apostrophe application. The role ... -
Exploring Synchronous Online Communication and its Effect on Non-Native Speakers of English
(2018-02-07)It is estimated that there are 1.5 billion people worldwide who speak English, of whom only 375 million are native speakers (Statista 2016). Jenks (2012) notes that the use of English as a Lingua Franca (ELF) is growing ... -
Content and Language Integrated Learning in Italian upper secondary schools – A Case Study
(2018-02-07)The term ‘Content and Language Integrated Learning’ (CLIL) was coined in the mid-1990’s to describe and enhance practices in content-based language learning (Coyle, Hood, & Marsh, 2010). The rapid integration of Europe ... -
The Untold story of the monster: a psychoanalytic analysis of the monster through the anamorphic lens
(2020-02-04)Research identifies the perception of evil as a mechanism to segregate people from inhuman and monstrous transgressors. Luke Russell defines that ‘the evil of the agent is supposed to provide a complete explanation of the ... -
A postcolonial and disability studies analysis of a selection of popular contemporary novels about disability
(2020-12-10)This thesis will combine postcolonial theory and disability theory to analyse the representation of characters with a disability and their family members in a selection of contemporary popular novels. The texts examined ... -
'Take him to the cleaners and make him do your homework': a corpus-based analysis of lexical structure used by English language learners
(2020-12-16)The present study is an empirical corpus based analysis of the use of four lexical bundles or strings by ESL students at a higher education centre in Ireland. The overall aim was to ascertain if students at both ends ... -
‘With great power comes great responsibility’: The impact of the parent-child relationship on the development of the heroic identity within comic book and graphic novel culture
(2020-12-17)The aim of this thesis is to explore the impact of the parent-child relationship on the development of the heroic identity within the comic book and graphic novel genre. The life of a hero is seen as a solitary one. ... -
Breaking through the looking-glass: (re)imagining Alice through visual representation
(2020-12-17)This thesis focuses on the visual iconography of the ‘Alice’ figure created in Lewis Carroll’s Alice books, and it traces the progression of Alice’s characterisation through multimodal platforms including illustration, ... -
Teacher talk at three stages of English language teacher career development: a corpus-aided study
(2021-03-30)Classroom discourse (CD) and teacher talk (TT) have received much attention over the years across a range of research perspectives, from qualitative case studies of individual teacher narratives to large-scale quantitative ... -
A literary theoretical exploration of silenced African women from psychoanalytic and feminist perspectives
(2022-04-01)The study explores the gender relationship in the three English speaking regions of Sub Saharan Africa through three novels: Nervous Conditions by Tsitsi Dangarembga; Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie; and Parched ... -
Céad mίle fáilte: a corpus-based study of the development of a community of practice within the Irish hotel management training sector
(2022-04-05)This thesis examines the discourse of a unique third-level academic institution in order to identify the variety of linguistic features, which align it, first of all, to the higher education sector in general, but more ... -
A corpus-based comparative pragmatic analysis of Irish English and Canadian English
(2022-04-06)This PhD thesis is a comparative study of the spoken grammar of Irish and Canadian Englishes within the framework of Variational Pragmatics at the formal level, used to study the pragmatic variation (the intra-varietal ... -
A journey through learner language: tracking development using POS tag sequences in large-scale learner data
(2023-09-29)This PhD study comes at a cross-roads of SLA studies and corpus linguistics methodology, using a bottom-up data-first approach to throw light on second language development. Taking POS tag n-gram sequences as a starting ... -
‘Jaysus, keep talking like that and you’ll fit right in’- an investigation of oral Irish English in contemporary Irish fiction
(2023-10-02)This project is an interdisciplinary and comparative investigation of the reproduction of linguistic features of Irish English (IrE) present in contemporary IrE fiction. To do this, a corpus of over 1 million words comprising ... -
The Irish question: an investigation into Irish language self-efficacy beliefs in adults
(2023-10-23)The vast majority of adults that have received their education in Ireland undertake compulsory Irish for around 13 years. However, over 60% of adults claim to have no Irish speaking ability (CSO, 2018). This study seeks ... -
Sarah Atkinson (1823-1893) in The Irish Quarterly Review, Duffy’s hibernian magazine, Duffy’s hibernian sixpenny magazine, the month and the Irish monthly: a study of nineteenth-century Irish women writers and their literary and publishing networks (1857-1893)
(2023-10-23)Anchored in the nineteenth-century periodical archive, this recovery project takes Sarah Atkinson (1823-1893) as a centripetal force. An influential Irish Catholic middle-class writer and philanthropist, Atkinson lists ... -
Revolution, rebellion and vampires: colonial hybridity in Irish gothic literature and historical documents
(2023-10-24)Colonial hybridity remains one of the most widely deployed and disputed literary theories within Postcolonial Studies. This thesis will provide an overview of colonial hybridity in Irish historical documents as well as ...