"Feeling foggy?": an investigation into the self-reported post-concussive symptoms in rugby union players at university level
- Authors: Boulind, Melissa
- Date: 2005
- Subjects: Brain damage , Brain -- Wounds and injuries -- Complications , Brain -- Wounds and injuries -- Psychology , Sports injuries -- Psychological aspects , Rugby football injuries , Rugby Union football players
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2938 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002447 , Brain damage , Brain -- Wounds and injuries -- Complications , Brain -- Wounds and injuries -- Psychology , Sports injuries -- Psychological aspects , Rugby football injuries , Rugby Union football players
- Description: A study was conducted on the self-reported symptoms of Mild Traumatic Brain Injury sustained in Rugby Union at the pre- and post-season stages. A full sample of 30 rugby players at Rhodes University was compared to 27 non-contact sport controls. A reduced sample of 20 rugby players and 9 control participants provided improved control for education and IQ and was compared. Measures included the WAIS-III Vocabulary and Picture Completion Sub-tests to estimate IQ level, the symptom checklist on a widely used computer-based program (ImPACT), and a paper and pencil self-report 31-Item Post-Concussion Symptom Questionnaire. Independent and Dependent T-Test comparisons were conducted on the full and reduced samples. The symptoms reported by the rugby group appeared to be more pronounced on both the ImPACT Symptom Scale and the 31-Item Post-Concussion Symptom Questionnaire when compared to the control group at both the pre-and post-season stages. It was concluded that the rugby players demonstrated evidence to support the hypothesis of having sustained more previous concussions and reporting more symptoms at the pre-season stage when compared to comtrol participants. No prevalent changes for either the rugby or control groups were seen in dependent comparisons from pre-to post-season.
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- Date Issued: 2005
The binding roots of free speech
- Authors: Boughey, Thomas John George
- Date: 2009
- Subjects: Freedom of speech
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2849 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1006255
- Description: This thesis argues that the modern notion of free-speech was born within the Westphalian nation-state. It suggests that the legal rights framework - particular to the Westphalian nationstate - not only legitimizes and legalizes the right to free-speech, but also enables us to invoke legally the necessary limitations that demand the limitation of free-speech in certain contexts. However, such a legal-rights framework is exclusive to the nation-state and cannot be enforced on an international level, outside of the nation-state boundary. With reference to examples on an international level, this thesis demonstrates that calls for the limitation of free-speech are indeed legitimate and necessary but cannot be enforced on an international level for the reasons just mentioned. In order to address this problem, this thesis proposes a framework - based on a Kantian model - that enables us to invoke the limitation of free-speech on an international level without appealing to a legal-rights discourse to do so.
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- Date Issued: 2009
When birthing makes the news : the depiction of women as a newsworthy item in Die Burger (Oos-Kaap)
- Authors: Preller, Cindy
- Date: 2010
- Subjects: Mass media and women -- South Africa Childbirth -- South Africa Women -- South Africa Die Burger (Port Elizabeth, South Africa) Journalism -- South Africa -- 21st century Mass media -- Moral and ethical aspects -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:3480 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1002935
- Description: The thesis “When birthing makes the news: the depiction of women as a newsworthy item in Die Burger (Oos-Kaap)” analyses a common, yet complex news topic in the South African print media due to the sensitive, often sensationalised, nature of the topic. The private experience of birthing is featured more and more in the public domain of newspapers because of widespread service delivery problems within the South African health department. Focussing on the Eastern Cape, I examine the representation of birthing in Die Burger (Oos-Kaap) in texts printed between 2005 and 2007, and scrutinise the media’s monitorial role of a self-appointed public hero acting on behalf of the women, to expose the poor conditions at government hospitals, specifically in the Nelson Mandela Bay region. How the women and their bodies are reported on, creates a discursive tension between the negative portrayals of the birthing women and the monitorial role of the media. The news values of sensationalism and profit are achieved with visceral representations of the reproductive functions of the birthing women. A poststructuralist feminist theoretical framework reveals discourses that perpetuate race, class and gender inequalities in the apparently socially-concerned sample of texts. A Critical discourse analysis (CDA) provides an approach and method to inform a close textual analysis of both the lexical and visual elements of the texts. The discourses in the sample differed from text to text. Despite these differences, the monitorial role of the media is still achieved. My research argues that acting in the public interest with sensationalist copy is still acting in the public interest. I conclude that it is not easy for newspapers to separate sensationalism from accountability. Media practitioners should be aware of their role in constructing women’s identities and be particularly thoughtful when reporting on birthing. In doing so, this research aims to improve the manner in which women and their bodies are reported on within the news industry.
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- Date Issued: 2010
The ‘obesity epidemic’ : an analysis of representations of obesity in mainstream South African newspapers post-1997
- Authors: Malan, Chantelle Therese
- Date: 2015
- Subjects: Obesity -- South Africa , Obesity -- Press coverage -- South Africa , Obesity -- Social aspects -- South Africa , Discrimination against overweight persons -- South Africa , Social medicine -- South Africa , Agent (Philosophy) , Social control -- South Africa
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:2892 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1019751
- Description: This study of 449 newspaper articles from South Africa from 1997 provides an analysis of the representations of obesity evinced in the corpus. The research argues that obesity is overwhelmingly framed as being diseased and that there are four main refrains within this frame, namely, statistics on obesity, the naturalisation of negative assumptions about fat, the social dysfunction of fat and the use of crisis metaphors to describe fatness. This framing lends itself to representations of obesity which are raced, gendered and classed. Fat bodies are portrayed as being in deficit and fat people as lacking agency. The disproportional focus on black bodies in the corpus can be attributed to assumptions of ‘incivility’ which are premised on racial stereotypes which construct black people as being unintelligent, irrational, lacking agency and being largely dependent on others to survive. This disproportional focus on black bodies can also be understood in the context of emerging markets. This study argues that the medicalisation of obesity has contributed to many oversimplifications and contradictions in the representation of obesity in the corpus, which seem to go unquestioned, such as the conflation of weight and health, something I argue is one of the main contributors to the negative consequences of the dominant framing of obesity. Framing obesity as medicalised also promotes fat shaming and acts as a form of social control which maintains existing power relations through the use of discursive practices for the identification and control of deviants. These representations are problematic chiefly because they promote the dehumanisation of fat people, but also because that they do not promote good health as they claim to do.
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- Date Issued: 2015
A corpus-based approach to writing in German as a foreign language in the South African tertiary context
- Authors: Ortner, Gwyndolen Jeanie
- Date: 2016
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: vital:3660 , http://hdl.handle.net/10962/d1021256
- Description: German Studies students at Rhodes University have normally never studied the German language before enrolling for the first-year course and face the challenge of a fairly rapid linguistic advancement in order to engage meaningfully with the literatures and cultures of German-speaking countries. This thesis investigates the process of teaching and learning to write in a more academic way in German as a foreign language at Rhodes University, using corpus linguistic tools for both analysis and instruction. The past 20 years have shown a shift from traditional teaching methods resting on notions of an underlying prescriptive grammar, to teaching based on insights from real-life language data (Gabrielatos, 2005; Krummes & Ensslin, 2012; Sinclair, 1997) and applications of corpora to teaching and learning have shown to be highly successful in many European contexts (Aijmer, 2010; Johns, 1991; Granger, et al., 2002; Varley, 2009). In the South African context however, this is a relatively new concept with few publications on the application of corpus linguistics to language teaching (Van Rooy, 2008), and one which does not seem to have reached its full potential. A writing course was instituted whose aim was two-fold: 1. to teach learners “every-day academic” German words (TAG words) and phrases (collocations) based on German mother-tongue corpus evidence; 2. to have learners write short assignments in German at regular intervals (Homstad & Thorson, 1996; Estes, et al., 1998); both aims with the overarching objective to improve the students’ academic register in German. After the writing course, 80% of the participants perceived that their writing had improved and specifically attributed this to the corpus-based instruction received during the writing course, and regular writing in German. Quantitative data (from the learner corpus created) shows a marked improvement in the use of the collocations taught. Moreover, participants (weaker students in particular) also found that their writing in English had improved as a result of the various exercises they had to complete as part of our German writing course.
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- Date Issued: 2016
An analysis of poetic syntax with special reference to Stockenström’s The Wisdom of Water (2007)
- Authors: Murdoch, Alan
- Date: 2019
- Subjects: Poetics , Poetry -- History and criticism Afrikaans poetry -- 21st century
- Language: English
- Type: Thesis , Masters , MA
- Identifier: http://hdl.handle.net/10948/41581 , vital:36538
- Description: Poetry, by its very nature, is different to prose. Through ostranenie, the poet tries to foreground his or her message (meaning). Ostranenie is defined as follows: ‘A neologism, it implies two kinds of action: making strange, and pushing aside. Consistent with this double meaning, the concept refers to the techniques writers use to transform ordinary language into poetic language’ (www.oxfordreference.com). Gräbe (1997: 25) states: ‘The recognition of a difference between ordinary or normal language on the one hand, and “unusual” or “different” language use on the other hand is dependent upon the distinction […] between “automatisation” and “foregrounding.”’ This study will look at poetry, specifically that of Wilma Stockenström in The Wisdom of Water (2007), through the lens of syntax.The aim of this study is to determine the unique contribution of syntactic strategies for analysing and interpreting poetry and how they aid the poet in foregrounding his or her intended meaning. The strategies investigated are those detailed by Ina Gräbe in Syntax in Poetry (1997), namely the violation of grammatical rules in poetic language (specifically displacement, deletion and selectional deviation), the exploitation of forms of repetition in syntactic pattern formation (specifically coupling, parallelism and elaboration) and finally syntactic units and typographic demarcations (specifically the relationship between sentence and line and, the relationship between sentence and stanza). Through qualitative analysis, this study performs a syntactical structure analysis of Stockenström’s poetry in The Wisdom of Water (2007) and shows how the use and effect of Gräbe’s syntactic strategies can foreground a poet’s intended meaning. It will further show the way in which such a linguistic analysis can provide insight into the poet’s meaning, that might not otherwise have been apparent to a reader.
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- Date Issued: 2019